I didn't say that. In fact, no one seems to have, according to Google
twitter.com
twitter.com
> I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it.
> But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I’d appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it. He’d dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelgänger, that went around saying “billions and billions” on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.)
In this case, Sagan did say 'billions' a lot. And he also tried to emphasize the scale of the universe (something the general public has difficulty grasping). It might be a misquote in the literal sense, but the meaning is actually quite accurate, and I don't think Sagan should be upset. 'Billions and billions' is a good shorthand for that.
Sometimes you have to modify a quote a bit to give it context. Just saying 'Im your father' is a bit too generic. But 'Luke, I am your father' lets the listener know we are talking about Star Wars. Same with the 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
I have no idea if this applies to Mr Graham, but just needed to put my useless opinion out.
The generated tweets are nonsense but seem to be fairly high quality nonsense. And the replies to Paul's reply were surreal, a bunch of them were just people having fun but a bunch looked like they were auto generated as well.
I feel at some point big machine learning networks will interact with humans so much through Twitter and other networks that eventually they will learn how to sway and manipulate people. I think it's one of the ultimate weapons a super power could create using machine learning. Of course looking at this it seems they'd likely get stuck just talking nonsense to their competitors.
Previous comment on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977216
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
Twitter style social media is susceptible to this, dall-e and lithe synthetic media could make fb and ig plausible posts.
Not a bad response to outrage mobbing,imo.
> How do you get to the point, then, where you're only filtering by human comments? What happens when its 99,000 comments, and 99% of them bots?? Will you know? Will you be influenced?
> Will the average person be influenced? If advertising and the idea of saying something over and over works, and words are free, and you can GPT-3 your hand-rolled (or state authorized) propaganda every day in every comment thread in every forum to look like an average person is advocating for X, will other average people be more convinced of X?
The people will get highly synthetic information either way. The powerful will continue to use the most effective influence mediums available to them. As it was.
Some common talking points by either side of the American political spectrum gets regurgitated and propagated a lot, and by true believers. Also by troll farms.
But those are not what I am worried about.
I am worried about some issues and opinions getting dragged from the fringes to the mainstream by sheer scale.
There are some cases which are not widely talked about- let's say it has a hundred deluded supporters. Now, a corporation might hire a high-tech troll farm that produces GPT-like-tech enabled troll accounts running wild in platforms and commenting wild stuff.
There can be an effect in the minds of the undecided, or even people on the other side- "if so many people are saying this..."
Thus is begins.
Decisions can be swayed and opinions can be manufactured this way.
It has already happened.
- pg
Wow, downvotes for asking a legitimate question about a pointless, contextless discussion between randos. What a lovely and welcoming community you have here.
This will also get downvoted.
For breaking the community guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Then we can find out if there really are bots on this site. (I am leaning towards there are.)
I see a lot of quotes by Einstein, Abe Lincoln, and Gandhi every day that are so wildly imagined. Most basic common-knowledge being packed as quotes by them. And people upvote/like/share stuff like that like sheep.
None of them are alive. They can't say anything to stupid stuff they are accredited to, but didn't really say.
There are several fact-finding websites [0] run by people to debunk fake quotes and this is a common passtime of some nerds [1].
But here we see, in the age of Twitter, someone is getting caught red-handed by the exact same person, not some fact-finder, not some fact-checking site, etc.
It is highly interesting to see. Isn't that the criteria for HN posts?
[0]:https://quoteinvestigator.com
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Einstein-said-the-definition-of-insani...
—Paul Graham