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There is something deeper about the damage done by the government, too. The Anthropic-DoW skirmish is the first major public debate that is truly about where the proper locus of control over frontier AI should be. Our public institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without strategic clarity. Our political leaders conveyed little understanding of their own actions, to say nothing of the technology and its stakes. They got off on an extraordinarily bad footing, and it is hard to imagine them ever recovering, because they do not seem to care about improvement.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional

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By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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The moral confusion on too many campuses after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis fits a familiar pattern. The acceptability of the speech depends on the speaker. Individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway to target oppressor groups through disruptions and threats. This victimology allows Palestinians and their supporters (the oppressed) to target, intimidate, and harass Jews (the oppressors).
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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