That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
A lot of people were writing off the Tories in like fashion around the turn of the century, and their predicament seemed even worse. Look at them now.
One lesson, however, from the Conservative rebuild: they didn't claw their way back to power by retreating further and further into the membership's comfort zone.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Sadly, he has zero charisma. Some level of charisma is key these days.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
You're far too pessimistic. This time next year when we are in deep economic shit (and actually feeling the pain) and the pandemic is a memory, even as Brexit is still an annoyance... Boris could seem a lot less appealing
Boring Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer could come into his own. Boring could be good. Give the other lot a go, etc
It’s about jobs, meaningful jobs. And support from state services that allow all to live in dignity.
Rishi’s budget actually continues the austerity of the 2010s, and doesn’t really do anything for jobs with the exception of the corporate investment subsidy.
Keir does get this I think, if my scanning of his budget response is fair - but he hasn’t figured out how to communicate that properly to the public in a compelling way.
Austerity is not quite the word for a Conservative government whose expenditure is £850 bn, a huge proportion of which is borrowed, and vast sums of which are redistributed to less well off people.
Austerity to public services. Austerity in wage growth.
Private sector wages won't grow as long as employers have an effectively infinite labour pool to fish in. I am a senior software engineer and can tell you when you go job hunting the wages companies offer now are on par with the wages they offered in 2002 outside of a couple of very niche specialities.
It used to be if your company decided against payrises then you could get one by changing job. No longer true anymore at least in my role. Think on that....I currently earn the same amount as I did in 2002. So do most of my colleagues. Yet we are constantly being told there is a shortage of it workers.
The only people I know who work in the private sector that have seen payrises are all minimum wage workers due to minimum wage being uprated.
Brexit for many was a chance to cut down the size of the labour pool. It was remainer Rose after all that said we should remain in the eu else wages might rise
No, I disagree. The reason wages haven’t risen are a combination of -
Globalisation, including offshoring A bias toward capital and away from labour The flourishing of zero-contract gig workers Stalled productivity growth in corporate UK
As far as I am concerned, European immigration was actually a great boost for U.K. productivity and actually tended to increase wages for native born employees.
Well lets see, wages were rising steadily in my industry slightly above inflation till 2002-2003....I wonder what happened then?
Same as for plumbers, electricians. When supply is higher than demand price decrease . Supply of labour increased you can try and blame it on other stuff all you want but we had all that stuff when wages were increasing too.
You just don't like being told that FoM caused any problems. It undoubtedly did.
No; we didn’t have all that stuff. Sorry.
Sadly it is just anecdote versus anecdote.
I employ software developers. I have pretty much near-shored or off-shored all if now but I reserve U.K. for niche / high value specialism.
Like you say there is and always was a shortage of skilled developers, which does not fit your insinuation that flat wages are because of over-supply.
Off shoring and near shoring are part of the infinite pool of labour however so it backs what I said. You wanted the job done cheaper so you used the infinite pool.
There are many tasks that have to be done here however and that is where fom comes in because where they couldn't offshore or near shore they suddenly had a pool of eastern european developers that would move here and do the job cheaper. Yet you claim that has no effect on wages.....pull the other one
No.
In my 20 years in digital, *skill availability* has always been more important than cost.
Your mileage of course may vary.
My skills have been up to date in all the 30+ years as a software engineer. Used to be though you learnt new skills so you could apply for better paying jobs....now you learn new skills so you can tread water. The only people that have benefitted from the infinite labour force are employers.
I have no doubt if we didn't have minimum wage then jobs like retail and hospitality and cleaning would now be paying a little above the going rates in eastern europe.
You may have gained from FoM but the experience of a lot of those that voted brexit is that there is always enough people out there that will do the job cheaper that their wages don't rise.
Sadly most people who voted Brexit were economically inactive, and seemed to have a very poor idea about how the modern economy work(ed).
Brexit was a massive leap backwards, and you are paying the cost in continued stagnant wages.
Total bollocks were most economiclly inactive the vote to leave was high among c1,c2 as well as d and e. My wages were stagnant for the 14 years before the referendum so it has cost me precisely bugger all. However in those 14 years people like you have gleefully used your infinite labour pool to keep wages stagnant or in the case of people like electricians and plumbers drive them down. We are glad you are crying now should have thought what the consequences might be of doing that really
Presumably you will be happy to pay more for your weekly shop at Lidl?
Well my weekly shop so far hasn't increased and if I start actually getting pay rises again its possible they might outstrip increases. Worth the gamble at least staying in the EU was doing bugger all for me.
In real terms since 2002 I have had a 33% pay cut and staying with FoM just promised more of the same
I'm not saying that being in the EU wasn't the reason for your 33% real terms pay cut but it seems massively simplistic to blame it entirely on the EU and FOM.
There's a whole generation of workers now (me included) who have never really experienced pay rises like you are accustomed to since entering the workforce in the early 2010s. Whether or not that lack of 'expectation' changes behaviour of employers, I don't know.
I am not claiming it was the only reason, out sourcing also played a role. However it is largely a vastly expanded labour pool problem mainly no matter what people like Gardenwalker says.
It is also true to say that for my job are wage inflation was vastly outstripping inflation due to shortages. That needed correcting I will admit but it went too far the other way.
The infinite labour pool also means companies have little need to train their existing workforce - they can just get those skills from abroad. Whuch also leads to wage stagnation.
Germany and Switzerland also have access to this “infinite pool”. I wonder how wages are faring there.
Median household incomes have grown in both.
They have stagnated (in real terms) in the US and the UK.
And they have done worse than stagnate in Italy.
This is a complex area.
Yep. Exactly.
1) Most europeans have english as a second language not german so if you can speak czech or english where are you going to look for work the uk or germany
2) Germany used the 7 year moratorium on free movement we didn't
And yet there are (and were up to Brexit) more Czechs living in Germany than in the UK
Don’t think you are allowed to count the Sudetenland as Germany these days...
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Sadly, he has zero charisma. Some level of charisma is key these days.
See Starmer even makes U KIP when he speaks
I just think you'd do better to focus your frustrations and energy on the Tories.
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
No, it's not that. I'm far from against these ideas. I spent half my childhood in the North and went to Northern university.
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
You would also need to remove half the cabinet based on who I've heard was for Darlington rather than the other options (Gove and Truss are 2 others)
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
I'm not a fan of Swayne. He's a pretentious prick that embodies the worst of the Tories in my eyes. I'd imagine HYUFD might like him?
But mocking people for taking a vaccine, who have never been antivax? The fact he's a Tory isn't here nor there, nobody should be mocked for taking a vaccine during a pandemic.
It could have been Corbyn or Sturgeon you wrote it about, it would still be wrong.
Unlike Starmer though Klopp is very good at what he does and has achieved great success. Liverpool are failing in spite of Klopp, the same can not be said of Starmer who is largely the architect of his own failure.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
No, it's not that. I'm far from against these ideas. I spent half my childhood in the North and went to Northern university.
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
You would also need to remove half the cabinet based on who I've heard was for Darlington rather than the other options (Gove and Truss are 2 others)
But they don't have a personal interest in the result.
Or, to put it another way, the last Labour leader not called Tony Blair to have won a General Election left office in 1976 and died a quarter of a century ago.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Sadly, he has zero charisma. Some level of charisma is key these days.
If they regularly trail by double digits, they might as well get someone with a bit of life in them to take over don't you think? Has to be a woman I'd say.
Look past the net satisfaction smoke and mirrors, and it is clear that he hasn't captured the public's imagination. He gets the same positives as Ed Miliband at this stage of his Leadership; the fact that loads of people don't have any opinion of him a year in is a bad thing for someone wanting to become PM, but net satisfaction disguises it as a positive.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
A lot of people were writing off the Tories in like fashion around the turn of the century, and their predicament seemed even worse. Look at them now.
One lesson, however, from the Conservative rebuild: they didn't claw their way back to power by retreating further and further into the membership's comfort zone.
They did at first. That's why I voted Labour in 2001, then they went for IDS, then they went for something in the night saying "are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
It wasn't until Cameron was elected they left the comfort zone.
I joined the party while Howard was leader in order to get a vote in the next election to choose someone not mad like IDS. Very glad to be able to vote for Cameron at that point and the party has gone from strength to strength since (ignoring the May mistake).
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
Off topic - but related to yesterday's fun north of the border. Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced scotch. My favourite is Bunnahabhain 12 which I've been drinking for the last 10 - 12 years. I'm not a big fan of peaty whiskies but don't mind a low level smokiness, and I really enjoyed a Glenlivet Caribbean cask I got for Christmas
My shortlist so far is Arran 10, Balvenie 14 Carribbean and Glendronach 12. Has anyone tried these, or does anyone have any other recommendations upto around £50
I prefer Glen Moray Classic, which isn’t pricy.
I had forgotten about this whiskey. I got a bottle as a gift for Christmas a few years ago and I seem to remember it was very easy to drink!!!
I drink exactly one glass of whisky every week. On Friday evening, to let myself know that I’ve done for the week and can relax.
The size of the glass varies according to the quality of the whisky.
Glen Moray tends to be the tumblers which are too big to get one hand round.
Most other whiskies go in the rather charming cut glass single shot arrangements I inherited from my grandfather.
Sadly while I enjoy a good whisky I abdjure it. One of those drinks that has a very adverse effect on me and turns me from my normal mellow self to physically aggressive
His constituency home is near Richmond. A few miles from Darlington. Now he plans to work there part of the week.
Quite incredible how blatant this stuff is getting now.
Yes quite blatantly its not all going to be Londoncentric.
Exactly as promised. People living in the North might be able to work up North rather than commuting to London to get stuff done - I imagine that must really get your goat.
No, it's not that. I'm far from against these ideas. I spent half my childhood in the North and went to Northern university.
But I am suspicious of the exact location choice of this norther treasury. Was the CoE involved in the decision? As Darlington was on the list he should have excused himself from the final selection imho.
You would also need to remove half the cabinet based on who I've heard was for Darlington rather than the other options (Gove and Truss are 2 others)
But they don't have a personal interest in the result.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
Normalcy bias
Didn’t eadric bang on about normalcy bias last year?
The logic seems to be that anyone who doesn't massively overreact to anything new, is de facto wrong.
For all the hate going SKS's way today, it is worth remembering that the government is (rightly) getting an awful lot of credit for its handling of CV19 vaccine purchases.
This is a war, we know we're going to win, and it was the government who led us to victory.
If Labour was led by the lovechild of Evita, Jesus Christ, and Clement Attlee they would still be lagging the Conservatives right now.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Okay you got me, I am just an idiot who thinks that giving people a reason to vote for you (and then them doing it) is a good thing. Clearly you are right that the winning strategy is actually to keep not winning many votes but hope that sheer apathy or a big split in the right wing vote helps you just about scrape through.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
That's an interesting face shield, nnot seen one like it before. Propped around lower jaw and the perspex covering mouth & nose. Could be very useful for those of us who wear glasses.
This can't be a resignation - you wouldn't trail it in advance. Perhaps it is something along the lines of seperate parties in Wales and Scotland. This would give more heft to new leader in Scotland and deflect from constant NHS issues in Wales
It's not even a real tweet is it?
Well I did say you wouldn't trail resigning in advance and I still think splitting labour across the devolved nations makes sense
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
That is where Starmer fails most. He has completely failed to outline any vision. His flags and change of tune fool no one on either right or left.
He needs to either enunciate something other than clichés, or get off the pot.
Sadly, he has zero charisma. Some level of charisma is key these days.
If they regularly trail by double digits, they might as well get someone with a bit of life in them to take over don't you think? Has to be a woman I'd say.
Look past the net satisfaction smoke and mirrors, and it is clear that he hasn't captured the public's imagination. He gets the same positives as Ed Miliband at this stage of his Leadership; the fact that loads of people don't have any opinion of him a year in is a bad thing for someone wanting to become PM, but net satisfaction disguises it as a positive.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
You're far too pessimistic. This time next year when we are in deep economic shit (and actually feeling the pain) and the pandemic is a memory, even as Brexit is still an annoyance... Boris could seem a lot less appealing
Boring Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer could come into his own. Boring could be good. Give the other lot a go, etc
Exactamundo.
I get the frustration, the wish for someone to climb the barricades and bring down this government by pure passion. Whilst they have got a big thing right, one big thing in 18 months doesn't- in the long term- counteract the many almost-as-big things they have got wrong in that time.
But I really don't see the GBP putting a passionate barricade type into Number 10. Not even Jess Phillips or Lisa Nandy. Like it or not, there's a reason that Labour's election winners have either been lawyers or dons.
And at some point, "Make Britain Boring Again" is going to appeal a lot.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
That's an interesting face shield, nnot seen one like it before. Propped around lower jaw and the perspex covering mouth & nose. Could be very useful for those of us who wear glasses.
I've seen something like that used by staff in a restaurant I used to go to.
Does anybody else remember restaurants? They were these places where, for a modest charge, you could sit down to dinner, have it all cooked and brought to you *and* they took all the washing up away afterwards! A remarkable concept. Shame it never caught on.
If the Tories win the next election and stay in power they’ll have dominated 54 of the 84 postwar years in the UK without winning in Scotland for the last 74. A sobering thought for Scots.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Okay you got me, I am just an idiot who thinks that giving people a reason to vote for you (and then them doing it) is a good thing. Clearly you are right that the winning strategy is actually to keep not winning many votes but hope that sheer apathy or a big split in the right wing vote helps you just about scrape through.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
All of which is fine. Except I was a Brownite, not a Blairite.
Aside from that teensy mistake you are spot on in your fabulous analysis.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
I am not suggesting Corbyn back, but a smaller Tory majority is not an electoral success.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So the best you are prepared to say about Starmer is he can do better than some negative hypothetical you are imagining?
You and other centrists were full of that any other leader being easily ahead nonsense now you struggle to even commit to the idea Starmer can match Corbyn's terrible 2019 result let alone his good 2017 one.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
Do you think he would win if there was a re-run of that election? I don't think so.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Okay you got me, I am just an idiot who thinks that giving people a reason to vote for you (and then them doing it) is a good thing. Clearly you are right that the winning strategy is actually to keep not winning many votes but hope that sheer apathy or a big split in the right wing vote helps you just about scrape through.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
All of which is fine. Except I was a Brownite, not a Blairite.
Aside from that teensy mistake you are spot on in your fabulous analysis.
Ohh, you are from the political philosophy that led Labour to 29% in a GE (before the Blairites had lost Scotland) silly me, I should show more respect, I'm from one that got (around) 40% and 32% in a GE, clearly you are much more plugged in with the votes than I am...
The world has moved on from 1997. I know it is tough for a lot of centrists to hear but it really has, what might have worked then will not necessarily work now, you really need to wake up to the modern world.
For all the hate going SKS's way today, it is worth remembering that the government is (rightly) getting an awful lot of credit for its handling of CV19 vaccine purchases.
This is a war, we know we're going to win, and it was the government who led us to victory.
If Labour was led by the lovechild of Evita, Jesus Christ, and Clement Attlee they would still be lagging the Conservatives right now.
Churchill was voted out.
But I'll bet he would have been riding high in the polls in the aftermath of a successful D Day.
He never said anything antivax, just anticoercion. Him going for a vaccine and publishing a photo to encourage others to do the same is not something to be mocked anymore than it should be for anyone else.
I think you’ll find that this is still free enough a country that anyone can mercilessly mock someone else as much as they want. Tory fanbois are equally entitled to leapt sanctimoniously to the mocked’s defence.
The great thing about sanctimony is that everyone can play and it's fun for all ages. I heartily recommend it.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
I am not suggesting Corbyn back, but a smaller Tory majority is not an electoral success.
It certainly isn't victory. But what is happening to Labour is Very Bad. It is a long term multi-election decline where not only is their seat tally declining, the seats where they are competitive is declining.
This happens to political parties. The Tories had their big bang in 1997, no improvement in 2001, then recovery in 2005 and 2010. Where is the Labour recovery? The risk is a long term decline and slide into irrelevance as happened to the Liberals. You can't recover unless you can analyse the symptoms of your decline - and Labour activists even now are on here trying to insist that defeat was success.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
Do you think he would win if there was a re-run of that election? I don't think so.
It depends on who he was up against, but he would struggle at the moment.
But the point really is that Labour members wanted a winner when they voted last year. Most members are on the left, and most of them voted for Starmer rather than Long-Bailey (admittedly a weak opponent), or Nandy (a strong opponent). Having made the decision, I'm of the view that members/supporters should be a bit more patient. The government is riding a wave at the moment; it won't last. I've always said Starmer should be judged after two years, not one. I'm sticking to that, although like many I'm a bit disappointed with him currently.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Your a Nut Job
If I thought Starmer was reconnecting with people, why would I write a header stating that he isn't?
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
He's still got his loyal fan base: hardcore aboulomaniacs with allergies to excitement...
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
My wife had the delayed rash with her second dose. It lasted 48 hours, and wasn't really a big deal.
Weirdly some of the younger people I know who are shortly due for jabs seem to be more worried about the possibility of side effects, even mild ones, than the oldies.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
Normalcy bias
Didn’t eadric bang on about normalcy bias last year?
The logic seems to be that anyone who doesn't massively overreact to anything new, is de facto wrong.
Credit where it is due, it is a step above 'Wake up, Sheeple', which even former Supreme Court Justices seem to indulge in now.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
I always thought that Carrie would end up hurting Boris more than Dom. When your partner becomes your adviser, it is virtually impossible to say no to her.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
He's not had a great time of it lately. But he's at least not offputting, so there's hope for him.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Look at last April's polls. Also would the Greens really poll 7% in a GE? 3% is more likely to be their ceiling.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
If you knew more about AI research you would, for example, be able to contextualize those "surveys". But you keep reading your pop-sci hype articles and forming your own opinion: if it's obvious to you that we are Getting There Quicker, based on playing with GPT-3 while not understanding what it is, well who am I to contradict you?
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
Do you think he would win if there was a re-run of that election? I don't think so.
I voted Nandy.
Always suspected SKS would be less successful than her
Is there a "Trot splinter group" for Nandy supporters
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Okay you got me, I am just an idiot who thinks that giving people a reason to vote for you (and then them doing it) is a good thing. Clearly you are right that the winning strategy is actually to keep not winning many votes but hope that sheer apathy or a big split in the right wing vote helps you just about scrape through.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
All of which is fine. Except I was a Brownite, not a Blairite.
Aside from that teensy mistake you are spot on in your fabulous analysis.
Ohh, you are from the political philosophy that led Labour to 29% in a GE (before the Blairites had lost Scotland) silly me, I should show more respect, I'm from one that got (around) 40% and 32% in a GE, clearly you are much more plugged in with the votes than I am...
The world has moved on from 1997. I know it is tough for a lot of centrists to hear but it really has, what might have worked then will not necessarily work now, you really need to wake up to the modern world.
Erm, do you understand how elections work? I couldn't give a rat fuck about national vote shares because - and it may be a shock to you - we don't elect anyone on national votes or shares.
To win a General Election you need to win one more vote than the next candidate in at least 326 seats. How many votes that tallies, what percentage it is simply doesn't matter. Its votes, and votes concentrated into seats. Labour got 40% in 2017. Fab! Thats 5 more percents than Blair got so it was a better performance, yeah? Erm, it was 262 seats. Not fab.
I no longer have skin in the game. I moved to Scotland, where Labour have got even less chance of connecting with voters than they have in England. You endlessly bang on about left vs right but the damage up here has nothing to do with that - Scottish Labour stopped knocking doors. Stopped listening. Stopped talking to people. Assumed they knew their issues and concerns and then one day people had enough and voted for someone else. Not about left and right, its about arrogance.
Look in a mirror if you want to see what that looks like.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Your a Nut Job
He's a purist, he would rather Labour had millions less votes pursuing Blairism than actually challenge the Conservatives and give ordinary working people something to vote for, because it doesn't suit his political preferences.
Also much like BJO the only political party I've ever joined is Labour*, I think extremist 3rd party sects is more your thing Rochdale.
The vaccination rollout is a roaring success compared to almost all other nations and people can see the end in sight.
Even better, the general public have been told they won't have to pay for all the spending, at least not directly in a way they'd notice (primarily via an increase in corporation tax). Because this is fundamentally a left wing response, it is harder for Labour to criticise, while the Tory right has agreed to stay quiet for at least a few months after their dream Brexit was delivered.
If that didn't result in a government bounce, I'm not sure what would.
Labour needs to be patient, reshuffle the front bench, and develop genuine policy ideas with mass appeal, not aimed at Lib Dems like myself.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
With all the books and public speaking fees when he was not in office, and all the rest of it, why isn't Boris rich enough to fork up for his own refurbishments anyway? What kind of out of touch elitist can't even spruce things up for the future wife no.3?
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
My wife had the delayed rash with her second dose. It lasted 48 hours, and wasn't really a big deal.
Weirdly some of the younger people I know who are shortly due for jabs seem to be more worried about the possibility of side effects, even mild ones, than the oldies.
Younger people are much more likely to get side effects - it's an immune response, and younger people have better immune systems.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Your a Nut Job
He's a purist, he would rather Labour had millions less votes pursuing Blairism than actually challenge the Conservatives and give ordinary working people something to vote for, because it doesn't suit his political preferences.
Also much like BJO the only political party I've ever joined is Labour*, I think extremist 3rd party sects is more your thing Rochdale.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
He's not had a great time of it lately. But he's at least not offputting, so there's hope for him.
You should join our next telephone canvassing session then see if you think he is not off putting to Labour voters
My wife had the delayed rash with her second dose. It lasted 48 hours, and wasn't really a big deal.
Weirdly some of the younger people I know who are shortly due for jabs seem to be more worried about the possibility of side effects, even mild ones, than the oldies.
Younger people are much more likely to get side effects - it's an immune response, and younger people have better immune systems.
So I gather, but what I meant was they are worried as though a more severe reaction speaks in some way to the vaccine not being good.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
If Labour want to win, they have to convince Tory-leaning voters to try them. Starmer won't do that. IMO the only person in the shadow cabinet who might is Jess Phillips.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
He's not had a great time of it lately. But he's at least not offputting, so there's hope for him.
You should join our next telephone canvassing session then see if you think he is not off putting to Labour voters
I can assure you he is
I'll take your word for it, though he might say you're not putting your back into the task
That Keir Starmer Tweet is literally fake. Go and look at his Twitter account, it's not there. It is embarrassing people are re-posting and commenting on literal fake news, I thought we were better than that.
Is the YG Poll fake too
You have backed a loser pal
Who are you backing BJO?
Who are you enabling? The Tories.
I will be voting Lab in local elections
In spite of SKS.
After that who knows
I hope there will be a successful leadership challenge or 2019 will look like a fantastic result
2017 will be the last time LAB gets 40% for a long time or maybe ever
You're far too pessimistic. This time next year when we are in deep economic shit (and actually feeling the pain) and the pandemic is a memory, even as Brexit is still an annoyance... Boris could seem a lot less appealing
Boring Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer could come into his own. Boring could be good. Give the other lot a go, etc
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
If you knew more about AI research you would, for example, be able to contextualize those "surveys". But you keep reading your pop-sci hype articles and forming your own opinion: if it's obvious to you that we are Getting There Quicker, based on playing with GPT-3 while not understanding what it is, well whom am I to contradict you?
--AS
I know what it is. I can see it. Perhaps you suffer from a deformation professionelle, and cannot step back and simply see
Here, some reading from NATURE, from.... yesterday
"OpenAI’s team was startled by GPT-3, says Dario Amodei, who was the firm’s vice-president for research until he left in December to start a new venture. The team knew it would be better than GPT-2, because it had a larger training data set of words and greater ‘compute’ — the number of computing operations executed during training. The improvement “was unsurprising intellectually, but very, very surprising viscerally and emotionally”, Amodei says."
The key word there is *visceral*. That's exactly the reaction many have to GTP3 (I know this, because you can see it time and again online, in recent months). It is visceral because we are astonished by it, but also scared. Because it is in the Uncanny Valley.
Which means AI is getting very close to resembling humans, but is not there YET
The vaccination rollout is a roaring success compared to almost all other nations and people can see the end in sight.
Even better, the general public have been told they won't have to pay for all the spending, at least not directly in a way they'd notice (primarily via an increase in corporation tax). Because this is fundamentally a left wing response, it is harder for Labour to criticise, while the Tory right has agreed to stay quiet for at least a few months after their dream Brexit was delivered.
If that didn't result in a government bounce, I'm not sure what would.
Labour needs to be patient, reshuffle the front bench, and develop genuine policy ideas with mass appeal, not aimed at Lib Dems like myself.
Get some traction generally and not be a repellant and I'd assume the LD backing, where it counts, would flow naturally without having to specifically pitch for them.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
It is indeed, and perhaps he needs another year sorting out the party structures to be match fit.
I was never a Corbynite, but Labour needs a leader who enjoys campaigning, who can be witty, who can be inspirational, who is not afraid of appointing strong personalities to the front bench, but most of all, someone who has a vision of what the Labour Party is for, not just what it is against.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
Voters are flocking back arent they.
Why didnt you vote for Nandy?
I did vote for Nandy.
So did I why on earth did people rate SKS above her
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
Gosh, I do hope Keir Starmer doesn't read PB; he'd be so depressed.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
Do you think he would win if there was a re-run of that election? I don't think so.
I voted Nandy.
Always suspected SKS would be less successful than her
Is there a "Trot splinter group" for Nandy supporters
Well, I voted Nandy as well. But she lost. Had she won, I'm fairly confident that many would have been as disappointed as they are with Starmer, in that she would have used similar techniques (patriotism etc.) to appeal to the lost w/c voters. Though she does know them better than Starmer. But Nandy is no radical leftie, and would have abandoned 'Corbynism' wholesale.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
Voters are flocking back arent they.
Why didnt you vote for Nandy?
I did vote for Nandy.
So did I why on earth did people rate SKS above her
Y chromosome.
In all seriousness, I don't know. After Corbyn perhaps the man just looks and sounds like a traditional PM and that's what the members wanted at that moment.
Liverpool lose 5 in a row at Anfield for the first time ever.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
3 results tonight all 0-1. I very much doubt that away teams have ever done as well in the league as this season, it is sometimes looking like a disadvantage to play at home.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Bit rich.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Corbyn only won 262 seats in 2017, just four more than Gordon did in 2010.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Okay you got me, I am just an idiot who thinks that giving people a reason to vote for you (and then them doing it) is a good thing. Clearly you are right that the winning strategy is actually to keep not winning many votes but hope that sheer apathy or a big split in the right wing vote helps you just about scrape through.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
All of which is fine. Except I was a Brownite, not a Blairite.
Aside from that teensy mistake you are spot on in your fabulous analysis.
Ohh, you are from the political philosophy that led Labour to 29% in a GE (before the Blairites had lost Scotland) silly me, I should show more respect, I'm from one that got (around) 40% and 32% in a GE, clearly you are much more plugged in with the votes than I am...
The world has moved on from 1997. I know it is tough for a lot of centrists to hear but it really has, what might have worked then will not necessarily work now, you really need to wake up to the modern world.
Erm, do you understand how elections work? I couldn't give a rat fuck about national vote shares because - and it may be a shock to you - we don't elect anyone on national votes or shares.
To win a General Election you need to win one more vote than the next candidate in at least 326 seats. How many votes that tallies, what percentage it is simply doesn't matter. Its votes, and votes concentrated into seats. Labour got 40% in 2017. Fab! Thats 5 more percents than Blair got so it was a better performance, yeah? Erm, it was 262 seats. Not fab.
I no longer have skin in the game. I moved to Scotland, where Labour have got even less chance of connecting with voters than they have in England. You endlessly bang on about left vs right but the damage up here has nothing to do with that - Scottish Labour stopped knocking doors. Stopped listening. Stopped talking to people. Assumed they knew their issues and concerns and then one day people had enough and voted for someone else. Not about left and right, its about arrogance.
Look in a mirror if you want to see what that looks like.
Mate the first part to winning elections is actually winning some damn votes, you can sing and dance all day about what Blair managed to do with a low percentage and widespread apathy but unless you can actually manage to achieve that then you are going to need to win some damn votes!
Also, I really really really, don't care any more about what happened a few decades ago than what happened loads of decades ago. So what about Atlee?
Also Atlee wasn't up against some limping along struggling Conservative party, he actually beat them after they had (somewhat) won WW2, Blair fought the Black Wednesday Conservatives whilst Atlee fought a Churchill WW2 winning Conservative party.
But both these events are in the past now, Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
Also Scottish Labour was Blairite, that is why they disappeared, you want the same to happen to English and Welsh Labour I want them to come back to the voters.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
No mate you have scabbed off to your Centrist Party and you think Starmer is reconnecting with normal people.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Your a Nut Job
He's a purist, he would rather Labour had millions less votes pursuing Blairism than actually challenge the Conservatives and give ordinary working people something to vote for, because it doesn't suit his political preferences.
Also much like BJO the only political party I've ever joined is Labour*, I think extremist 3rd party sects is more your thing Rochdale.
*Also the only one I've left!
Ordinary working people now vote Tory...
Why is that? Aren't the Tories the evil people taking away their rights and slashing their services? Why are these idiots voting against their own best interests is the question from the left. Because - as I wrote in the header - how "ordinary working people" see their interests, and how @TheJezziah see their interests are far apart.
Comments
One lesson, however, from the Conservative rebuild: they didn't claw their way back to power by retreating further and further into the membership's comfort zone.
Boring Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer could come into his own. Boring could be good. Give the other lot a go, etc
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1367594785377300483?s=19
The docks, however, are being reinstated as a freeport.
But mocking people for taking a vaccine, who have never been antivax? The fact he's a Tory isn't here nor there, nobody should be mocked for taking a vaccine during a pandemic.
It could have been Corbyn or Sturgeon you wrote it about, it would still be wrong.
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1367534715528507395
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1342341511158128641
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
I cannot see it myself.
Look past the net satisfaction smoke and mirrors, and it is clear that he hasn't captured the public's imagination. He gets the same positives as Ed Miliband at this stage of his Leadership; the fact that loads of people don't have any opinion of him a year in is a bad thing for someone wanting to become PM, but net satisfaction disguises it as a positive.
It wasn't until Cameron was elected they left the comfort zone.
I joined the party while Howard was leader in order to get a vote in the next election to choose someone not mad like IDS. Very glad to be able to vote for Cameron at that point and the party has gone from strength to strength since (ignoring the May mistake).
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060
34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060
21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030
Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040
Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045
Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
Lots more info here:
https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intelligence-singularity-timing/
It is a strength not a weakness in the system.
Also clearly 2017 was such a good result (compared to any centrist result any time recently) because of individual Blairites in constituencies like you who individually won 1000's of votes to the party in those constituencies....
But for some reason didn't do that for Labour in all the other elections around it.
I get it, for you left wing votes are bad votes and don't count but you do have to actually get people to vote for you to have a chance at winning, Only you would consider not getting people to vote for you a success!
Edit: We can see the result of the strategy you want in the polls, Conservative vote holding up whilst Labour vote collapses.
I get the frustration, the wish for someone to climb the barricades and bring down this government by pure passion. Whilst they have got a big thing right, one big thing in 18 months doesn't- in the long term- counteract the many almost-as-big things they have got wrong in that time.
But I really don't see the GBP putting a passionate barricade type into Number 10. Not even Jess Phillips or Lisa Nandy. Like it or not, there's a reason that Labour's election winners have either been lawyers or dons.
And at some point, "Make Britain Boring Again" is going to appeal a lot.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1367599829661138952?s=20
Does anybody else remember restaurants? They were these places where, for a modest charge, you could sit down to dinner, have it all cooked and brought to you *and* they took all the washing up away afterwards! A remarkable concept. Shame it never caught on.
Aside from that teensy mistake you are spot on in your fabulous analysis.
He's got the left, the far left, the right, the far right, the Blairites, and the Liberals all ganging up on him. Probably the Nats as well. Does he have any fans left?
(Though he did win the Labour Party leadership election rather comfortably, less than a year ago).
You and other centrists were full of that any other leader being easily ahead nonsense now you struggle to even commit to the idea Starmer can match Corbyn's terrible 2019 result let alone his good 2017 one.
You might be interested in this recent programme which covers much of the same ground - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sgt1.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
The world has moved on from 1997. I know it is tough for a lot of centrists to hear but it really has, what might have worked then will not necessarily work now, you really need to wake up to the modern world.
I feel sorry for you too.
Only Party have been in a lifetime is Labour unlike you who have tried 3 in a year.
Your a Nut Job
This happens to political parties. The Tories had their big bang in 1997, no improvement in 2001, then recovery in 2005 and 2010. Where is the Labour recovery? The risk is a long term decline and slide into irrelevance as happened to the Liberals. You can't recover unless you can analyse the symptoms of your decline - and Labour activists even now are on here trying to insist that defeat was success.
But the point really is that Labour members wanted a winner when they voted last year. Most members are on the left, and most of them voted for Starmer rather than Long-Bailey (admittedly a weak opponent), or Nandy (a strong opponent). Having made the decision, I'm of the view that members/supporters should be a bit more patient. The government is riding a wave at the moment; it won't last. I've always said Starmer should be judged after two years, not one. I'm sticking to that, although like many I'm a bit disappointed with him currently.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/07/11/why-people-voted-labour-or-conservative-2017-gener
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
--AS
Always suspected SKS would be less successful than her
Is there a "Trot splinter group" for Nandy supporters
To win a General Election you need to win one more vote than the next candidate in at least 326 seats. How many votes that tallies, what percentage it is simply doesn't matter. Its votes, and votes concentrated into seats. Labour got 40% in 2017. Fab! Thats 5 more percents than Blair got so it was a better performance, yeah? Erm, it was 262 seats. Not fab.
I no longer have skin in the game. I moved to Scotland, where Labour have got even less chance of connecting with voters than they have in England. You endlessly bang on about left vs right but the damage up here has nothing to do with that - Scottish Labour stopped knocking doors. Stopped listening. Stopped talking to people. Assumed they knew their issues and concerns and then one day people had enough and voted for someone else. Not about left and right, its about arrogance.
Look in a mirror if you want to see what that looks like.
Also much like BJO the only political party I've ever joined is Labour*, I think extremist 3rd party sects is more your thing Rochdale.
*Also the only one I've left!
Even better, the general public have been told they won't have to pay for all the spending, at least not directly in a way they'd notice (primarily via an increase in corporation tax). Because this is fundamentally a left wing response, it is harder for Labour to criticise, while the Tory right has agreed to stay quiet for at least a few months after their dream Brexit was delivered.
If that didn't result in a government bounce, I'm not sure what would.
Labour needs to be patient, reshuffle the front bench, and develop genuine policy ideas with mass appeal, not aimed at Lib Dems like myself.
Why didnt you vote for Nandy?
I can assure you he is
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Here, some reading from NATURE, from.... yesterday
"OpenAI’s team was startled by GPT-3, says Dario Amodei, who was the firm’s vice-president for research until he left in December to start a new venture. The team knew it would be better than GPT-2, because it had a larger training data set of words and greater ‘compute’ — the number of computing operations executed during training. The improvement “was unsurprising intellectually, but very, very surprising viscerally and emotionally”, Amodei says."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00530-0
The key word there is *visceral*. That's exactly the reaction many have to GTP3 (I know this, because you can see it time and again online, in recent months). It is visceral because we are astonished by it, but also scared. Because it is in the Uncanny Valley.
Which means AI is getting very close to resembling humans, but is not there YET
I was never a Corbynite, but Labour needs a leader who enjoys campaigning, who can be witty, who can be inspirational, who is not afraid of appointing strong personalities to the front bench, but most of all, someone who has a vision of what the Labour Party is for, not just what it is against.
We have a centrist party?
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high?
They delivered Brexit
They gave people furlough
Boris is a lad isn't he
Europe turned out to be twats like we told you
My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
In all seriousness, I don't know. After Corbyn perhaps the man just looks and sounds like a traditional PM and that's what the members wanted at that moment.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
Also, I really really really, don't care any more about what happened a few decades ago than what happened loads of decades ago. So what about Atlee?
Also Atlee wasn't up against some limping along struggling Conservative party, he actually beat them after they had (somewhat) won WW2, Blair fought the Black Wednesday Conservatives whilst Atlee fought a Churchill WW2 winning Conservative party.
But both these events are in the past now, Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
Also Scottish Labour was Blairite, that is why they disappeared, you want the same to happen to English and Welsh Labour I want them to come back to the voters.