ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 192

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ah, but there are ways around that. My blog's spam filter works tolerably well, and is getting better as I train it -- there are days when 30 to 40 pieces of AI-generated trash end up in the spam folder and get fed to Fido. If more people enacted preemptive moderation on their blogs, and used similar methods, the AI plague could be reduced significantly.

Publishers are starting to wise up, too. A magazine I get has just announced that anybody who submits an AI-written article to them will be banned permanently from submitting anything at all, full stop, end of sentence. As usual, the introduction of a new factor brings countervailing moves from others...

I can't even imagine what it means to be a teacher at any level these days with AI available to students....

Same tools are available to the teacher as well. I suspect that teaching will have to change to use more of the Socratic Method, but who knows?

My son's in high school, and one of his teachers assigned an essay to be prepared at home, but actually written in class. I've also heard about folks requiring handwritten papers instead of typed / computer. Finally, some teachers are moving towards more oral examinations / recitations. (Everything old is new again.)

And then there are the AI tools to detect plagiarism &/or AI-written papers.

I would be very, very careful with AI tools meant to detect AI. AI can glitch out in some pretty wild ways, and worse, can be hacked. There's an entire field, adversarial attacks, devoted to using AI to find ways to fool other AI systems. Since the way that generative AI works is that it uses two systems, the disriminator that tries to identify what things are, and the generative system that tries to make things that fool the discriminator, generative AI is already part way there.

Even worse, assuming the claims made in Not with a Bug but with a Sticker are accurate, many of these exploitable glitches are features of most if not all AI systems that are designed to do similar tasks, so once found, they will fool everything that is not specifically trained not to fall for that specific trick. Add to this that I haven't seen any conclusive reason why what YouTube's enegineers called "The Inversion", the moment where AI systems, facing a flood of fake material being designed intentionally to fool them, start to conclude that the human activity is fake, and I've come to think that there's a very real risk that the use of AI tools to detect AI will backfire spectacularly because it will eventually start to determine most human activities are actually AI.

It's just that old IT chestnut, "Garbage in, garbage out."

(But the cost in money and expended energy is many orders of magnitude higher than anything earlier.)

*Ochre Harebrained Curmudgeon*

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 192

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