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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

I doubt she and others left just because of this one incident.

My guess is that OpenAI has been doing more and more domestic spying type work as well as more and more military work - target selection and the like.

That's how the schoolhouse was blown up by a Tomahawk. An AI was fed old information, didn't realize or do proper validation, an analyst copy-pasted, then someone just punched the coordinates into the their control station and hit "fire".

It also wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI et al are being pressured to work with Israelis for targeting and analysis, too, since their "black box" AI that was doing terrorist acid tests and assigning bombing targets has proven nearly useless.

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The schoolhouse was an intentional target - the children of some military leaders went there. They triple-tapped the school hoping to kill parents going in to save the kids.

How is that better? If true then that would be an even clearer war crime.

It's worse, obviously.

That doesn’t make much sense based on Irans own statements. Three Tomahawks yes. The strikes were reported as being in quick succession. 4 parents were reported as killed and 100+ kids and nearly 30 teachers. Basically it killed the teachers and little kids. No attempt at the responding parents like you incorrectly imply.

citation needed

Why only ask for citations of one side's claims?

Because the other side is the general informed consensus for which multiple sources are readily available for me to find. I have seen nothing to indicate this side, hence I'm asking for any evidence, because I don't see it. Either could potentially be correct, but I don't think they're equally probable.

To the extent there is a consensus here, it's not an evidence-based one; it's entirely founded on untested statements made by people who have both a track record of lying and incentive to do so.

Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.

And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence? Let's start by actually having evidence for "your side", then you can demand evidence from the other.

> And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence?

It's not. I have no idea how you got there.

The right thing is to seek evidence for both perspectives. This is ironically not rocket science. Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so, but especially don't pretend to sneering objectivity when you do so.

I got there because somebody asked for evidence for a certain viewpoint and you seemed to push back against this ask by suggesting that if you ask for evidence, you need to demand it from both sides. As if somebody failing to do that doesn't entitle them to any evidence from anybody.

> Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so

Exactly. That's why they asked for a citation. A response providing such citation is more appropriate than essentially saying "well you didn't ask for a citation from $other_side either".

That argument would be coherent if not for the fact that in this case, the commenter had scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them, then challenged the other set; that's not reasonable.

Accepting something without evidence and only challenging things that disagree with your evidence-less beliefs is the exact opposite of even-handed.

> scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them

And what tells you that they were not already aware of the evidence for those statements from prior knowledge? If so, then they would naturally only ask for evidence for the claims for they are not yet aware of the evidence. No need to re-ask for that.

Obviously I don't know whether they had such knowledge, but you seem to assume they didn't and are criticising them for this.

Because as much as you attempt to weasel around it, we're not talking about a spherical hypothetical in a void. We're talking about a specific event, for which no such evidence has been released.

If someone says "the sky is blue" and someone else says "actually the sky is polka dots!" are you going to ask for citations from both?

In that case I wouldn't ask for citations from either, because I have direct evidence.

But with two competing claims, and no easy way to check ground truth, you absolutely ask for citations from both sides. There's nothing rational about uncritically accepting the narrative you heard first.

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