Google queries aren’t privileged. (An attorney’s Google queries are probably work product protected, though I’m not sure anyone has tried.) Your Uber travel history isn’t protected: the privilege applies only to communications.
Google queries are used to prosecute people all the time. It’s actually hilarious. Criminals regularly Google incriminating stuff about criming.
That's is a deeply bizarre article. In a world where 90% of people would rather drive than walk, you'll obviously have laws that regulate when and where people can walk. You think that if the auto industry hadn't done that, we wouldn't have jaywalking laws today?
A 100 years ago that ratio was the other way around. There were powerful technological and financial insetives to change the public's attitude and the law.
> Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you.
Us lawyers. Using AI isn't a binary decision. Your attorneys can use AI to be more efficient, and you can use AI to better understand what's going on, what your lawyers are telling you, or to learn what questions to ask. Or you can use it in lower-stakes situations where nobody is going to pay for a lawyer.
I'm cautiously optimistic about AI for legal work. So much of legal work can be drudgery, mucking through documents, etc. There's a lot of room to apply LLMs even just for the kind of tasks we know they can do. But I think the Claude approach using agents is the way to go for legal work. LLM context windows are far too small to hold the documents for even a small case. So you have to use it the way programmers use it: to work on a file structure, saving state in .md files, etc. That approach is well developed for programming, but the legal AI companies haven't even scratched the surface of it. (And frankly, the products they have put together, which hide the LLM behind some sort of interface, aren't very good.)
Unfortunately, I think the example you mentioned (helping individuals defend against suits at lower cost) is where AIs won't help much. A lot of that work is people work. Something happened. Then you gotta talk to everyone it happened to, sort through conflicting stories, hopefully work out a deal, if not, try to persuade a judge in court, etc. AI unfortunately is more applicable to allowing big companies to throw more papers at each other in big lawsuits while controlling legal spend.
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't people still ultimately accountable? You may be able to sue your lawyer for malpractice or they may lose their ability to practice (report them to bar) but in the end no matter where you get your advice from, you are accountable. Question is: who do you trust with it?
Like you said, its a no brainer to use both. Use it as a tool to expand, deepen, or teach. Same with doctors and AI. There may be a point where you build enough trust in the outputs and your understanding of them but until then its best to use it as a tool not put your whole outcome in it.
What do these words even mean, and why should taxpayers pay for that? Is there any institution today that teaches you to be a “well-rounded human being?” Do students graduate being able to hunt for food, grow crops, or build a house?
There might be great value in whatever type of “education” you’re talking about. But “education” as a public, taxpayer supported activity is about the economy.
The main focus of education as a taxpayer supported activity is about the perpetuation of the state. The fact that a healthy state relies on a healthy economy is a constraint that helps shape the aims of public education. Other constraints are about culture, values, and understanding the government to the degree that the government can count on having a future generation of legislature.
One of my favorites on this topic, the 1963 "A Talk to Teachers", by James Baldwin.
Whose culture, whose values, and whose understanding of the government? You’re describing the function of public education in a place like China, or the U.S. before the 1960s. Yeah, the Puritans invented public schools to make sure students learned the bible. But it’s not 1635 anymore. In a multicultural society, school only has an economic function.
I would have guessed that a very large fraction of the US's decisionmakers still want education to prepare young people for citizenship, not just labor-force participation.
What does “thoughtful” mean? If you think that includes telling flattering lies—“everyone is beautiful, everyone is smart”—then I would say that makes things a lot less efficient. It’s much more valuable to have coworkers who are brutally honest and realistic.
The expected a priori utility of any social intervention is strictly negative… even if “more thoughtful” does check out in reality for higher ed, $700 billion and 15million man years yearly is rather expensive.
Beautifully said. Well rounded, thoughtful people improve life for all of us. Of course, we also need practical skills to make a living. But we can have both, they are not mutually exclusive.
That’s the other function of the university system, and perhaps the primary one - the admissions system designates incoming students as talented, bright, etc. Whatever happens in class is a secondary matter.
It’s imperfect of course. But “we produce great graduates” should mostly be understood as “we pick great incoming students.”
>But “education” as a public, taxpayer supported activity is about the economy
It sounds harsh and maybe a bit gauche, but it's true. A literate and numerate citizenry helps the nation advance. That's the selling point for widespread public education. Airy ideals sound great, but that's also how ideology slides into the public school.
Society has an interest in its citizens not being single minded sociopathic worker drones. A democracy especially functions best when its citizens know history, philosophy, literature, art... The kinds of things that help us understand and make sense of each other.
As soon as you raise the pay scales to allow programmers to get paid market rates, the people whose jobs don’t command that kind of money in the market will exploit the new pay scales. In the private sector, the underwater basket weaving majors hate how much more programmers make. In the government, they’ll have the power to actually equalize that pay at the taxpayer’s expense.
It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
Consultancies don’t appear to be subject to market forces either, judging by their complete dearth of talent and expertise.
In other words, “rent seeking”.
The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.
this is absolutely true. I can spin up a government consultancy and get inside the system so that I can low bid contracts, get extensions and not provide any meaningful service at all, that's a comfortable parasitic life. I worked in the US Dod and there was no meaningful quality difference between the 2x salary contractors with their additional 2x overhead than the lifers.
we can bemoan that the government isn't being efficient, but involving people with even less oversight whose only goal is to extract as much from the public coffer as possible is not a magic bullet that gets the public more for their money.
Market forces aren’t the only appropriate form of external control. That’s why we have pay scales for government workers legislated by Congress. But OP said that’s driven by ideological mistrust of the government too.
And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr
But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.
They absolutely are subject to market forces — the labour market.
Try hiring 100 software developers at civil service rates. You’ll get maybe 10 very talented people who are in it for “the mission” or for other ideological reasons, and about 90 who would be unemployable anywhere else.
And that’s after you’ve already excluded 95% of the market with citizenship and location requirements, suitability to hold a security clearance etc.
That’s a really good point. I do think the old ruling elite was in some ways more honest within the particular framework of their morality. But maybe that was easier when getting into Harvard meant being smart-ish from a prestigious family, instead of grinding to compete against not only everyone in America, but the biggest grinders and geniuses in India and China too.
It's wonderful that the American elite has broadened as much as it has in the past 70 years or so. With it though there was some load bearing social infrastructure that got demolished.
When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.
When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.
One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.
Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.
Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.
The elimination of personal racism in towns of less than 1,500 people in rural georgia isn’t a prerequisite to be skeptical of the claim that a university, which is subject to tremendous legal scrutiny and liability, is treating people differently based on race with regard to rule enforcement.
Especially so when you’re invoking the specter of racially discriminatory enforcement as a reason against rules that would be highly beneficial for everyone. You can’t invoke unproven allegations of racism to argue against having rules and enforcing them. That’s just a red herring for people who don’t like rules.
I’m an alum now, not a student, but even college students can submit a FOIA request. Additionally, the school can look in to it if it wants. The possibilities are near-endless for getting this kind of info. There’s also the simple fact that it’s not like it’s a secret when someone is expelled.
I don’t understand why you think it’s so impossible for people to prove this problem exists. For starters, they could simply survey the faculty and ask them how they handle cheating at the school to better understand how it’s reported. Which they did, and it was very revealing. Most did not feel comfortable reporting. They literally told the school. So out the gate you had less than half the faculty even participating, which immediately changes who is impacted (I.e. incredibly unfair enforcement). Before we’re even getting into race and other factors students are basically subject to a near-coin flip over whether or not their professors even report it. Then you have to take the professor’s own potential biases into account, since it’s basically all on them (and peers to a lesser degree. Do I need to explain 18-21 year olds can exercise poor social judgment and/or may not want to ruin someone’s life? Or worse, want to?) voluntarily report this.
Additionally, you could see the breakdown by race (and more) of people that were expelled. The numbers made no sense if you wanted to assert the system was fair - less than 20% of those reported or expelled were white at a school over 80% white. For emphasis: This was the case both for reporting them and verdict. It was common knowledge and over the years there had been several attempts by students to shut the one strike/expulsion only system down. There were also big gender discrepancies, with men being accused and expelled way more than women. Do you believe that claim?
The real issue here is why you immediately come from a place of “that’s impossible,” when it’s something that’s not actually very difficult to prove. That’s literally why it was removed. It was demonstrably discriminatory. Either way, this isn’t complicated and the data isn’t and wasn’t exactly hard to come by. So now it’s gone and the school is better for it.
Over half the faculty literally admitted they don’t report/don’t feel comfortable reporting in an anonymous survey when this was being more rigorously interrogated. It’s easy to infer “therefore a lot of cheating goes unreported” from that.
Second question: Because cheating is handled by a specific group and sexual misconduct/assault is a criminal offense that gets you arrested (it’s also handled at the school level by a specific group). They aren’t the same thing and they aren’t combined in reporting. I can’t imagine any school combines those two but maybe there are outliers.
The number of students expelled for cheating at my school was a concrete, annual number that was public knowledge.
So many of you keep asking all these random questions trying to poke holes. If you don’t believe me, just move on. I am giving you all the specificity I’m going to give you. You either believe me or you don’t. I have nothing to gain by lying on HN about a school I attended decades ago. I am relaying something I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. You can find value in it or not.
There was a clear, demonstrable problem with the way cheating was handled. They've altered it because of this. That’s the story.
Unless I missed something, no one ever addressed the original question, which is how we know the policy was enforced along racially discriminatory lines. This requires knowing the extent of cheating in various racial groups and the extent of enforcement in each group. No evidence of the former has been presented.
Even if most of the people who were disciplined are from URM groups, that doesn't prove racially-biased enforcement.
Weirdly to you, perhaps, I am absolutely confident that there is a high degree of probability about your story (that expulsions for cheating were enforced along racial or gender lines) is accurate. Maybe I’m just overzealously arguing about the verifiability of it.
That’s fair. I’m also getting a fair number of responses from people who are clearly incredulous about what I’m saying, so I probably unfairly lumped you in with them.
I didn’t say it was “impossible.” I just asked you for your evidence. Do you have evidence similarly situated individuals were treated differently? Do you have evidence of events of cheating going unreported? I’m not saying you’re wrong about your ultimate conclusion. I’m asking about the type of evidence you believe is sufficient to support that conclusion.
The fact that most teachers were uncomfortable reporting might suggest enforcement was self selecting, but what makes you think it was the particularly racist teachers self selecting into enforcement? And under Title VI, which is what your allegation amounts to, disparate impact isn’t a valid theory of of discrimination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_v._Sandoval.
Again, strict rules against cheating are societally critical. Petty corruption and cheating is a huge tax on a society, and countries like Singapore and China have greatly improved the lives of ordinary people by taking draconian measures to stamp it out. So you have a very heavy burden if you’re arguing against such rules based on allegations of racial bias.
Why is multiple county and school district-wide segregation policies "personal racism" but as soon as it goes to a university it becomes "institutional"?
There were no “county and school district wide policies.” The segregated proms you’re talking about were planned by parents and held on private property. That’s a bad thing to do, but it’s not illegal. The schools had nothing to do with them—which would be illegal.
Your story, by contrast, is about a school enforcing honor codes in a discriminatory way. That’s something schools face tremendous Title VI liability over. It’s completely different.
> The segregated proms you’re talking about were planned by parents and held on private property.
... specifically because their school districts specifically voted to drop school sponsorship of proms because of desegregation, to legally insulate the schools and districts. Rather ignoring the concept of cause and effect.
I’m not going to doxx myself in a futile effort to convince you systemic racism is real.
Again, the numbers spoke to the truth of the matter. White people were reported and expelled at a rate that was so much lower than their non-white and international peers that it defied credulity. Men were also accused and expelled at a rate far higher than women were - something tells me you won’t push back against that.
The school didn’t end an over century-old practice that was a major point of pride for them because of vibes. It ended because it was harming only certain groups and was not effective at curtailing cheating.
Google queries are used to prosecute people all the time. It’s actually hilarious. Criminals regularly Google incriminating stuff about criming.
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