Will GPT-4 kill survey research?
Discover more from The Intersection
Will GPT-4 kill survey research?
Plus, the 2022 CES is out, public opinion 20 years after Iraq, what's "woke", and where Democrats still win white voters.
No. 259 | March 24th, 2023
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
@ricburton: OpenAI published a paper on whose jobs are most under threat 🫣
Mathematicians — 100%
News analysts, reporters, and journalists — 100%
Blockchain engineers — 94%
Survey researchers — 84%
@PatrickRuffini: AI polling idea (Twitter)
Clive Thompson: Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet (Medium)
“Lately I’ve been seeing people using ChatGPT to write code. One guy posted on Twitter about how he used it to make a simple version of Pong “in under 60 seconds”, while another had it write a Python script to rename files.
I wanted to get in on the action, so I asked ChatGPT — the March 14 version — to make a simple to-do list web app. I started off with this request …
I’d like to make a simple to-do web app. Show me the code that would do the following: Display the text “My To-Do List” at the top, with a field beneath where I can type in to-do items. When I type in a new item and hit “enter”, the new item would appear in a list below the input field. When I click on any list in the item, it disappears.
Presto — it cranked out some simple HTML and Javascript, which did exactly what I asked for.So, are coders screwed? Is ChatGPT the beginning of the Star Trek vision: We’ll just tell the computer what we want it to do?
The short answer is: Not right now, and probably not any time soon.”
Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! (Stephen Wolfram)
“Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.
Back in January, I made the point that, as an LLM neural net, ChatGPT—for all its remarkable prowess in textually generating material “like” what it’s read from the web, etc.—can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations, or to systematically produce correct (rather than just “looks roughly right”) data, etc. But when it’s connected to the Wolfram plugin it can do these things.
📊 Polling & Public Attitudes
@YouGovAmerica before and after the 2022 election. lots to explore so dig in! (Twitter)
Geoffrey Skelley: 20 Years After The Invasion Of Iraq, Americans Still Want The U.S. Involved In World Affairs (FiveThirtyEight)
“The two likely rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 both openly oppose interventionist policies in Ukraine, like providing the country with further assistance in its war against Russia. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made waves last week when he said defending Ukraine from Russian aggression was not “vital” to American interests. In doing so, he aligned himself with former President Donald Trump. Their shared position on U.S. involvement could be taken as evidence of an isolationist realignment on the American right, especially as polling suggests Republicans are less likely than Democrats to support aiding Ukraine.
[While] partisan attitudes toward American involvement in these recent foreign conflicts have seemingly flipped, it’s unclear how the American public as a whole now feels about our country’s place in the world. Several factors make it hard to tell how much American opinion has shifted toward isolationism. Foreign policy is not only about the use of military force, after all, and public opinion remains more supportive than not of the U.S. playing a major role in global affairs. Meanwhile, the influence of political leaders and partisanship on Americans’ attitudes complicate a common narrative among political and media circles that the country wants to become less involved internationally.
Nate Cohn: What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters (The New York Times 🔒)
“Believe it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016. Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term. Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of ‘woke’ to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.
This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase ‘woke’ is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a ‘woke’ part of the federal budget. ‘Wokeness’ was even faulted for the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
But while the definition of ‘woke’ may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young ‘new’ left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.
As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting ‘woke’ than any other politician. Like it or not, ‘woke’ will shape this year’s Republican primary.”
Patrick Ruffini: The Shape of Polarization in America (The Intersection)
“It is cliché by now to say that the country is polarized. Despite the predictable nature of the polarization discourse, there’s strong empirical evidence for the underlying trend.
The tl;dr of it is that while rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans used to agree on a lot, they now hardly agree on anything. When we think of a time that politics was less ideologically polarized, we think of a period like midcentury America, when you had a lot of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. But the reality is that politics was a lot like this at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, liberals only barely outnumbered conservatives in the Democratic coalition — 27 to 24 percent. Today, the liberal-to-conservative ratio among Democrats is more than three-to-one.”
Laura Clancy: Young Adults in Europe Are Critical of the U.S. and China – but for Different Reasons (Pew Research Center)
“Young people ages 18 to 29 in British, French and German focus groups have few positive things to say about the United States or China as major players on the world stage. The U.S. is seen as the “world’s policeman” with a self-interested history of interventionism that is disappointing to Western allies, while China is labeled the “world’s factory,” respected for its economic dominance but strongly criticized for its expansionism and record of human rights violations.
In November 2022, Pew Research Center conducted focus group sessions among four distinct ideological groups in the capital cities of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The groups, which were convened to better understand how young people want their countries to engage with the world, revealed a series of nuanced and conflicting opinions about international engagement, the nature of that engagement, history and foreign policy priorities. But, when groups were asked to discuss the roles the U.S. and China play in global affairs and the international impact of their actions, the young participants expressed strong critiques of both major powers, regardless of country or ideological group.”
Nate Cohn: A Rough Guide of the Electoral Fallout if Trump Is Indicted (The New York Times 🔒)
“This week, we’re approaching uncharted waters. The front-runner for a major party nomination for president may soon be indicted. This is the blurry corner of the map where we can’t do much more than draw fantastical sea creatures. We know this part of the world is probably ocean, but we don’t know much else. We’re sure it’s dangerous.
We’ve learned a thing or two from previous expeditions by Donald J. Trump into rough, faraway waters. Already, he has survived multiple federal investigations, two impeachment trials and countless predictions of his political demise. Every drunken sailor at the pub knows he can’t be counted out. But if Mr. Trump has defied the odds before, he hasn’t always come back unscathed. It’s not wise to tempt fate too many times.”
Andrew Van Dam: The politics of cruise ships, and more! (The Washington Post)
“When we ask you to submit the quantitative queries that fuel the machinery here at the Department of Data, we often toss out a few questions to prime the pump. Recently, we mused about the political leanings of people who go on cruises. It struck a nerve. More than a few of you implored us to answer.
Ordinarily, we wouldn’t consider any one mode of travel particularly political. But someone brought to our attention a newsletter writer who characterized Democrats as ‘snobs’ who look down on anyone who ‘goes on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts.’
Hmm. Is that right? Do cruises and all-inclusive resorts really attract a predominantly Republican clientele?
We tracked down our friend Carl Bialik at YouGov, a polling impresario who once wrote the (excellent) Numbers column at the Wall Street Journal. Late last year, YouGov asked 1,000 American adults this very question (at least the one about cruises) as a way to gauge how the coronavirus pandemic had changed our behavior.”
🗳️ Elections
Where Do Democrats Win White Voters? (Split-Ticket)
For decades, column after column has been written on how diverse America has become. From John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, to the 2020 election postmortems, analysts have devoted hundreds of thousands of words to the diversification of the American electorate.
These statements are not without merit. America is diversifying, and it is doing so rapidly. At the turn of the century, exit polls estimated that white voters were 81% of the electorate. Since then, their share has dropped in every single presidential cycle — by 2020, they made up just about 72% of the electorate, and this figure is projected to fall further in the coming years.
🔬 Academia
🏀 Sports
Santul Nerkar: Yes, A 16 Seed Beat A 1. But March Madness Hasn’t Been That Mad. (FiveThirtyEight)
“The 2023 men’s NCAA Tournament started with a bang. Within six hours of the round of 64 tipping off, we’d seen an experienced No. 4 seed Virginia collapse in dramatic fashion to No. 13 Furman and the much taller No. 2 Arizona get schooled by No. 15 Princeton down the stretch. By Friday night, we’d lost a No. 1 seed,1 as Fairleigh Dickinson vanquished Purdue in just the second-ever 16-over-1 result, and by the time the dust settled on Sunday, the teams that began with the fourth-, fifth- and seventh-best odds in our model to start the tournament had all fallen — while the school more famous for producing Nobel Laureates than Naismith Award winners had advanced to the Sweet 16.
Except, the opening rounds weren’t actually all that mad overall — we just got some very high-profile doses of March mania. If we look at the last 20-plus years of the men’s event, the number of seeding upsets in the first two rounds in 2023 was actually the fifth-lowest, though the share that were ‘big’— i.e., No. 13 seeds or worse winning a game — was higher than in any other tournament going back to 2002:”
😂 Humor
