The irony is most fact-checking sites (including BBC Verify) concluded that the effects of the NOAA cuts on the disaster were minimal, since the data available at the time would have led to the same prediction regardless of whether the recent layoffs had happened or not.
(This isn’t a Trump support post, it’s a “Grok is even worse than we already thought” post.)
Grok appears to be tuned to be more conspiratorial, and skeptical of official sources, while being more credulous of one-off random theories being spouted on the internet. Trump and MAGA world generally benefited from those types of voices when they weren’t in power, but now that they control the government this phenomenon will chip away at their political support from these types of low information voters, right around the time that those voices are being amplified by Elon’s control of Twitter and his new Grok bot.
It’s actually pretty difficult to intentionally inject a bias into AI. It’s hard enough for them to find enough legit data to train it on, and feeding it enough bullshit to regurgitate one specific belief is a bigger task than most people realize. So they put artificial constraints on it where they can, but that produces a huge drop off in output quality.
“Never thought I’d find myself agreeing with an AI.”
One of the things that REALLY bothered me about the “DOGE” cuts to FEMA, NOAA and other weather services is that they were the one of the top examples for actual government efficiency. For every $1 spent from your taxes, you were saved $6 (as of 2018, iirc) due to FEMA, and thats just the damage mitigation efforts. For NOAA, the scale is much higher, all combined, I think it added up to (roughly) $100 saved for every $1 you spend, this is in things like research (water purification, agricultural protection being the biggest contributors to that front), storm damage prevention via forecasting, combating climate change, sustainable fishing initiatives, and another big one is storm proofing the electrical grid. I say roughly in my estimate, because the report that lists the savings in plain text has been scrubbed from all government websites thanks to the trump admin’s “climate change doesnt exist” policy, and I cant find it on the wayback machine, if someone can find it please let me know (the report was from I want to say 2021, and was hosted on the NOAA website as a pdf, I believe the guardian and some other news sources referenced this in a recent article at something like $70 per $1 spent, that figure only took into account immediate savings and research value, not long term benefits like reef protection and rewilding efforts IIRC, I ALSO CANT FIND THAT FUCKING STUDY EVEN THOUGH ITS FUCKING REFERENCED BY EVERYWHERE!!![outside of a report by the American Meteorological Society that references data from 2006 for some fucking reason!])
I’m way too tired to put in the effort to back this stuff up considering its actively being hidden by the government, but you can find tons of shit that references the stuff im talking about, even if they’re now dead links, i might come back when i have energy to provide exact links.
If they actually cared about efficiency they wouldn’t be cutting these services.
Edit: I haven’t slept in 48 hours, grammar and stuff is likely shit, will revisit once better rested
Its the same with the IRS cuts. For every dollar spend funding the IRS, they get $6 back - and they’ve found its non-linear. For every dollar spent auditing high-income earners (top 10%), the IRS gets $12 back.
So guess which department in the IRS that DOGE and Trump targetted for heaviest defunding?
“Facts over feelings” - Grok
That last line must really burn.
