Codex works to verify a chart showing Iran having a relatively high level of religious tolerance compared to neighbors

Here’s a chart from an X post charting answers to the question “The only acceptable religion is my religion” (perfect for Pride Month!):

Iranians living in the Islamic Republic of Iran are, according to this chart, much more likely to tolerate non-Islamic belief than, for example, the noble Palestinians who reside in Jordan (whose territory is about 80% of British “Palestine” and in which over 97% of residents are Muslim (0% are Jewish, which makes puts it on track to be celebrated as an ideal society from a progressive point of view)).

Should we believe this chart? Is it a reasonable size survey, for one thing? I found the cited source and was able to get the raw numbers. 1200 people were surveyed in Bangladesh and only 25 disagreed, consistent with the published bar chart’s percentage.

Codex crunched away for about 15 minutes, asking for permission quite a few times (I haven’t ever used it for something like this so maybe the next one will go smoothly). Codex (ChatGPT/OpenAI) concludes that the X chart is a fair representation of the data (i.e., it accomplished a fact check). The Codex-produced chart in Excel is hard to read, though, with the country names buried inside bars of color (not to say “colored bars”):

Note that some countries the X author left out are near the top here, e.g., Maldives (“100% Muslim” according to Google) and Libya (nearly 100% Muslim, according to Google, with the exception of some expats (oil industry workers?)).

I asked “Can you redo the chart so that the country names are in a separate column? Or at least left-justified?” This took another 10 minutes with many failed attempts and several requests for approval. The result was at least off by one, with the Bangladesh label applied to the percentage legend:

Another 5 minutes and much straining by NVIDIA chips in a data center somewhere…

So the AI assistant does work, but I think that asking a Chatbot to produce a chart, without reference to a desktop computer and Excel, might have been faster/simpler.

Separately, why did we attack a country that is far more tolerant than our NATO ally Turkey (recipient of about $31 billion in aid, cumulatively) and far more tolerant than Jordan, a country to which we have provided $34 billion in aid?

(Loosely related, maybe our surrender to Iran isn’t quite as great a deal for them as portrayed in the media. If it were, wouldn’t the Iranians have already agreed to our surrender? Instead, there are merely negotiations.)

Here’s Codex’s Excel output:

One thought on “Codex works to verify a chart showing Iran having a relatively high level of religious tolerance compared to neighbors

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *