Founder of Silver Bulletin: natesilver.substack.com/, and cohost of Still Counting podcast!
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The Vermont governor race is a fun one. Only UNH has polled the race, and they now have the Democrat ahead. But Scott won by 52 points in 2024 and all the expert raters have it solid R! FLIPR has no idea.
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Anyway, today's update is out, fairly boring day of polling for a change.
natesilver.net/p/nate-silver…
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I wrote a whole book on this subject, and the thesis is about the normative and practical importance of human agency. It doesn't help that people like you have no idea WTF AI can do right now.
There's no word for the actual problem going on with AI discourse, which is not that we're anthropomorphizing AI systems but that writers simply airbrush out of the narrative the humans building and running these systems.
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The whole problem is that the AP's language is inaccurate and politically charged. I don't particularly trust the labs. But most (certainly not all) people with real expertise in this field would consider their guidance to be presumptive at best.
You’re policing language right now. You’re policing the AP’s language. Attempting to find more accurate and less industry propaganda terms isn’t policing anything, they’re not imposing their guidelines on Nate Silver, you’re welcome to parrot EA cultists all you’d like
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OK then give Astra or Fable a 10,000-line program, ask it to debug it, ask it to understand what's going on, ask it to make revisions. It's certainly not perfect. I'm bullish on human expertise fwiw. But it sure as hell is way more than a "stochastic parrot."
No, it's different in this case, because LLM are designed to create an illusion that they do think and talk like human beings.
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but that is how they work right? predicting language? been trying to follow you all on this all day. is your contention humans are just LLMs? if not, how can the distinction not matter?
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AI "chatbots" are at most a marginally useful technology. It's the programming and math stuff where they cross into the realm of thinking ("thinking"). Critics without programming/math/tech-adjacent skills are like blind men trying to understand an elephant.
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IDK if you polled some unbiased sample of experts in the field (granted, "experts" and "unbiased" are doing a lot of work there), I imagine most of them would roughly agree with the idea that AI models "think," at least for more advanced tasks.
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“Feel,” even “want,” I can get behind as things for which evidence is thin. But AIs *clearly* think and understand. If your definition of “think” excludes entities that can autonomously resolve Millennium Problems, it is your definition that is flawed.
This desire to avoid anthropomorphic language has become a pathology.
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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Interesting that Dems' generic ballot gains have come from undecideds rather than Republicans, whose numbers have held steady.
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Anyway, the continued gains on the generic ballot (and continued decline in Trump approval) has been enough to offset the NYT poll in Maine in our forecast update today: natesilver.net/p/nate-silver…
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For the people who are anti anthropomorphizing AI, what would be the correct terminology to describe a model “escaping” its sandbox (since obviously a model doesn’t wear clothes)?
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An Orca cunningly breaking out of captivity at Sea World, orcathromorphizing is still allowed per @AP.
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language policing has become a permanent fixture of all sides of discourse, and there's been a lot of it in AI specifically. But what's interesting is that (IMO) it doesn't map cleanly to any particular heretofore identifiable ideologies.
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I don't even think that's a useful split. AOC is not safety-pilled. I think Elizabeth Warren is a bit moreso, but was she part of the Bernie left?
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The whole "don't anthropomorphize AI" thing is very Woke 1.0. People trying to police language that is perfectly natural in some cases and ending up in a web of contradictions.
I don't think this is analytically helpful. But either way, extremely surprised to see the line "such as animals" in this statement.
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Nate Silver retweeted
This is interesting, via @NateSilver538:
In 2024, one takeaway was that the Red Wave was especially strong in blue cities. In 2026, the Blue Wave seems especially strong in red states.
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Polls over the past week or two (mostly GREAT for Democrats, but Collins still ahead in Maine?!?) tell an internally consistent but slightly weird story: D gains are overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.
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I went into that a bit here, as well as in this week's Still Counting. This probably makes for more of a boom-or-bust story than if the gains were concentrated more evenly.
natesilver.net/p/the-blue-wa…
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