One of humanity's greatest weaknesses is cognitive dissonance. People can convince themselves of just about anything. And in some ways intelligence is a burden here. A fool will just do something with a reason of 'f you, that's why.' It's only the clever man that will even bother rationalizing the villain into the hero, and we're great at it. An interesting thought experiment is to ask people if they'd be willing to push a button that would randomly kill a person somewhere in the world for a million dollars. They'd have no direct accountability themselves and their action would be unknown to anybody else.
People will rationalize themselves into declaring this moral even though it is obviously one of the most overtly amoral actions possible. One friend I have, a rather intelligent guy otherwise, was even trying to create a utilitarian argument that he'd donate some percent of his 'earnings' to life saving charities meaning he'd be saving more life on the net. The fact that if everybody thought and behaved the same way, the entirety of humanity would cease to exist, was a consideration he didn't have a response for. Let alone the fact that he just rationalized his way into justifying near to any deed imaginable, so long as you got paid enough for it.
I don't think that was intentional, but invading countries while trying to distract them with negotiations, randomly assassinating leaders and hoping everything just turns out well, threatening to "destroy civilizations", targeting bridges and more, all while aiding and abetting Israel which is intentionally destroying pharmaceutical, educational, and other such civilian institutions is all 100% intentional.
In some ways worse than bombing the school was the effort to implicitly deny it. The school was near a military facility, and itself was a military facility in the past. US intelligence screwed up. They should have simply acknowledged what happened and why. Their response just reeked of cowardice and malice at the highest level.
I don't think most people understand how the times have changed here. CNN's prime time shows get fewer views than a mid-tier YouTuber, literally. They hit < 1mil at prime time. And their demographic is, again literally, dying off as they have a median viewer age of 67 [1], which is steadily increasing presumably due to a lack of new viewers. On the bright side for them that puts them on the 'younger' side of most cable news networks.
Cable news is basically dead, but I think most of us missed the funeral. It used to be a relatively big deal decades ago, but those times are long since passed.
> a mid-tier YouTuber, literally. They hit < 1mil at prime time.
By "mid-tier YouTuber", I suppose you mean a top 0.00001% youtuber or thereabouts? Only the top 100ish with 50m+ subscribers translate to an actual audience per video of 1m+ (outliers notwithstanding), and you're comparing a US news network against an entertainment platform with a global audience of billions. I'm going to guess that CNN is still more influential to US politics than a gaming channel in India or Indonesia, even if a few of the latter get more views. Not to say that cable news influence hasn't waned from its peak, obviously, but I don't think the comparison to "mid-tier Youtubers" really holds up at all.
I don't think your numbers are reasonable. Widespread use of fake subscription services distorts things but plenty of people get CNN level views with orders of magnitude fewer than 50 million subs. Here [1] is an account whose median view is CNN prime-time level. She has 186k subs.
Beyond that it's a power law distribution. Some guy who uploaded 1 video for a friend counts as a 'YouTuber', but obviously they do not matter in terms of overall competition. We're only talking about the channels that are regularly uploading content of some reasonable standard. And amongst that group - CNN level is very much in the mid-tier range, and I think that's being generous. There are currently about 70k channels with at least a million subs.
As for influence, I don't think news has much of any influence at all in US politics anymore. They blew it all by going hyper-partisan for the sake of views - moderate short to mid-term gains for catastrophic long-term consequences. Pretty much the standard of most US businesses now a days. In terms of confidence in institutions, television news now ranks lower than every measured institution, except Congress. [2] They scored 11%, Congress scored 10%. And that's with piggy-backing off the phrasing of simply "television news" from the poll, instead of just cable news. Broadcast news is going to score significantly higher in confidence than cable news.
I think people typically flip the causality here. People's voting isn't determined by their media habits, but rather their media habits are determined by their voting. For instance in these cable news discussions, Fox is often a huge target. But if you covertly turned Fox into the NYTimes tomorrow, you'd have 0 impact on election outcomes. All you'd end up doing is creating a vacuum that'd probably be filled by OANN or another similar network.
Tucker Carlson is another great example. There was a segment of people who were loudly rejoicing after he was fired from Fox. But it predictably had a less than zero effect on his visibility, as he now gets vastly more viewers than he did on Fox by running his segments independently. People weren't watching Tucker because of Fox, they were watching Fox because of Tucker. And, in turn, the people watching Tucker aren't just adopting his views - but rather tend to watch him because they have comparable worldviews themselves. If his worldview suddenly turned into that of Rachel Maddow overnight, all that'd happen is his viewership would also trend to zero.
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Just think about yourself. Do you honestly think you're going to go start supporting the current administration if you just freebased a few thousand hours of Fox, OANN, or whatever else? Our fundamental views are shaped very slowly and more from things like life experience than headlines, which is a big part of the reason that age is such a large factor in typical ideology.
It goes both ways; there's a feedback. People start watching a channel because they're predisposed to agree with it, but when the channel constantly reinforces their biases, it foes from a slight predisposition to a strong opinion to an absolute certainty.
Fox News doesn't just give a conservative opinion on events, but constantly asserts that every other information source is wrong. Not just wrong, in fact, but a deliberate attempt to con them.
You're correct that eliminating Fox News would not, in itself, end that process. They've had decades to reinforce their views. It may well be inescapable at this point.
But OANN isn't as slick as Fox News. It doesn't attract people with a predisposition; it's more likely to turn them off. If Fox News were to disappear, and OANN expand to fill its space, it might eventually reduce the number of people drawn into that self-reinforcing mechanism.
Don't forget Ellison/Skydance also control TikTok, where according to Pew 38% of adult Americans get their news.
The internet has killed institutions of journalism that have a reputation to protect. Billionaires did the rest of the job (RIP Washington Post). Pretty bad outcome. We are left random YouTubers, people with a Substack or podcast, etc. No fact-checking standards / departments. Will Propublica and PBS Newshour/Frontline be around in 10 years. Federal funding cuts already killed Weekend Newshour.
If you can change the narrative the whatever percentage of CNN's prime time viewers are getting, then that's even fewer receiving opposing programming. That's 100% of the goal whatever number of viewer percentages are affected. Or is it 1200% fewer opposition viewers??? ::face-palm::
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.
Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.
Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.
Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.
What sort of gain would that be for a non-world class runner? I'm unfamiliar with high level running, but I'm curious as in most sports these sort of things provide a small benefit at the top level (seems to be about a ~3% reduction in times over the past decade since the shoe wars began), and that quickly becomes statistical noise outside of the top due to diminishing returns.
But if you really want to reduce your marathon time by 15 minutes, then gaining a few minutes from better shoes, a few minutes from a high altitude training camp/holiday in Flagstaff/Dolomites, and a few minutes from a day at a gait analysis centre, may be worthwhile - or atleast a fun way to spend money on your hobby.
I'd add another thing here as well. Many take this sort of conspiratorial view like companies training on benchmarks would be some sort of underhanded intent at cheating. In reality, benchmarks also provide a way for companies to easily compare themselves to competitors and work to iteratively improve their own models, so there's a completely non-nefarious motivation to maximize scores on benchmarks.
In the end all it does is affirm what you're saying though. Benchmarks are essentially obsolete the moment they become recognized. I suppose it's just another iteration of Goodhart's Law.
As a slight tangent here, it's not just poetry. When you read something like 'The Republic', especially with regards to Plato's views on the cyclical nature of political systems and the end of democracy (and what it turns into), it reads a lot like an edgelord speaking with vaguely disguised metaphor with a rather large helping of hindsight bias. But the fact that it was written some 2400 years ago changes everything and emphasizes that history doesn't just repeat, it plagiarizes itself.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
I expect they're just banking on getting their investment back with some fat returns by licensing it to the NSA to decrypt their hoovered up encrypted coms, with their data storage now reaching up to the yottabyte level. That's a lotta byte.
You know you're blowing your reputation when such claims are met by scientific articles with the headline, "Google claims 'quantum advantage' again." [1]
People will rationalize themselves into declaring this moral even though it is obviously one of the most overtly amoral actions possible. One friend I have, a rather intelligent guy otherwise, was even trying to create a utilitarian argument that he'd donate some percent of his 'earnings' to life saving charities meaning he'd be saving more life on the net. The fact that if everybody thought and behaved the same way, the entirety of humanity would cease to exist, was a consideration he didn't have a response for. Let alone the fact that he just rationalized his way into justifying near to any deed imaginable, so long as you got paid enough for it.
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