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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

Marie: I don't know why this video came up on my YouTube recommendations, but it did. I watched it on a large-ish teevee, and I found it fascinating. ~~~

 

Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Sunday
Jan292012

Two Rights Don't Make a Wrong

In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. -- President Obama, SOTU

Last Week PolitiFact rated these statements "half-true" because they decided that the President was "crediting his policies for the jobs increase." After an uproar -- I linked Paul Krugman's rebuttal -- PolitiFact backed down and deemed the statements "'mostly true' ... because [President Obama] was not making the linkage as strongly as we initially believed." Akhilleus wrote a good philosophical rebuttal to PolitiFact in comments to the Commentariat. Here's a letter I wrote to Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact, which is way less esoteric than Akhilleus' discourse but is something I think maybe a logic-challenged newspaperman can comprehend:

Shortly after we started PolitiFact, the housing bubble burst. -- Bill Adair

I would rate that statement as "true."

Whatever inference I derive from such a remark would be my doing, not yours. I may think that you are holding PolitiFact responsible for tanking the economy, that you are simply noting a coincidence, or that you are complaining that the mortgage on the house you bought in 2007 is underwater.

Two proximate true statements don't "merge" to constitute a "half-true" or "mostly true" statement. They remain two true statements. So if the president says, "When my stimulus program kicked in, the economy started creating jobs," each of those statements is true. Economists will argue whether or not there was a causal relationship, but the president would merely be making two proximate accurate observations.

What President Obama actually said was this: "In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005." There is nothing even slightly untruthful about either of those statements. I may infer President Obama single-handedly saved the economy, or I may infer that market forces independent of any government (or Federal Reserve) action caused the slight improvement in the jobs figures. It's not for PolitiFact to tell me what's on my mind -- or to impugn the President for what you infer is on his mind. That's what your rating does, whether you make it "half-true" or "mostly true." Get real. The statements are true. Period.

Time for another upgrade. And time for you to do some Reality Chex there at PolitiFact. Not for the first time, you're letting your success undermine your mission. When you become less truthful than the politicians you "fact-check," you become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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