If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
Two basic rules about resumes: never ever ever send a resume through as a Word document -- only ever send a PDF. And 2: never ever ever use Times New Roman as the font.
So tell me why ive had four separate doctors apply for a role I'm organising interviews for using WORD DOCS WITH TIMES NEW ROMAN. AND PHOTOS!!!?!?! ALL ADVICE SAYS NOT TO INCLUDE A PHOTO OF YOURSELF OR TO GO OVER MULTIPLE PAGES BUT THESE PEOPLE ARE SENDING FIVE PAGE WORD DOC TIMES NEW ROMAN RESUMES WITH PHOTOS IN THE TOP CORNER, WHY. AMD VISIBLE FORMATTING TABLES SOMETIMES TO BOOT!!!
TIMES NEW FUCKING ROMAN. WORD DOCS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Are you guys serioussssssss
I get to always always send basically all finished documents as PDFs, and that resumes don't need pictures for the vast magority of jobs, but what do you have against a font? It's not like comic sans or something. I thought times new Roman was like a common essay font. Tbh idk what font I'm using bc I fw my latex template as little as possible. It looks normal-ish tho
I'm the middle of a bunch of Tasks And Duties rn but I dont want to forget to reply, so apologies for the screengrab instead of a proper text reply, but in short:
That one is a sans-serif ----- "sans" as in "without," and "serif" as in "decorative flicks on letters."
Serif fonts are ones like Times New Roman, Garamond, Centaur, Georgia, etc. Here's an example of one with some of the flicky little "feet" circled:
They can be really pretty fonts -- but they can also look quite cluttered, if there's a lot of text. They're also harder to read than more plain (sans-serif) fonts, especially for people with things like dyslexia or impaired vision or etc.
I personally find serif fonts to be a good option for titles, but not for anything more substantial than that -- especially big walls of text like essays or resumes.
A sans-serif font is something like Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, etc. Here's the same example as above but with the LACK of flicky feet circled:
Because its more plain than the other, san-serif fonts are LOT easier to read, especially when theres a lot of text. And its more accessible for those who struggle with reading, because theres less clutter. This one is a better choice for everything from advert paragraphs to essays/books/resumes/etc.
Yeah but its still very much a held-over mentality. If someone was using computers at the time that TNR was the default font, they very much view it as a crappy font still today -- and who is most likely to be looking over resumes? Someone who has been using computers since TNR was the default font and using it was an immediate sign of "this person is barely literate" or someone younger than that? Odds are good its an older person with baked in prejudice against times new roman.
I worked for a brief stint in a recruitment office (awful job; do NOT do it) and they literally put resumes in the Dont Bother Reading pile if they used TNR. I also have several friends who are resume filterers at their jobs, and every single one of them WILL harshly judge a resume thats sent in in TNR.
And its not like youre not allowed to use any serif fonts at all. Just... maybe pick one thats not as divisive and likely to get your resume skipped as times new roman.
If you’re judging someone’s fit for the job by whether they changed the default font or not … Jesus. What a dumb fucking reason to overlook a potentially good employee.
I mean. Yeah. But also it IS something that i have seen numerous recruiters do, so imo it makes sense to actively choose a widely inoffensive font so youre not knocked out early by a person looking for quick ways to slim down on the number of resumes they have to go through
I get that but it’s not really surprising that people are unaware of the rule “don’t use the font Times New Roman because it’s the default font” when it is no longer the default font. Don’t use Times New Roman is not something I’ve ever heard and I’ve been educated multiple times on applying to jobs. It may just not ever have been a thing here in the UK, but it’s really not amazing to me that people don’t know this. Nor that people are still sending through word docs as CVs when this used to be perfectly normal and equally, I have never been instructed specifically to make my CV a PDF, it just seemed like a good idea at some point along the way. So yeah, neither of these things are that shocking and while it’s good for people to be aware of them so they don’t get caught out, the recruitment industry has its head so far up its own ass, I’m amazed it can even tell if the CV has a serif font or not.
i will not trust you specially if ur asking for commissions if you dont have a banner/avatar and i get the most vague dm ever abt that. just felt like pointing this out
your neutrophils absolute? 2.71. anion gap? why, that's 11! hemoglobin A1C? a solid 5.4. and don't fret, champ—your VLDL (calculated) is a cool 12. real fascinating stuff. hm? what's that? you want to know what kind of blood you have? like, so you won't have to look your next ER nurse in the eye and tell her you have no clue what type you have right after giving her a date of birth that confirms you are over 30 years old? psh, don't be silly! we can't tell you that! it's a ✨secret✨
Hi, I'm a laboratory technician who works in all departments, including the blood bank. Getting your blood typed at birth is normal practice in some places, but not everywhere. In your case, if your doctors didn't anticipate you imminently needing a blood transfusion, they probably didn't order a type & screen (the test that will tell you your blood type, as well as find possible antibodies that could cause a transfusion reaction). If they were concerned, they might have ordered a blood bank "hold," onto which they could add a type & screen later, but a hold by itself won't get you your blood type either.
I don't know the regulations elsewhere, but in some countries, including the United States, where I am, your type & screen "expires" after a few days, and it will need to be repeated before you get another transfusion. We also will never, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, transfuse type A or B or AB blood into your body going only on your word (or anyone else's word, or an ID card) that you know what type you are. We test you. Every time. And until we test you, we will only give you type O, because that's the only type that won't kill the other types dead if they get the wrong one. This is why for us there's not really any point in knowing your blood type ahead of time in case of an emergency; the testing will still need to be done before you get anything but O. And then, 3 days later, the test will expire, and if you still need blood, you'll get tested again.
We do all this because Shit Happens - someone screwed up your test the first time, the wrong patient's blood got labeled as yours, you were carrying a fake ID when the ambulance brought you in, you developed a new antibody since your last transfusion, your blood type CHANGED (rare, but can happen), etc, etc - and the blood bank is the only department in the lab where if enough errors go unnoticed, we can directly kill a patient.
So, depending on where you live, this is possibly why you don't know your blood type - whoever treated you never ordered it because they didn't expect you to need a transfusion (a surprising number of surgeries are pretty light on blood loss these days, actually), so there was no reason to test you at that time. It's also possible it's suppressed/not visible to patients in whatever system they use.
Outside of needing a transfusion within the next 3 days, your blood type isn't very useful information, medically speaking. Some doctors will order your type for you if you ask, though.
Imagine saying this to the Robin Hobb who published her first book while financially struggling as a waitress and post lady with 4 children to take care of alone because her husband was an offshore fisherman in Alaska
Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)
Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!
Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.
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