There are plenty of sycophantic humans around, especially with regard to relationship advice.
I find there is an inverse relationship between how willing people are to give relationship advice, and how good their advice is (whether looking at sycophancy or other factors).
Because sycophancy in humans is motivated not by the wellbeing of the person seeking advice, but by the interests of the sycophant in gaining favour.
It makes sense that this behaviour would be seen in LLMs, where the company optimizes towards of success of the chatbot rather than wellbeing of the users.
Yup. I know too many people who have a default message when asked for relationship advice: oh, my, the other person is terrible and you should break up.
It's an easy default and it causes so many problems.
Can you understand why banks were bailed out to the extent of protecting shareholders?
In the UK the first bank to go, Northern Rock, was simply taken over by the government. The shareholders got nothing. The bailout of Lloyds bank required the government taking a 40% stake. This is the way to go - if you need a bailout there should be a cost to the shareholders. otherwise you are just privatising profit and nationalising risk.
Not that UK regulation was great all round or the bailout perfect. It certainly failed to prevent the crisis which could have been done (no doubt the same applies in many countries). I looked at Northern Rock's accounts some time (an year, maybe?) before the crisis and was horrified by their reliance on interbank lending. it was obvious they could not cope with a rise in rates.
Not xenophobic. Oxford happily takes money from people from anywhere all the time. It might be things such as his involvement in the Al Yamamah arms deal.
> whereas someone in 14C England, say, would not have known any other form of governance than the unchecked power of the State (strictly, the King)
The king's powers were not unchecked. People had human rights by custom and law (Magna Carter, for example), parliament controlled taxation, aristocrats had a great deal of power, the Church had a lot of power.
Nowhere near democracy, but a very different system from an unchecked dictatorship.
Edit to add: this was the system from which modern democracy slowly evolved.
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, held his position on the condition that "...if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King"
That is a pretty narrow requirement and what he wanted to do anyway.
Maybe it was required because as an Anglo-Norman himself, and his former position in England and his families former position, he needed to guarantee where his loyalties lay?
Indeed, but it's interesting that it is included in the Declaration of Arbroath asking the Pope to recognise Scotland's independence - I think it might have been to emphasise that it wasn't just about his wants but all of the Scottish aristocracy?
A dictionary definition is not necessarily the correct definition. Almost all dictionaries these days have a "descriptive, not prescriptive" policy - they tell you what a word is likely mean in common usage, rather than tell you how to use a word correctly.
This is an especially big problem with a badly defined word like this,
It's usually better to look at Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism". Yes, it's a set of vague aesthetic criteria, but aesthetics is a big part of Fascism and the thing that distinguishes it from other forms of totalitarianism. The aesthetics helped drive public support, which is also crucial to distinguishing Fascism from, say, feudalism: it's inherently a post-democratic politics.
Edit: I wrote this comment, clicked through, and of course Eco is the first writer referenced.
Much of the article is about getting people to pay for services around open source, specifically package registries. Big users paying to use a package registry hardly sounds unreasonable.
its not actually clear what the article is about, and it has the usual journalistic conflation of concepts (market cap is not the same thing as income!).
London in the 70s (which GP was talking about) already had long commutes (large suburbs and lots of commuter towns) and most households had cars. Roads are much safer and public transport is good so kids can get around by themselves.
One big difference is that more women work: stay at home mums used to strengthen communities - doing voluntary work, organising things. Now that is mostly done by retired people so the pool is smaller and fewer households have someone directly involved. Another way to look at it is that the working hours for a similar household has increased greatly so the household as a whole has less time to contribute to the community.
Another factor is that people move around more. Again, very noticeable in London where a lot of people have moved out because of high house prices. People do not near people they grew up with.
I find there is an inverse relationship between how willing people are to give relationship advice, and how good their advice is (whether looking at sycophancy or other factors).
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