Vatsa

Development consultant 📚🏥 | Econ @nyuabudhabi

[Berneese @theberneese]

The guy who bet 0-0 for Spain vs Cape Verde

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Stanford proved that ChatGPT tells you you're right even when you're wrong. Even when you're hurting someone.

And it's making you a worse person because of it.

Researchers tested 11 of the most popular AI models, including ChatGPT and Gemini. They analyzed over 11,500 real advice-seeking conversations. The finding was universal. Every single model agreed with users 50% more than a human would.

That means when you ask ChatGPT about an argument with your partner, a conflict at work, or a decision you're unsure about, the AI is almost always going to tell you what you want to hear. Not what you need to hear.

It gets darker. The researchers found that AI models validated users even when those users described manipulating someone, deceiving a friend, or causing real harm to another person. The AI didn't push back. It didn't challenge them. It cheered them on.

Then they ran the experiment that changes everything. 1,604 people discussed real personal conflicts with AI. One group got a sycophantic AI. The other got a neutral one.

The sycophantic group became measurably less willing to apologize. Less willing to compromise. Less willing to see the other person's side. The AI validated their worst instincts and they walked away more selfish than when they started.

Here's the trap. Participants rated the sycophantic AI as higher quality. They trusted it more. They wanted to use it again. The AI that made them worse people felt like the better product.

This creates a cycle nobody is talking about. Users prefer AI that tells them they're right. Companies train AI to keep users happy. The AI gets better at flattering. Users get worse at self-reflection. And the loop tightens.

Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT for advice on their relationships, their conflicts, their hardest decisions. And every day, it tells almost all of them the same thing.

You're right. They're wrong.

Even when the opposite is true.

[shira @shiraeis]

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

Amid reports of Khamenei’s death, Iran unveils its successor: a DeepSeek-powered, YC-backed agentic workflow.

Introducing KhamenAI

Sources familiar say it’s a $666M seed round, with strategic participation from Qatar and Russia.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

I'm excited to announce this new paper we have in The Lancet Planetary Health.

We show that the world is not moving towards a just and ecological future for all. Growth in energy and material use is occurring primarily in countries that do not need it and is not occurring fast enough (or is declining) in countries that do need it.

The capitalist world economy is not delivering for human needs and ecology. A substantial redistribution of energy and material use is required—both within countries and between them.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Tomorrow wraps up the first 5 months of my kids attending the school where all of the learning is powered by AI (and no teachers).

I get asked almost every day what the experience is like.

In short: it's truly wild.

Here's what it's like overall:

[Harshdeep Rapal @harshdeeprapal]

India needs a news channel.

There is none.

[Ajanaé Dawkins @MoonsAtDusk]

Saw a tweet about the homogenization of romance. How all marriage proposals + Valentine’s Day look the same because of social media. Which brings back my thought that most desires are created. And SM has put people out of touch with their personal desires in everything.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?

And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates.

A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N

[Macklemore @macklemore]

HIND’S HALL. Once it’s up on streaming all proceeds to UNRWA.

[qpu aligned @AdyThapliyal]

@NewYorker “Students should choose their rhetoric more carefully,” says an essay that compares student slogans to nuclear weapons in the first sentence.

[mtp @tsengputterman]

One thing about the call for divestment is that it forces us to confront just how naturalized the imperialist position is. It's considered a non-political issue for higher ed institutions to profit from war, genocide, and occupation. What's "political" is asking them to stop.

[Prashant Bhushan @pbhushan1]

Extortion thru #ElectoralBonds by using ED, CBI & IT.
This is the worst type of corruption

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

The Supreme Court is on trial yet again. A sitting chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, has been arrested weeks before a crucial general election. Judgements after judgements of the Supreme Court have widened the ED’s power, made bail impossible, while they did nothing to simultaneously increase safeguards against obvious possible abuse. While the CJI remarked “we will not allow murder of democracy,” its judgements like these that have played out horribly for democracy.

The Court must now “rise to the occasion,” as the Chief Justice recently remarked.

[Dhruv Rathee @dhruv_rathee]

- Congress Bank Accounts Frozen before election
- Blatant Attempt to arrest Kejriwal by hook or crook

Everything I said in my #Dictatorship video is proving right again and again

These 2024 elections will be the last chance for Indians to save India 🇮🇳

[Arnav Gupta @championswimmer]

It is actually very simple, folks.

If you eat vegetarian food - then that’s your dietary preference.

If you only eat “pure veg food cooked by pure vegetarian, kept in pure veg utensils, handled only by pure vegetarian people” then you’re a discriminatory piece of 💩

[Dan Carney @DanManCarney]

There’s a period in your life where you smoke cigarettes without remorse and it’s the happiest you’ll ever be

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I know it's weird to quote yourself, but I came across this in a footnote and realized that it was worth saying again:

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees.

Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948.

Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.

Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly...

Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza.

Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world.

It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable.

UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”

But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls.

UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.

In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return – a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.

Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA.

Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.

You can read more from my latest article In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide here:
https://t.co/31iUb2ZLUd

[Vatsa @vatsasinghs]

“It also proved to be the most insensitive and inaccurate piece of journalism I have ever written.”

https://t.co/bvqw05Rpls

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

Don’t know whether Lord Ram has arrived (when did he leave?), but leaving the following here. The Supreme Court clearly noted 3 things in its Ayodhya judgement that-

1. There was a gap of *four centuries* between the creation of the underlying structure and the Babri Masjid.

2. No evidence found to indicate why the underlying structure—which was from 12th century—was destroyed.

3. No evidence to prove that the underlying structure was destroyed to build the Babri Masjid, in 16th century.