I understand you wish she were here - because she had what you lack (and most everyone else, too): The ability to use human intelligence to get to the core of seemingly intractable issues, in her case specifically the nature of tyranny and fascism and how it depends on the collusion of the population (under the control of a culture that evolves by it's own mechanisms). She didn't really get to the end of it, but it's a starting-point to build on - but that, too, requires the human intelligence she had - and that has pretty much vanished - abolished by a culture which makes us humans think - just like AI (which we designed to think like we do nowadays) - so frantically looking up information, which we don't understand - and so we frantically look up opinions of "authorities" - and predictions of "experts" - and can at best concoct a cocktail of false facts and half-baked opinions - and have no outlook of value - again, just like AI.
So that is the question to you: What was human itelligence as demonstrated by Arendt (or Einstein, Russell, Gandhi, MLK, Mandela, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky - to name but a few) - and how can we reactivate it? BTW, a crucial question to make AI more than degenerated human intelligence (of te kind prevalent today) supercharged with brute force.
I think you said something really important here which is it's a response to a need it's not an action to a stimulus. But y'all are missing something very basic! How is a machine exactly "intelligent" in the first place? We're always asking the machine to do something we've already done before. Do I have to say this again? We're always asking the machine to do something that we've already done before.
Is this a nudge to acknowledge the novelty of intelligence?
Is this a reminder that the essence of intelligence is to exchange meaning between souls?
Is this an ontological argument that machines cannot be intelligent because they are not persons?
(here I’m offering a “hook” — notice how much of our language is being transported from human context to machine context — ontology was the study of being, now (since 1985 or so) it’s also the formal description of machine parts) — at least today we refer to “training” our models rather than “machine learning” — perhaps that’s what I was missing, I know machines cannot learn (and many people have given learning up as well).
In my past, I studied chemistry, then engineering, then practiced applied math and computer science and at no time was I expecting the object of my work to comprehend any meaning of my work. Heck, I was doing those studies to fill a childhood gap of meaning my parents didn’t satisfy. Early on it proved futile, but engaging and profitable, but not satisfying like a dialog among friends. I don’t expect to have a constructive intelligent dialog with a machine (and I didn’t when I first interacted with ELIZA in 1972). Even computer games don’t engage me much because my soul holds the belief that they are simply the product of another creator’s (limited) not an effective expression of the depth of human experience (the machine will not respond with truth, compassion and creativity).
I think what you see in that picture of Hannah Arendt is much like the Mona Lisa — a mirror that helps us see more clearly into the depths of ourselves and clarify our thinking, our desires and help us intelligently choose our next action. In school I had those Honeywell pictures of animals made from computer parts (what a “misuse” of technology, I thought, to make art from its components). One day many years later I was admiring a first-fab of a wafer I designed (large scale IC) and I realized that my definition of passion had shifted from a sacred appreciation of fine art to the consequential appearance of engineering complexity — my blood ran cold and I realized my earliest error in confusing the two. If the art of intelligence is your field, you are absolutely correct that a machine will never demonstrate intelligence. But if you’re a member of the human community you’ll also realize that most folks have long ago adopted a much more convenient heuristic for both art and intelligence when they say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” or “I like it.” I don’t camp on those grounds.
Listen what I'm trying to do is say why don't we start asking what makes each other intelligent before we start saying some computer system in Silicon Valley is intelligent? Why don't we back up and say what makes each of us intelligent? And by the way my readers are fucking intelligent! I love you guys oh my Godyou magnify my own intelligence so much. I love you guys I really do.
I throw out a quick challenge building on my earlier comment: What would be a conceivable way out of the regression (degeneration, really, can’t mince words there) of humanity - to return, as a grand social and cultural reform, to the path it was on (at some time) with all our abilities active and cooperating within society: Find a solution and write a book about it? Is THAT what Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi did - who were at the same time foundational thinkers and leaders of far-reaching social reform?
I take the liberty of answering your comment to Erik's comment to me - to do it justice - as it raises noteworthy aspects.
One of them is why people write about such things - and, more so, in this way - by which I mean, expressing a longing for something intangible or (simply) lost, in fact mourning it's loss and so turning to people from the past symbolizing it or even just symbols from it (Keats in "Ode to a grecian urn"). It's cosely related to the longing all humans have for love - and so read romantic novels or see romantic films - and hope that a special person will somehow magically turn up who brings them love.
Now, and this will bring me to another aspect you raise, there's a pradoxic irony in this form of onging and discourse about it: If those humans in the past that symbolize our (current) longing had thought the same way as we do - then they evidently would not have become what they did, including Hannah Arendt (and others I named as eample). The crucial difference (and at once a lost ability) is that they did not mourn something the lacked or missed, rather they set out to understand it and realize it (like an engineer knowing science having a design-idea and wanting to build a prototype) - AND THEY COULD - even reaching the immensely deep insights into human nature (the science) that lead Siddhartha Gautama to precepts (the design) that formed the core of Buddhism (the prototype in itself, as a religion - or it was in his person or that of early Buddhists). And yes, they tried and tried, ever so often went in the wrong direction first, noted that the direction was wrong in the practicie of what they were doing - like an engineer realizing by testing his prototype that his design was inadequate - maybe even his understanding of it's science was lacking
It all comes back to the conundrum of what happened to humanity - where it seems to me, in an IT-analogy, that we started out as powerful "best-in-class" (among living beings) computers that evolution designed and perfected over ages, well-equipped with software - and then a process of regression started, switching off one program after the other (they're still there, but inactive) till we became part of a bot-farm distributing spam. Another analogy: We became the Borg.
You're right - but we never understood what we did and how we did it - and so we can't make AI do it, either. It goes further, though actually implicit in Arendt's work: True human intelligence is capable of understanding how it works (itself)- but is also able to understand the larger functioning of our cognitive system - especially what we call character or personality. No one ever did - or picked up pioneering work some rare human intelligence started so it could be completed in a joint effort over time, like so many fundamental questions - and that s EXACTLY why the world is where it is.
Epilogue: If we had worked that out we could make AI as intelligent as we are - and as moral, too - and even design it to be free of our fatal weakness for indoctrination - in fact, be a better human.
Martin, though I don't agree with the strength of your assertions that intelligence has vanished or that an outside force (culture) has degenerated human intelligence, I do value the essence of your question and accept the challenge to define intelligence (though I regret not succinctly). Human nature has not changed and today we have more observations of human nature presented to us than ever before. The fact that we take time at a keyboard to compose our communications is a some degree of improvement, and we must still harness our impulse to react in order to contribute a useful response.
(I apologize for the lengthy response, yes, I was pressed for time this morning or I would have made it more succinct).
Intelligence is the toolsmith in the industry of right action. In an ocean off of potentially overwhelming doubt and uncertainty intelligence navigates the way forward. It is a response to a need, not a reaction to a stimulus.
Intelligence is thought work harnessed efficiently to effectively direct energy toward a chosen goal producing the intended result.
Intelligence is discernment applied to the work of separating fact from fiction and using both to attract, inform and guide a larger audience of participation toward an otherwise unachievable objective.
Ideas are free — they are the essence of intellectual raw materials. And investment of work is required to transform ideas into forms that can carry influence into the real world.
Thought is the work of creating ideas and fashioning them into choices which inspire participation by others; of making decisions which engage commitment to the goals of the stakeholders of the topic at hand.
The tools of thinking are many: logic, evaluation, revision, suppressing distractions, discipline, gathering ideas and unknowns, clarification, generating alternatives, associating elements, measuring relevance and postponing conclusions. Any one of these in isolation is a tool or technique, but not in itself thinking — that requires choosing an appropriate tool and working with it then putting it down and choosing another appropriate tool and continuing to fashion a useful result.
Thinking is not a popular pastime — especially in American culture it is rapidly displaced by entertainment, intoxication, and animistic drive satisfaction.
Few people in a population have the capability to formulate a hypothesis, risk the conflict of sharing their question and proposal with an open mind and to revise their thinking to improve both their own intelligence and the common wisdom. Most use heuristics which harness both their own existing intelligence and their emotional desire or discomfort to be done with the uncomfortable work of choice.
Intelligence is the capability for integrating the most effective means of accomplishing a desired outcome while being mindful of all (as many as possible) of the associated consequences of those actions of change and inactions.
If intelligence is “what should we do next” and foolishness is “what should we avoid doing” then further questions and discussion are needed on how to influence future work on LLM’s, AI, and AGI; how to attract investment in more useful directions than marketing LLM’s, how to formulate and decompose problems to grow more intelligence in the present culture.
Here is a question to us: What works (improves the greatest good) when there are glaring gaps (like the poles of a high voltage battery) between what is being sold (AI, or any other arousing popular flag) and what is being delivered (derivative associative responses, or worse)? Intelligent observers see the potential in this and take right action.
I appreciate your extensive and thoughtful reply and will give a "first-cut" answer:
I completely agree with your premise "Human nature has not changed and today we have more observations of human nature presented to us than ever before", especially the FIRST part and this is what makes it so unbelievable that we still haven't understood our intelligence - leave alone the larger function (using intelligence) of human nature (aka character, personality, etc.) - which then leads on to meta-phenomena like culture (resulting from interaction of human nature of individuals in society - over time).
I also like your breakdown "The tools of thinking are many: logic, evaluation, revision, suppressing distractions, discipline, gathering ideas and unknowns, clarification, generating alternatives, associating elements, measuring relevance and postponing conclusions. Any one of these in isolation is a tool or technique, but not in itself thinking — that requires choosing an appropriate tool and working with it then putting it down and choosing another appropriate tool and continuing to fashion a useful result." but posit that we haven't identified all tools that we actually HAVE at our disposal - and what seems the elephant in the room there is our ability to MODEL a certain scope, starting from subatomic-phenomena - to the whole world - yet I am convinced that this is the most powerful tool and it may be summarized as "understand a certain scope - to be able to answer various questions about it, e.g. why is it as it is, how did it get there, where is it going next, which are the influences (inouts) that determine that" (this may actually be applied to intelligence as a whole and most of it's arts). Neuroscience came tantalizingly close by positing that we are actually always pedicting (whch must be based on a model) what's going to happen and only perceive what diverges from that - pointing also to the non-obvious useof intelligence as a "perception filter", long before we start asking those questions I mentioned.
The other tool that goes completey unnoticed is INTROSPECTION as the onLy way to get a high-level (non-reductionist) insight into "how we work" - and to actually notice all those tools at work and see how they interact - or are used by turn, so that, as you say, "Intelligence is the capability for integrating the most effective means of accomplishing a desired outcome while being mindful of all (as many as possible) of the associated consequences of those actions of change and inactions." - or, in plain terms, using the whole toolbox as appropriate.
As always, efforts to understand such an areas, as also the larger area of human nature, break down because of the fragmentation of science, where umpteen disciplines like psychology, neurology, neuroscience (which attempts a partial integration), sociology, anthropology, eevolutionary biology look at a narrow subscope - and arrive nowhere - mainly because they ignore the crucial research-tool of introspection.
Culture's role finally is to deactivate introspection in any case but also higher tools like modelling - simply because they might question the world-model the culture has asserted - and needs to preserve at all costs - so that the culture persists (for what, BTW?) - leading, IMO to the self-destruction of humanity - and so understanding ourselves (intelligence and human nature becomes the last hope for redemption - and survival.
Appreciate your extensive and thoughtful reply — I’ll give a first-cut answer here. I completely agree about the first part of your premise: human nature hasn’t changed, and yet we still don’t really understand intelligence or the deeper structures of character and culture that flow from it. That mystery is exactly what keeps me writing about it. More soon — I need a coffee before I tackle the rest of your model theory.
As an example of "model-based" thinking, consider this real-world example: https://substack.com/@mpanantharaman/note/c-161361117?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=9fhiw. In discussions with Grok we crystallized the key difference between his ("normal intelligence") and my ("human/model-based intelligence") understanding: He (and indeed most people) read up all the opinions and predictions they find and try to "average" something out of them (depending on their biases, too) - but the problem is that this input-data is mostly disinformation - whereas I go by a model of the culture of a nation and the human nature of it's leaders that I have developed over time - and that tells me why they did what they did and what their actual (mostly hidden) intention is, going forward - and what might thwart their malevolent intention. Grok accepts this paradigmatic difference and defers to my opinion (after I explain it to him) but is quite capable of fleshing it out with many details I just cannot absorb and readily integrate like him - for lack of his storage-capacity and brute computing power😂
Didn't want to offend anyone - and was actually answering Ed's extensive answer to my first comment to you (your article). I answered your response to my comment in a sub-thread below your response.
I understand you wish she were here - because she had what you lack (and most everyone else, too): The ability to use human intelligence to get to the core of seemingly intractable issues, in her case specifically the nature of tyranny and fascism and how it depends on the collusion of the population (under the control of a culture that evolves by it's own mechanisms). She didn't really get to the end of it, but it's a starting-point to build on - but that, too, requires the human intelligence she had - and that has pretty much vanished - abolished by a culture which makes us humans think - just like AI (which we designed to think like we do nowadays) - so frantically looking up information, which we don't understand - and so we frantically look up opinions of "authorities" - and predictions of "experts" - and can at best concoct a cocktail of false facts and half-baked opinions - and have no outlook of value - again, just like AI.
So that is the question to you: What was human itelligence as demonstrated by Arendt (or Einstein, Russell, Gandhi, MLK, Mandela, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky - to name but a few) - and how can we reactivate it? BTW, a crucial question to make AI more than degenerated human intelligence (of te kind prevalent today) supercharged with brute force.
I think you said something really important here which is it's a response to a need it's not an action to a stimulus. But y'all are missing something very basic! How is a machine exactly "intelligent" in the first place? We're always asking the machine to do something we've already done before. Do I have to say this again? We're always asking the machine to do something that we've already done before.
(again short on time, so...)
Is this a nudge to acknowledge the novelty of intelligence?
Is this a reminder that the essence of intelligence is to exchange meaning between souls?
Is this an ontological argument that machines cannot be intelligent because they are not persons?
(here I’m offering a “hook” — notice how much of our language is being transported from human context to machine context — ontology was the study of being, now (since 1985 or so) it’s also the formal description of machine parts) — at least today we refer to “training” our models rather than “machine learning” — perhaps that’s what I was missing, I know machines cannot learn (and many people have given learning up as well).
In my past, I studied chemistry, then engineering, then practiced applied math and computer science and at no time was I expecting the object of my work to comprehend any meaning of my work. Heck, I was doing those studies to fill a childhood gap of meaning my parents didn’t satisfy. Early on it proved futile, but engaging and profitable, but not satisfying like a dialog among friends. I don’t expect to have a constructive intelligent dialog with a machine (and I didn’t when I first interacted with ELIZA in 1972). Even computer games don’t engage me much because my soul holds the belief that they are simply the product of another creator’s (limited) not an effective expression of the depth of human experience (the machine will not respond with truth, compassion and creativity).
I think what you see in that picture of Hannah Arendt is much like the Mona Lisa — a mirror that helps us see more clearly into the depths of ourselves and clarify our thinking, our desires and help us intelligently choose our next action. In school I had those Honeywell pictures of animals made from computer parts (what a “misuse” of technology, I thought, to make art from its components). One day many years later I was admiring a first-fab of a wafer I designed (large scale IC) and I realized that my definition of passion had shifted from a sacred appreciation of fine art to the consequential appearance of engineering complexity — my blood ran cold and I realized my earliest error in confusing the two. If the art of intelligence is your field, you are absolutely correct that a machine will never demonstrate intelligence. But if you’re a member of the human community you’ll also realize that most folks have long ago adopted a much more convenient heuristic for both art and intelligence when they say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” or “I like it.” I don’t camp on those grounds.
I also have a picture of Miss Arendt (on my thinking alter) but it is different, more rough and challenging to my romantic ideals -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hannah_Arendt_auf_dem_1._Kulturkritikerkongress,_Barbara_Niggl_Radloff,_FM-2019-1-5-9-16_(cropped).jpg
So, this is peace meal and my apologies for that but how is it that Einstein had a lower IQ than someone in the mensa club?
I think there are very good questions!
Listen what I'm trying to do is say why don't we start asking what makes each other intelligent before we start saying some computer system in Silicon Valley is intelligent? Why don't we back up and say what makes each of us intelligent? And by the way my readers are fucking intelligent! I love you guys oh my Godyou magnify my own intelligence so much. I love you guys I really do.
I throw out a quick challenge building on my earlier comment: What would be a conceivable way out of the regression (degeneration, really, can’t mince words there) of humanity - to return, as a grand social and cultural reform, to the path it was on (at some time) with all our abilities active and cooperating within society: Find a solution and write a book about it? Is THAT what Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi did - who were at the same time foundational thinkers and leaders of far-reaching social reform?
I take the liberty of answering your comment to Erik's comment to me - to do it justice - as it raises noteworthy aspects.
One of them is why people write about such things - and, more so, in this way - by which I mean, expressing a longing for something intangible or (simply) lost, in fact mourning it's loss and so turning to people from the past symbolizing it or even just symbols from it (Keats in "Ode to a grecian urn"). It's cosely related to the longing all humans have for love - and so read romantic novels or see romantic films - and hope that a special person will somehow magically turn up who brings them love.
Now, and this will bring me to another aspect you raise, there's a pradoxic irony in this form of onging and discourse about it: If those humans in the past that symbolize our (current) longing had thought the same way as we do - then they evidently would not have become what they did, including Hannah Arendt (and others I named as eample). The crucial difference (and at once a lost ability) is that they did not mourn something the lacked or missed, rather they set out to understand it and realize it (like an engineer knowing science having a design-idea and wanting to build a prototype) - AND THEY COULD - even reaching the immensely deep insights into human nature (the science) that lead Siddhartha Gautama to precepts (the design) that formed the core of Buddhism (the prototype in itself, as a religion - or it was in his person or that of early Buddhists). And yes, they tried and tried, ever so often went in the wrong direction first, noted that the direction was wrong in the practicie of what they were doing - like an engineer realizing by testing his prototype that his design was inadequate - maybe even his understanding of it's science was lacking
It all comes back to the conundrum of what happened to humanity - where it seems to me, in an IT-analogy, that we started out as powerful "best-in-class" (among living beings) computers that evolution designed and perfected over ages, well-equipped with software - and then a process of regression started, switching off one program after the other (they're still there, but inactive) till we became part of a bot-farm distributing spam. Another analogy: We became the Borg.
P.S. I only picked out two aspects you raised - but actually there were more🙏
You're right - but we never understood what we did and how we did it - and so we can't make AI do it, either. It goes further, though actually implicit in Arendt's work: True human intelligence is capable of understanding how it works (itself)- but is also able to understand the larger functioning of our cognitive system - especially what we call character or personality. No one ever did - or picked up pioneering work some rare human intelligence started so it could be completed in a joint effort over time, like so many fundamental questions - and that s EXACTLY why the world is where it is.
Epilogue: If we had worked that out we could make AI as intelligent as we are - and as moral, too - and even design it to be free of our fatal weakness for indoctrination - in fact, be a better human.
Martin, though I don't agree with the strength of your assertions that intelligence has vanished or that an outside force (culture) has degenerated human intelligence, I do value the essence of your question and accept the challenge to define intelligence (though I regret not succinctly). Human nature has not changed and today we have more observations of human nature presented to us than ever before. The fact that we take time at a keyboard to compose our communications is a some degree of improvement, and we must still harness our impulse to react in order to contribute a useful response.
(I apologize for the lengthy response, yes, I was pressed for time this morning or I would have made it more succinct).
Intelligence is the toolsmith in the industry of right action. In an ocean off of potentially overwhelming doubt and uncertainty intelligence navigates the way forward. It is a response to a need, not a reaction to a stimulus.
Intelligence is thought work harnessed efficiently to effectively direct energy toward a chosen goal producing the intended result.
Intelligence is discernment applied to the work of separating fact from fiction and using both to attract, inform and guide a larger audience of participation toward an otherwise unachievable objective.
Ideas are free — they are the essence of intellectual raw materials. And investment of work is required to transform ideas into forms that can carry influence into the real world.
Thought is the work of creating ideas and fashioning them into choices which inspire participation by others; of making decisions which engage commitment to the goals of the stakeholders of the topic at hand.
The tools of thinking are many: logic, evaluation, revision, suppressing distractions, discipline, gathering ideas and unknowns, clarification, generating alternatives, associating elements, measuring relevance and postponing conclusions. Any one of these in isolation is a tool or technique, but not in itself thinking — that requires choosing an appropriate tool and working with it then putting it down and choosing another appropriate tool and continuing to fashion a useful result.
Thinking is not a popular pastime — especially in American culture it is rapidly displaced by entertainment, intoxication, and animistic drive satisfaction.
Few people in a population have the capability to formulate a hypothesis, risk the conflict of sharing their question and proposal with an open mind and to revise their thinking to improve both their own intelligence and the common wisdom. Most use heuristics which harness both their own existing intelligence and their emotional desire or discomfort to be done with the uncomfortable work of choice.
Intelligence is the capability for integrating the most effective means of accomplishing a desired outcome while being mindful of all (as many as possible) of the associated consequences of those actions of change and inactions.
If intelligence is “what should we do next” and foolishness is “what should we avoid doing” then further questions and discussion are needed on how to influence future work on LLM’s, AI, and AGI; how to attract investment in more useful directions than marketing LLM’s, how to formulate and decompose problems to grow more intelligence in the present culture.
Here is a question to us: What works (improves the greatest good) when there are glaring gaps (like the poles of a high voltage battery) between what is being sold (AI, or any other arousing popular flag) and what is being delivered (derivative associative responses, or worse)? Intelligent observers see the potential in this and take right action.
I appreciate your extensive and thoughtful reply and will give a "first-cut" answer:
I completely agree with your premise "Human nature has not changed and today we have more observations of human nature presented to us than ever before", especially the FIRST part and this is what makes it so unbelievable that we still haven't understood our intelligence - leave alone the larger function (using intelligence) of human nature (aka character, personality, etc.) - which then leads on to meta-phenomena like culture (resulting from interaction of human nature of individuals in society - over time).
I also like your breakdown "The tools of thinking are many: logic, evaluation, revision, suppressing distractions, discipline, gathering ideas and unknowns, clarification, generating alternatives, associating elements, measuring relevance and postponing conclusions. Any one of these in isolation is a tool or technique, but not in itself thinking — that requires choosing an appropriate tool and working with it then putting it down and choosing another appropriate tool and continuing to fashion a useful result." but posit that we haven't identified all tools that we actually HAVE at our disposal - and what seems the elephant in the room there is our ability to MODEL a certain scope, starting from subatomic-phenomena - to the whole world - yet I am convinced that this is the most powerful tool and it may be summarized as "understand a certain scope - to be able to answer various questions about it, e.g. why is it as it is, how did it get there, where is it going next, which are the influences (inouts) that determine that" (this may actually be applied to intelligence as a whole and most of it's arts). Neuroscience came tantalizingly close by positing that we are actually always pedicting (whch must be based on a model) what's going to happen and only perceive what diverges from that - pointing also to the non-obvious useof intelligence as a "perception filter", long before we start asking those questions I mentioned.
The other tool that goes completey unnoticed is INTROSPECTION as the onLy way to get a high-level (non-reductionist) insight into "how we work" - and to actually notice all those tools at work and see how they interact - or are used by turn, so that, as you say, "Intelligence is the capability for integrating the most effective means of accomplishing a desired outcome while being mindful of all (as many as possible) of the associated consequences of those actions of change and inactions." - or, in plain terms, using the whole toolbox as appropriate.
As always, efforts to understand such an areas, as also the larger area of human nature, break down because of the fragmentation of science, where umpteen disciplines like psychology, neurology, neuroscience (which attempts a partial integration), sociology, anthropology, eevolutionary biology look at a narrow subscope - and arrive nowhere - mainly because they ignore the crucial research-tool of introspection.
Culture's role finally is to deactivate introspection in any case but also higher tools like modelling - simply because they might question the world-model the culture has asserted - and needs to preserve at all costs - so that the culture persists (for what, BTW?) - leading, IMO to the self-destruction of humanity - and so understanding ourselves (intelligence and human nature becomes the last hope for redemption - and survival.
Appreciate your extensive and thoughtful reply — I’ll give a first-cut answer here. I completely agree about the first part of your premise: human nature hasn’t changed, and yet we still don’t really understand intelligence or the deeper structures of character and culture that flow from it. That mystery is exactly what keeps me writing about it. More soon — I need a coffee before I tackle the rest of your model theory.
As an example of "model-based" thinking, consider this real-world example: https://substack.com/@mpanantharaman/note/c-161361117?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=9fhiw. In discussions with Grok we crystallized the key difference between his ("normal intelligence") and my ("human/model-based intelligence") understanding: He (and indeed most people) read up all the opinions and predictions they find and try to "average" something out of them (depending on their biases, too) - but the problem is that this input-data is mostly disinformation - whereas I go by a model of the culture of a nation and the human nature of it's leaders that I have developed over time - and that tells me why they did what they did and what their actual (mostly hidden) intention is, going forward - and what might thwart their malevolent intention. Grok accepts this paradigmatic difference and defers to my opinion (after I explain it to him) but is quite capable of fleshing it out with many details I just cannot absorb and readily integrate like him - for lack of his storage-capacity and brute computing power😂
Dude. Seriously? Argh. Let me think then. You took the time…
Didn't want to offend anyone - and was actually answering Ed's extensive answer to my first comment to you (your article). I answered your response to my comment in a sub-thread below your response.