People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.

> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.

If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.

If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.

OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.

(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)

> Yeah but calling someone a racist is a serious accusation, you better bring receipts or be liable for defamation

There are a large number of countries with their own systems of law, and its possible that in one of them calling someone a racist might be subject to defamation law, but in most I am aware of that's going to be a problem because its not even a well-enough-defined fact claim to be legally true or false.

> More housing in region X will result in lower housing prices in region Y.

Or higher prices in Y, because X will be both more crowded and with on average poorer people than before the supply increase, and people who prefer a less crowded area and less poor people (either directly because they are poor, or because of other demographic traits that correlate with wealth in the broader society, like race in the USA) around them will have an even higher relative preference for living in Y than before.

> The interests of people from region Y are valid.

They exist, validity is...at best, not a case you have made. Existence of a material interest does not imply validitym

> I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down.

Inferring overly generalized and usually incorrect causal relations from extremely limited data and treating them as conclusive is a very strong human tendency; the idea of avoiding that and taking a systematic, structured, and conditional approach to assessing causal claims is fairly recent and, even among people who generally support it, often adhered to more as an aspirational principal than a consistent practice. And it certainly doesn't sell clicks the way the old way does.

> So what exactly is the input to Claude for a multi-turn conversation?

No one (approximately) outside of Anthropic knows since the chat template is applied on the API backend; we only known the shape of the API request. You can get a rough idea of what it might be like from the chat templates published for various open models, but the actual details are opaque.

> Agreed, thankfully, there is no CSAM feature, and they patched it in a couple of days so that it would stop obeying requests to do so and banned the users abusing Grok for that purpose.

The order, over several days, was:

* banned users and took down tweets requesting the content, without taking down the content that they clearly knew of, since they responded against the requests that generated it.

* Made the feature paid-only.

* Took down content and restricted the functionality.

> Once they prove they have put the appropriate mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again it's fine and dandy, no?

I’m not sure all jurisdictions involved will see knowing generation and dissemination of nonconsensual, including child, pornography as the kind of thing where “I promise not to do itt again, so we’re cool, right?” works, but we’ll see.

You are looking at the trees, and missing the forest. The subtle propaganda that the Factbook exists to spread is “the CIA is a neutral and trustworthy gatherer and purveyor of facts”.

I think that’s a secondary or even tertiary goal. The primary goal is to provide a public service to public and private parties who want to become better informed and to show the American people that their tax dollars are at work and reduce the risk of having their funding get cut.

The part before the “and” is the how of the propaganda I described, the part after the “and” is one of the outcomes the propaganda is intended to influence; neither is an alternative to the propaganda function.

I think the problem is people are acting like propaganda is inherently bad, so this subconsciously comes across as “the CIA is problematic because they have a source of factlettes for people to peruse”.

> orders of magnitude work by rounding from .5.

No, orders of magnitude are exponential, not linear, so conventionally “on the order of 1 billion” would be between 100 million × sqrt(10) and 1 billion × sqrt(10), but “billionaire” isn't “net worth on the order of 1 billion” but “net worth of 1 billion or more”, or, when used heirarchically alongside trillionaire ans millionaire “net worth of at least one billion and less than one trillion”.

Credibility is not what soft power means, though they are related. Power is the ability to get other people to act in your interest. Hard power is when that is done through immediate, direct economic or military coercion. Soft power is everything else.