Comment by grobbyy
2 days ago
There is widespread fraud in the government. It needs to be addressed. There is widespread inefficiency too.
I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.
I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power.
However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the same as proof.
I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.
> There is widespread fraud in the government.... There is widespread inefficiency too... I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.
Given that just getting the names of the people involved in this process incurred Musk's wrath and accusations of criminal behaviour... how can you have any justified belief in people having 'skills' to address 'fraud' and 'inefficiency'?
We'd need some common definition of 'fraud' in the first place. Many of the things that have been labelled 'corruption' seem to just be 'things Musk doesn't like'; I suspect 'fraud' would be similar.
"Inefficiencies" - we have the Chesterton's Fence idea to illustrate that what might be 'inefficient' is intentional with an overall positive purpose. Again, define 'inefficiency'. The rate at which firings have been happening may certainly be 'efficient' from an operational standpoint, but having to scramble to rehire key people who shouldn't have been fired in the first place is 'inefficient' at best.
> I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.
I'm not sure we have enough verifiable 'facts' that can support many conclusions at all, and I think that 'fact' itself is evidence of intentionality in keeping the public in the dark about what's going on and why.
I bet much of this fraud benefits big donors of both parties.
I doubt they will fix that
There's a lot of just plain simple fraud too. I've seen embassies issue visas only with bribes, or employees simply collect salaries without doing their jobs. As in you're hired to review documents by some legally mandated criteria, and they simply toss them into piles without even glancing at them and go home early.
That benefits no one, except for the employee.
I'm certain that happens, but that can't possibly be the trillion dollars they think they are going to save.
Sure, but about what amount are we talking?
Millions vs billions.
Some government jobs were basically UBI. They provided incomes in rural America.
This is sort of the group that interests me the most, there is some notion of the government as sort of an employer of last resort in some areas which is a progressive/liberal idea, though id imagine with the areas most impacted by offshoring these jobs are disproportionately in red / Trump supporting states.
And even if you’re ok with getting rid of these jobs, the biggest impact might not even be the loss of these jobs but the loss of the consumers who had these jobs spending money in their local communities.
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> I think the people in DOGE have the skills
Do we know any of them? How many are accountants, auditors, etc, people with decades of experience with government affairs?
Even trying to determine who the workers were brought down threats of criminal prosecution and investigations.
With LLMs, it's close to having someone with that experience and knowledge right there with you.
LLMs tend to be very naive in their outputs when you start asking for anything below surface level. If you ask it how to audit something, it'll probably give you a solid high level answer - look at a, b, c and try to build a narrative about how they relate and then look for deviance (I'm not an auditor and I didn't use an LLM for this). Once you start trying to look at the mechanics of how to actually do that, that's when it will start "hallucinating" or just generally swirl. It's the side effect of having a ton of training data on what something is but not much data on how to do it in practice.
This may change at some point in the future, but I would hardly say that using an LLM is "close to having someone with that experience and knowledge," or maybe it is "close" but it isn't a substitute for "having" when dealing with serious topics.
Knowledge of what exactly?
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This is an incredibly naive approach to topics that might leave thousands unemployed, uninsured or even dead.
LLMs are basically a C+/B- student, I wouldn't trust my life to any of them.
I'm sure the 5 people investigating Musk's companies for wasteful spending were all fired because they were fraudulent.