Even in conventional programming it seems easier to ask about a famous person's parents than vice versa. A name is an ambiguous pointer so if someone says "Tom Cruise" you'd generally just look for the most famous person of all the people who have that name and answer the question for that individual. But to do the reverse you have to figure out that no "Mary Lee Pfeiffer" is famous enough on their own to be the target of the search and then go on to search through all the children of all the people named "Mary Lee Pfeiffer", notice that one is really famous, and then answer with that result.
I think that, in particular, protesting Meta releasing their models to the public is a lot less likely to go well than protesting, say, OpenAI developing their models. Releasing models to the public seems virtuous on its face both to the general public and to many technologists. Protesting that is going to draw attention to that specifically and so tend to paint the developers of more advanced models in a comparatively better light and their opponents in a comparatively worse light compared.
Wouldn't the question be why epidemiologists don't study this? As far as I'm aware virologists don't study the transmission of viruses between people any detail, or at least this would be an out-of-paradigm research project for any virologist investigating it. I think the real question would be why epidemiologists don't investigate it.
I'm especially worried about the US going forward. In general presidential republics don't have a good track record. Luckily the US has benefited from strong notions of democratic legitimacy over most of its history. Also, except at the very beginning, for a brief period around the birth of the Republican party, and recently with the introduction of open primaries US political parties haven't had strong ideological partisanship but were mostly very ideologically mixed with most partisanship being over spoils rather than ideology.
In How Democracies Die the authors argue that the most worrying sign for a democracy is an escalating pattern of constitutional hardball where contestants continue to adhere to the written rules but more and more break unwritten norms. Within the last couple of decades we've seen filibusters go from a rarely deployed emergency break to a routine legislative tactic, repeated showdowns over the debt ceiling, a breakdown in norms around supreme court appointees, etc. I don't expect any disaster imminently, but the trends are very bad.
My impression has been that we mostly just have David Fravor's word that most of those independant lines of evidence exist. Have there actually been interviews with, e.g., the ship radar operators where they describe seeing things that were only consistent with the UFO story?
I guess a better way of putting that is that R0 is fixed for a particular population but humans are composed of many different populations, just like there are other populations of different species a virus can also infect which might have their own R0s as well.
It'll tend to change with things population, social conventions, etc. For the herd animal populations it was originally applied to you can pretty much ignore all of that but not for humans. Especially for things like coronaviruses with a high k where R0 is driven by the fat tail of the distribution. In a small village where most bat/human coronavirus crossovers tend to happen the village size limits how large a superspreader event can be. Not so in a city. And then you have things like Ebola spread being partially driven by funereal customs.
LLMs currently seem to lack any equivalent of the sort of global workspace that comprises our conscious minds, letting us silently plot many steps ahead and serialize our experiences into memories which preserve the most important parts of what we experience while dropping the rest. I worry that this won't actually be all that hard to add with maybe a single conceptual breakthrough, leading to a stupendous augmentation of what is effectively the LLM's unconscious mind with a consciousness[1] and catapulting it from not being fully general to a genuine superintelligence very quickly.
[1] In the sense that you're unconscious during NREM sleep or unconscious of subliminal stimuli, not anything to do with qualia.
That's about where I am too.
The facts very strongly suggest that the board is not a monolithic entity. Its inability to tell a sensible story about the reasons for Sam's firing might be due to such a single comprehensible story not existing but different board members having different motives that let them agree on the firing initially but ultimately not on a story that they could jointly endorse.