Up until very recently I would have said definitely not, but we're talking about LLM scrapers, who knows how much they've got crammed into their context windows.
Is this not belligerently ignoring the fact that this work is already done imperfectly? I can’t tell you how many serious errors I’ve caught in just a short time of automating the generation of complex spreadsheets from financial data. All of them had already been checked by multiple analysts, and all of them contained serious errors (in different places!)
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
If I’m not mistaken, she goes on to say “but we don’t live in that world, and so we must…” and goes on to argue for policy that doesn’t neglect the poorest and least fortunate members of society.
The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
Sorry, but citation needed. Means testing might seem “obvious” from first principles, but from a policy point of view, it makes little to no sense.
The macroeconomic effects of welfare programs create a society that is better for everyone to live in. Reducing the issue to a matter of personal responsibility is a reframing that allows you to completely lose sight of the big picture, and create programs that are destined to fail by not reaching many of the people they need to.
I mean, that's a very corporate accounting way of looking at it. But countries are not corporations, or even banks, and the abstraction is so leaky it's pretty much never worth using.
There are plenty of places where consumption taxes DON’T have a strong effect, like vice taxes on tobacco and alcohol. It’s absolutely worth actually testing it.
In my own experience, the vast majority of people using this phrase ARE using it as a source of authority. People will ask me about things I am an actual expert in, and then when they don’t like my response, hit me with the ol’ “well, I asked chatGPT and it said…”
I do not need people to lead on that. That’s precisely why leading on “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” makes me trust something less — the speaker is actively assigning responsibility for what’s to come to some other agent, because for one reason or another, they won’t take it on themselves.