Friday, June 14, 2024

Holy Waters: The Sea

Pub at Beetoota Multifaceted consultancies big 4


Holy Waters: The Sea Field & Stream


 The Beauty And Boredom Of 500 Laps Around The Same .148-Mile Loop Defector


Surveillance pricing Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic

 









What one man learned living alone in the wilderness for 40 years WaPo


How complex systems fail Richard Cook



11th Circuit Judge Admits to Using ChatGPT to Help Decide a Case

e-discovery Team: Urges Other Judges and Lawyers to Follow Suit: “The Eleventh Circuit published a ground breaking Concurring Opinion on May 28, 2024 by Judge Kevin C. Newsom on the use of generative AI to help decide contract interpretation issues. Snell v. United Specialty Ins. Co., 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 12733 *; _ F.4th _ (11th Cir., 05/28/24). The case in question centered around interpretation of an insurance policy. Circuit Judge Kevin C. Newsom not only admits to using ChatGPT to help him make his decision, but praises its utility and urges other judges and lawyers to do so too. 

His analysis is impeccable and his writing is superb. That is bold judicial leadership – Good News. I love his opinion and bet that you will too. The only way to do the Concurring Opinion justice is to quote all of it, all 6,485 words. I know that’s a lot of words, but unlike ChatGPT, which is a good writer, Judge Newsom is a great writer.

Judge Kevin C. Newsom, a Harvard law graduate from Birmingham, Alabama, is creative in his wise and careful use of AI. Judge Newsom added photos to his opinion and, as I have been doing recently in my articles, quoted in full the transcripts of the ChatGPT sessions he relied upon. He leads by doing and his analysis is correct, including especially his commentary on AI and human hallucinations…”

What do novelists have to say about election fever?

Have you no sense of decency?

June 9, 1954 — In a dramatic confrontation, Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, lashes out at Senator Joseph McCarthy during hearings on whether communism has infiltrated the U.S. armed forces. Welch’s verbal assault—including the enduring question "Have you no sense of decency?"—marked the end of McCarthy’s power during the anticommunist hysteria of the Red Scare in America.

Read more via this link. 


The Liar’s Dividend: The Impact of Deepfakes and Fake News on Politician Support and Trust in Media

“This project, The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability? is joint work between the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. While previous work has addressed the direct effects of misinformation, we propose to study the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians “crying wolf” over fake news. 

We argue that strategic and false allegations of misinformation (i.e., fake news and deepfakes) benefit politicians by helping them maintain support in the face of information damaging to their reputation. This concept is known as the “liar’s dividend”(Chesney and Citron 2018) and suggests that some politicians profit from an informational environment saturated with misinformation. While previous scholarship has demonstrated that the direct effects of misinformation may be overstated (Lazer et al. 2018, Little 2018),the more subtle indirect effects of misinformation may be even more concerning. 

Therefore, we aim to assess the extent of the harms to political accountability and trust in media posed by the liar’s dividend. Importantly, our study will also evaluate which “protective factors,” such as media literacy, help to insulate against this form of misinformation. We posit that the payoffs from the liar’s dividend work through two theoretical channels. First, the allegation of a deepfake or fake news can produce informational uncertainty. After learning of a political scandal, a member of the public will be more likely to downgrade their evaluation of the politician or to think that the politician is a “bad type.” 

However, if the politician then issues a statement disclaiming the story and alleging foul play by the opposition in the form of a deepfake or fake news, then some members of the public may be more uncertain about what to believe. Compared to a counterfactual where the politician makes no so such allegation, we think claims of a deepfake or fake news will result in aunidirectional shift in average evaluations of the politician in the positive direction, along with an associated increased variance (a reflection of increased uncertainty). Second, an allegation of a deepfake or fake news can provide rhetorical cover. 

To avoid cognitive dissonance, core supporters or strong co-partisans may be looking for an “out” or a motivated reason (Taber and Lodge 2006) to maintain support for their preferred politician in the face of a damaging news story. This rhetorical strategy also employs a “devil shift”(Sabatier, Hunter and McLaughlin 1987) where politicians not only signal their own innocence, but also criticize political opponents and the media, prompting supporters to rally against the opposition. 

To evaluate these potential impacts of the liar’s dividend and the channels through which the liar’s dividend bestows its benefits, we use a survey experiment to randomly assign vignette treatments detailing embarrassing or scandalous information about American politicians to American citizens. Our study design, treatments, outcomes, covariates, estimands, and analysis strategy are described in more detail in our pre-analysis plan, which was pre-registered with EGAP/OSF.”


Teamsters and Amazon Labor Union Announce Affiliation, Member Vote Still Ahead Labor Notes

 

Deere & Co. Cutting Production, Salaried Workforce WSJ

 

Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get? Funding the Future


Uneasy on the Ear: An Interview with Lola De La Mata The Quietus