“I don’t think there’s a young person, a woman, a Democrat, independent or a diverse voter that will stay home.” Stephanie Cutter, Democratic strategist, on the impact of a Republican decision to not nominate a supreme court justice, as quoted in the NYT.
Just one question comes to mind: how does a voter become diverse?
idk about you man but I am diverse as FUCK
American racial euphemisms are so frickin’ cringey
White people, particularly white men, know that they will never be counted as “diverse”, further increasing their incentive not to support “diversity”.
re: The Unfreedom of Scarcity, this looks like the usual claim of people's actions are affected by incentives, and sometimes those incentives are ugly and not uniform across the population. Therefore, in order for people to be free from these ugly incentives, you need an all powerful central authority to enforce equality. This is Chomsky's anarchist position.
I think it went even beyond that to suggest that consent was not meaningful in those circumstances. An attack on free civil society has to begin with attacking the validity of consent in some way - suggesting that voluntary institutions aren’t really voluntary for some reason. If some central institution of a free society can be declared coercive somehow, then of course coercion is justified in fighting back against it, and it’s a short hike from there to liquidating the kulaks.
I saw an Internet comment once that joked that every line of argument made by a radical feminist ultimately ends by trying to prove that women are incapable of consenting to sex. Anti-capitalists do the same thing, but they try to prove that workers are incapable of consenting to employment. And then oftentimes the same people will demand obedience to the state claiming that every citizen has freely consented to a wholly imaginary social contract!
You’ve just got to be relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought when you’re dealing with stuff like this. Do those ‘ugly non-uniform incentives’ invalidate anyone’s agency? That’s absolutely central to their argument, and yet…no, they just don’t. Imagine if you were in a court of law and someone was on trial for murder and they claimed it was self-defense because the victim offered them a trade they found very difficult to turn down and thus they were being coerced. That’s the core of what the whole case turns on. Everything else they have to say is dependent on that twisted logic. They proceed past it as swiftly as they can and try to cover it with emotional appeals but that’s the cornerstone supporting their entire ideology, and it’s nonsensical.
People saying Trump’s plan to deport millions are “unprecedented”, like Operation Wetback wasn’t a thing.
“Unprecedented” does not mean extreme, or bad. If Trump announced an intention to bring back slavery, that would be pretty extreme, and pretty bad, but it’d be the exact opposite of unprecedented.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
…wait, what?
a twisted version of Gift of the Magi: the woman who mistakenly thinks her husband is a cuck due to a miscommunication earlier in their relationship and sadly goes along with it to please him; he doesn’t get anything out of it at all but it’s gone on so long he can’t find a way to admit the truth.
A second-order cuck who enjoys the marital infidelity of others but would never touch a woman himself, running for office only to find out that existing social changes already in motion made his plans irrelevant.
Problems in privacy engineering that seem unsolvable:
- sending information to another party that lets them observe and interact with it, but not store it indefinitely (or only lets them store it imperfectly)*
- sending information to another party that lets them save it and interact with it however they want, but not share it with a third party*
- verifying that one is not currently being observed (maybe use short-range EMPs to solve this in the case of checking a room for bugs?)*
- being able to store and retrieve information from a device in a quickly and easily human-readabe format that no one else can understand
- being able to e.g. enter passwords without anyone observing or understanding the step between thinking of the password in your mind and the device receiving the password*
- encryption that can be broken only with a warrant somehow
- being able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved and used publicly, but not without the owner learned why and how you used it (this one may be very bad for people interested in reducing the power of IP laws)
Pretty sure many of these are actually theoretically impossible unless you can restrict the amount of surveillance or computational power that potential observers have access to.
The ones marked with a * are things that, as far as I can tell, intuitive social interaction and subjective feelings of security and privacy depend on. If they end up being major problems and sources of risk, I predict widespread mental health problems.
Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.
wut
A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.
But there’s a real, and significant, segment of his supporters who voted for him because of, not in spite of, the racism, misogyny, and fascist policy.
Do you know the logic behind the US government releasing Tor to the public? It’s along the lines of the following - if the only people that use Tor are American spies, than any US agent found using onion routing software will be outed. If many people use Tor for a variety of activities, then the presence of onion routing software could mean anything from ordinary local black market dealings to just being paranoid.
The signal is hidden in the noise.
Well, congratulations, because that can also happen unintentionally as a Tragedy of the Commons with words such as “racism” and “misogyny”. People were told to be careful with overusing the terms, but haha, like that was going to happen. Besides, the people questioning the use of such terms were the Oppressors, right? They should be mocked for “freeze peach”, right?
Now the overuse of antibiotics has created a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oops.
(1/2) A little while ago, you said: "I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign ...". You were probably much more in tune with the campaign than I was, but this really isn't what I remember. I recall hearing a lot of "Trump is crazy and so are his policies; it's obvious and he can never win."
(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?
I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:
I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’
A Calexit would cost the country an enormous amount of money, it’s true, and weaken Trump as well.
But if you’re worried about the most powerful country in the world being too right-wing, removing a large portion of the left-wing population from the voter base seems like the exact opposite of what you should want to do.
The State of California’s elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump’s Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump’s sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.
California’s Democratic leaders believe there are numerous federal programs receiving state funds as well, which they will seek to cut, to make up for anything Republicans siphon out of their budgets. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate reports that the federal government only spends 78 cents in California for every tax dollar sent from that state to Washington:
The state of California is studying ways to suspend financial transfers to Washington after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities, KPIX 5 has learned. “California could very well become an organized non-payer,” said Willie Brown, Jr, a former speaker of the state Assembly in an interview recorded Friday for KPIX 5’s Sunday morning news. “They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
Isn’t most of the transfer from CA to the federal government in the form of individual Californians having their wages garnished by the IRS? Is Sacramento just going to suggest that Californians stop paying their income taxes and promise to protect us somehow?
“They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
This sounds like a “yes” to me. The IRS can’t arrest thirty million people who have the state government on their side, so this is pretty much the exact one way a tax resistance could work effectively. If enough Californians simply stop paying their federal taxes (especially big corporations) it would quickly clog the ability of the feds to respond in any meaningful manner apart from rolling in tanks like the USSR.
DO IT
Stop California paying taxes, or rolling in the tanks? At this point I could go for either one.
when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.
Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.
Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man. He killed people that didn’t need to be killed. He dropped people out of helicopters. He used methods of great violence. No one should imitate him.
But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.
So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.
Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.
Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.
I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.
Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.
However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system.
It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.
Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.
Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.
I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with. Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required. Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans. People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.
Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something? Or are you going to get rid of extroversion? Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.
There’s no logical proof that they can declaw all religions equally, or
that the distribution of violence is the same at the tails of all
otherwise-declawed religions, though.
Religions are declawed in a secular society naturally as long as no deliberate action (that ensues resistance) is taken. Christianity is very heavily fragmented and society in general has done a really good job declawing it. We are at a “you can’t even prove if God exists or not” level right now. That’s an absurd step down from the absolute majority of humanity’s history
What if your religion expressly forbids secular government/society?
Gets declawed and settles down. Most religions are against any government ever overriding religious laws.
What if it has standing kill orders against people who leave it? What if it starts demanding concessions like being able to have its own courts, so loudly to the point that people overestimate its presence in the country by a factor of three?
Of course people won't stop making art if you took out copyright! It'd just be harder for anyone to be a *professional* artist, who makes art full-time, in any format that's easily copyable and time-intensive. So, you're left with 1)people who can get patrons to support them, 2)people who can do it full-time because they don't have to work, and 3)amateurs/hobbyists (there's nothing wrong with art as a hobby! but typically skill has some correlation with amount of practice).
Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.
(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).
or maybe just take the Civilization premise seriously and make it that you’re an honest to god immortal born into the world in 4000 BC and obsessed with micromanaging your people to greatness.
I wonder how feasible it would be to have a human population on a planet in the same system as a super-earth ocean planet by growing food on the super-earth, then transporting it to the inhabited planet.
Wouldn’t it always be cheaper to build algae bioreactors than pay the launch costs for the food?
how's it imperialism if there's nobody on the planet
IDR the specific arguments about that but an inter-stellar coalition of planets replicating imperialized relations between the home planet and the colonies does seem like it’d b very feasible
Richard Spencer got thrown out of the fucking libertarian conference. if you can’t hold a table at a libertarian convention, you’re having a bad year.
from what i’m reading he never had a table to begin with, he just kind of set one up in the lobby
he taped a poster board with his name written in marker onto a table in the lobby outside the conference. people filmed the exchange leading up to him being ejected from the hotel. at one point he said “america is a european country” and a bunch of libertarians laughed at him. an anarcho capitalist asked him if he knew what hemispheres were
imagine getting owned by an ancap of all people
it’s not slavery if it’s voluntary, and he definitely walked straight into that one :^)
What the European left/center-left needs to do yesterday is to hire the best damn PR people and spin a massive bipartisan thing about integrating immigrants better - something that’s both massively important as a long term policy and to move away from the awful no-win one-dimensional debate, “holy shit just let people in” vs. “they are scum and should keep languishing Over There”.
Jesus fuck. Integration needs INVESTMENT. You don’t just fucking dump people on the ground, give them meager welfare and expect most of them them to adapt somehow. The horrible flaw of liberalism appears to be the unwillingness to convince people that investing in migrants is both better and safer, and instead ending up with a compromise that might well blow up in their faces.
Yes, immigrant crime/etc is not statistically That Bad, but still there’s no way to win on it when your position is not having a position + vague appeals to humanitarianism. If you could outflank the Right on “oh yes, we agree, better law and order, better employment programs, strong communities”, then you’d have something to go on without actually being horribly evil.
Immigration is *not*, historically, a threat to nations - the Goths being an exception that proves the rule. And Europe is wealthy and stable and powerful. This fucking shit should be easy.
Instead, we’ll most likely get a creeping compromise with the Right: less access *and* less funding for helping migrants already here. Which is fucked up.
(p.s. I’ve seen so much concern trolling along the lines of “like it or not, this nice bleeding-heart liberal experiment is something people hate, and it’s with a heavy heart that I call for more barbed wire”. I fucking hate that. The Left needs to save open borders, and the only way to do that is to improve/reframe the whole toxic debate. Not just fucking capitulate.)
I’m sorry, but integrating immigrants is White Western Cultural Imperialism.
I mean, I’m joking, but good luck getting the Left to abandon that kind of thinking, and without abandoning that kind of thinking, good luck getting them to support integration.
The wonder of a post scarcity society is that it some people can have this without the rest of us needing to be communist catgirls. Also, aren’t most catgirls ancaps? or is that just my bubble?
the issue here is that the “prominent person” in question has no intrinsic value, thus strip-mining them for news leaves them with nothing left.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each said a host of problematic things over the course of their lives, yet strangely they haven’t been abandoned by everyone yet.
Trump was elected because of this and actively exploited it on purpose, a move most others cannot safely execute.
Intrinsic value isn’t the actual defense against it. It’s more about a sort of social or political power.
Sometimes, a prominent person P says something ambiguous and weird on TV. It can be pre-taped, but it has to be “live” like an interview or a late night talk show. The statement is possibly problematic when taken out of context, and only a small point in support of the main thesis.
For example: “If you don’t know what the candidates stand for, maybe don’t vote” or “Women’s child rearing work is important and should be valued”or “Black men have big penises”.
The talk show host asks next question. Someone tweets this sentence in isolation.
News Cycle I
“P said racist/sexist/fascist thing”
“Other people react to thing said by P“
“What twitter users think of P’s latest gaffe“
“Former friend condemns P”
“People distancing themselves from P”
Now our protagonist clarifies that they meant what they said, but they meant it in an innocuous, literal way.
News Cycle II
“P doubles down on racist/sexist/fascist comments”
“P still not apologising”
“Right-wing weirdos agree with P“
Now P must clarify that he really didn’t mean it like that. He does not agree with the weirdos at all and regrets any offense he may have caused. He clarifies his original statement to eliminate any confusion.
“Has racism/sexism/fascism re-entered the mainstream? A political scientist explains, also P is terrible“
At this point, the actual statement by P is buried three clicks deep in these news articles. P thinks the original offhand statement was blown out of proportion. He tries one more time.
News cycle IV
“P: Concerns about racism/sexism/fascism blown out of proportion“
“P goes on offensive in racism/sexism/fascism row“
Q, a friend of P, tries to give a sympathetic account of the original statement.
News cycle V
“Q: P was misunderstood“
“Q defends P’s racist/sexist/fascist outburst“
“Q’s defense of P proves old boys networks still at work“
“P’s employer has still not fired racist/sexist/fascist P“
After Q, nobody wants to stick their neck out for P now, and nobody wants to be seen talking to P. People who defend P mostly do so anonymously.
News cycle VI (mostly think pieces, not news stories)
“People need to stop defending P“
“Stop saying racism/sexism/fascism is no big deal“
“Waffling about giving racist/sexist/fascist people a platform hurts marginalized people the most“
The media realise that there is nothing more to say, and smaller outlets/latecomers try to milk the issue one last time. Nobody wants to talk to P any more, and P is wary of any journalist who contacts him.
News cycle VII (still no news stories)
“The privilege of P-supporters“
“We’ve had it with pro-P trolls in our comment section“
“Why we don’t talk to P and why people like P do not deserve a right of reply“
P tries to find somebody who wants to talk to him, somebody sympathetic. He does not want to talk to anybody who previously painted him as racist/sexist/fascist.
News cycle VIII
“P sets record straight“
“P shows true colors, talks to far-right ‘newspaper’ “
Repeat until so many people get fed up with racism accusations / fear unfounded racism accusations that a living meme gets elected President by showing he doesn’t care about racism accusations and plows through them like fresh fallen snow.
When a university student living in the Philippines uses American Black lingo like “fam,” am I supposed to criticize his cultural appropriation or celebrate his multicultural diversity?
My favorite thing about that terrible quote about "rural white people have no culture" is it literally says white Americans don't have special wedding dresses when like... we have a style and color of wedding dress that is so culturally mandatory that they all look roughly the same and virtually every women has to wear it when she gets married and it's treated as so sacred that mothers sometimes pass it down to their daughters and you can never ever wear that dress except on your wedding day.
yeahh like the fact that the author of that quote is a white man who says he was born in a rural ohio town makes it really transparent that he was speaking from a “fish dont know water” angle
I am "this is bad, but criminal abortions are so much worse" pro-choice, not "FUCK YEAH! DEAD FETII FOR EVERYONE!" pro-choice. Framing pro-life as men forcing their opinions onto women sounds obviously wrong to me. What's your estimate on gender composition in pro-life?
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s hugely disparate.
I… Can’t really confidently accept that. Like, I agree that just criminalizing abortion in a country accustomed to having it legal, and not doing anything else, would be spectacularly ineffective and destructive.
But we have to actually end it. I’m not willing to lie to myself.
First question: What does one even do about Russia secretly interfering with our politics? If people are actually involved (and apparently Flynn was) you can impeach or disqualify them. Trump has been president for a few weeks and has managed to screw up royally, so we could kick him out, but earlier on… you’re kinda out of luck unless you want to totally screw up the politics.
Second question: What is actually going on? Is Trump genuinely trying to be friends with Russia and enemies with China (stupid plan in a world that successfully avoids war!) or just Putin wants to weaken the USA with idiot leaders or what?
My gut feeling is that either that Putin blackmailing/threatening/bribing Trump, or that authoritarian leaders with a socially conservative support base flock together. Or both.
Russia + China is not an unreasonable combination. So yes, I think preventing that is part of it. China is about to enter a period of decline, but it’s still more likely to become a global hegemon than Russia.
I think there are several things going on here.
Trump actually does have some level of respect for authoritarian rulers, I think. Even I sometimes look at China and think about what could be accomplished if all the NIMBYs were stopped from holding up projects, even though I know actually doing that wouldn’t work out so well. But I think half of it on Trump’s part is just signalling.
The sanctions over the Ukraine, as far as I can remember, have not actually been lifted and are likely to stay in place, as far as I can tell.
Russia itself is less powerful than it has been, both in terms of its economy and its conventional military. They couldn’t really invade America even if they wanted to, and they aren’t going to become a global hegemon. China is a much greater threat to America’s global power long-term, depending on just how bad all their looming crises become. China also sticks out more to his base because it wasn’t Russia that the jobs got offshored to.
Trump is probably seeking to cooperate with Russia when it suits America’s interests, rather than just fight Russia across the board. In part, he wants to signal this to Moscow.
This also depends on just how you define “America’s interests”. If you think of democracy or global capitalism as being synonymous with “America’s interests”, then I don’t think Trump agrees with you.
Trump probably does find Islam threatening in a way that he does not actually find Christians, Hindus, gays, transgender people, etc threatening. So, let’s suppose he wants to drain the migrants out of Europe. Right-wing parties are gaining steam, and others are shifting right on the issue. But so long as there is nowhere to put the migrants, the media can pelt the nativists with stories about migrant suffering. Enter the Syrian “safe zones” plan from his campaign. Paying off the construction of temporary housing and mass issuing of rations is cheaper than a lot of military action, it keeps the migrants out of Europe, and it creates somewhere to put them for when they leave Europe without triggering the same level of media-based political fallout. However, to do this, he needs support from Russia/Putin.
Trump is signalling that he does not care if Syria is ruled by a tyrant. He’s willing to compromise if it gets him his safe zones.
this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP
Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.
Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
This is why every political debate feels like arguing with the mirror: why would people who fear and detest Islamic law push for something common in countries which follow Islamic law, and why would their opponents oppose it.
(Rhetorical question, but still).
You already know the answer to this one. American right-wingers want a Muslim registry with fingerprints and DNA samples for testing bombs, not one with marital status for limiting marriages to Muslims. As for the Left, they don’t want Muslims to actually practice Islam; they want Muslims to become the equivalent of non-practicing Catholics or something along those lines.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
Okay this is mostly hilarious as a profile of some NRXer’s online presence in a way that probably feels deeply familiar to anyone reading this from the dashboard of tumblr dot com.
Probably not actually relevant as a political matter, because he was an appointee of Flynn and so unlikely to stick around.
Honestly, I didn’t find anything in there particularly outrageous. Homogenous societies do seem to have the better stats he mentions, Islamist terrorists really do exist and would love to nuke New York. I think the risk he assigns it is overestimated, but potential nuclear attack is one reason I don’t want to live in New York.
the idea that Milo can’t be racist because he’s Jewish or can’t have regressive gender politics because he’s gay is just strange, I mean isn’t that the exact kind of identity politics weirdness that he and his acolytes decry?
or is it supposed to function as a tu quoque to his opponents?
I mean it just seems like the correct response to allegations of racism or sexism or whatever would be to own it and stick to his guns.
It may be operating on the theory that if this brute categorization is weaponized and shoved in the Left’s face enough, they’ll get the idea that Venn Diagram Intersectionality is dumb and cuts the corners off of people to get them to fit in the overlapping circles of identity prescribed for them.
If that is the intent, it won’t actually work, though. We’re talking about the same political movement that pushed identity politics so much that white nationalism is starting to come back from the dead.
A number of people recommended this post to me, and it is indeed good and worth reading. I say that only partly because it provides evidence that aligns with the preconceptions I already had :P
I was thinking about this stuff after I was arguing about deep learning the other day and claimed that the success of CNNs on visual tasks was a special case rather than a generalizable AI triumph, because CNNs were based on the architecture of an unusually feed-forward and well-understood part of the brain – so we’d just copied an unusually copy-able part of nature and gotten natural behavior out of the result, an approach that won’t scale
The gist of Sarah’s post is that in image recognition and speech recognition, deep learning has produced a “discontinuous” advance relative to existing improvement trends (i.e., roughly, the trends we get from using better hardware and more data but not better algorithms) – but in other domains this has not happened. This is what I would expect if deep learning’s real benefits come mostly from imitating the way the brain does sensory processing, something we understand relatively well compared to “how the brain does X” for other X.
In particular, it’s not clear that AlphaGo has benefitted from any “discontinuous improvement due to deep learning,” above and beyond what one would expect from the amount of hardware it uses (etc.) If it hasn’t, then a lot of people have been misled by AlphaGo’s successes, coming as they do at a time when deep learning successes in sensory tasks are also being celebrated.
Sarah says that deep learning AI for computer games seems to be learning how to perform well but not learning concepts in the way we do:
The learned agent [playing Pong] performs much better than the hard-coded agent, but moves more jerkily and “randomly” and doesn’t know the law of reflection. Similarly, the reports of AlphaGo producing “unusual” Go moves are consistent with an agent that can do pattern-recognition over a broader space than humans can, but which doesn’t find the “laws” or “regularities” that humans do.
Perhaps, contrary to the stereotype that contrasts “mechanical” with “outside-the-box” thinking, reinforcement learners can “think outside the box” but can’t find the box?
My broad, intuitive sense of these things is that human learning looks a lot like this gradient descent machine learning for relatively “low-level” or “sensorimotor” tasks, but not for abstract concepts. That is, when I’m playing a game like one of those Atari games, I will indeed improve very slowly over many many tries as I simply pick up the “motor skills” associated with the game, even if I understand the mechanics perfectly; in Breakout, say, I’d instantly see that I’m supposed to get my paddle under the ball when it comes down, but I would only gradually learn to make that happen.
The learning of higher-level “game mechanics,” however, is much more sudden: if there’s a mechanic that doesn’t require dexterity to exploit, I’ll instantly start exploiting it a whole lot the moment I notice it, even within a single round of a game. (I’m thinking about things like “realizing you can open treasure chests by pressing a certain button in front of them”; after opening my first chest, I don’t need to follow some gradual gradient-descent trajectory to immediately start seeking out and opening all other chests. Likewise, the abstract mechanics of Breakout are almost instantly clear to me, and my quick learning of the mechanical structure is merely obscured by the fact that I have to learn new motor skills to exploit it.)
It is a bit frustrating to me that current AI research is not very transparent about how much “realizing you can open treasure chests”-type learning is going on. If we have vast hardware and data resources, and we only care about performance at the end of training, we can afford to train a slow learner that can’t make generalizations like that, but (say) eventually picks up every special case of the general rule. I’ve tried to look into the topic of AI research on concept formation, and there is a lot out there about it, but a lot of it is old (like, 1990s or older) and it doesn’t seem to the focus of intensive current research.
It’s possible to put a very pessimistic spin on the success of deep learning, given the historically abysmal performance of AI relative to expectations and hopes. The pessimistic story would go as follows. With CNNs, we really did find “the right way” to perform a task that human (and some animal) brains can perform. We did this by designing algorithms to imitate key features of the actual brain architecture, and we were able to do that because the relevant architecture is unusually easy to study and understand – in large part because it is relatively well described by a set of successive “stages” with relatively little feedback.
In the general case, however, feedback is a major difference between human engineering designs and biological system “design.” Biological systems tend to be full of feedback (not just in the architecture of the nervous system – also in e.g. biochemical pathways). Human engineers do make use of feedback, but generally it is much easier for humans to think about a process if it looks like a sequence of composed functions: “A inputs to B, which inputs to C and D, which both input to E, etc.” We find it very helpful to be able to think about what one “part” does in (near-)isolation, where in a very interconnected system this may not even be a well-defined notion.
Historically, human-engineered AI has rarely been able to match human/biological performance. With CNNs, we have a special case in which the design of the biological system is unusually close to something humans might engineer; hence we could reverse engineer it and get atypically good AI performance out of the result.
But (I think; citation needed!) the parts of the brain responsible for “higher” intelligence functions like concept formation are much more full of feedback and much harder to reverse engineer. And current AI is not any good at them. If there are ways to do these things without emulating biology, many decades of AI research has not found them; but (citation needed again) we are no closer to knowing how to emulate biology here than we were decades ago.
That might be for the best. In order to hold the economy together (for human workers) and ensure human safety, we need AI to develop slowly enough that its arc of development can be directed towards human goals.
If one compares market solar to collectivist coal, of course market
solar ends up looking worse than it actually is, because market solar
isn’t taking everyone else’s money at gunpoint (or at smokestackpoint
via hospital bills, disabilities etc.).
In
what sense are negative externalities “collectivist” or “taking
everybody’s money at gunpoint”? Because they wouldn’t exist in ancap
utopia, because in ancap utopia all problems would be fixed?
Calling things with unaddressed negative externalities “collectivist” sounds like some kind of psyop to trick libertarian capitalists into accidentally becoming socialists. I mean, I’m happy to see capitalists acknowledging the seriousness of externalities, but trying to roll them into a capitalist economic model takes you to weird places.
Externalities tend by their nature to be subtle and off-book: they’re very hard to quantify or even identify, and companies and NGOs expend considerable resources on further obfuscating them. So you might go 20 years under a policy before you have
even a crude measure of its externalities, and even then, getting that information is so costly that the crude measure will be heavily influenced by the interests of whatever group first chooses to bear that cost. And then, what? How do you actually price externalities from air pollution and climate change into carbon? As far as I can tell, you can’t except via a carbon tax (which will almost surely not price it “correctly” since it’s imposed by political fiat). Which might not sound like a dealbreaker for a capitalist, but the problem with handling broad externalities this way is that there are so many of them.
Like, okay, one thing I like to go on about is that small neighbourhood stores have major positive externalities on their neighbourhoods and broader communities, and the move toward big-box stores is one of countless ways in which companies improved margins by declining to provide those externalities. Thus big-box stores have an “unfair” advantage and which eventually leads to a world where no one can afford to provide those classic benefits and all the social structures dependent on them collapse. Morever, economic monoculture (in this case, The Only Store Is the Wal-Mart) is itself a negative externality, since it reduces the ability to weather shocks. If you really want to get serious about accounting for subtle and diffuse externalities in a capitalist model, you end up with massive interventionism and forced wealth redistribution through taxation and subsidy pretty fast, at which point you’re not really letting “the market” do things in the first place.
It seems like at some point you just have to give up and accept that the market will price things not just in accordance with their real value but also according to the ease of pricing them and of slotting those prices into a transactional model. There are countless cases where things that are very valuable are handled poorly by the market simply because they have issues with that second criterion. As long as costs and benefits vary in legibility, profit-seeking will optimize for illegible costs and legible benefits at the expense of other varieties, irrespective of their true importance.
I mean, you say that about a Capitalist model, but any model is going to have difficulties effectively finding, evaluating, and pricing externalities. …even models that insist on “not using prices”.
Hey internet, I just mixed Indian curry with kimchi and put it over Japanese rice. Quick, someone come yell at me about cultural appropriation.
What about Japanese curry! They picked it up from the British, who picked it up from India, so it’s been through multiple layers of cultural reinterpretation.
The Imperial Navy made it a standard dish, just like the Royal Navy, and apparently the maritime defence force still eat curry for Friday meals even today!
But we must go deeper… while the Japanese were occupying Korea, they introduced curry there. Now you can get Korean Japanese British Indian curry, a hybrid dish whose existence depends on the most brutal imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries!
Coming up next: why the US navy drinks coffee and the British navy drinks rum, a sordid tale of slavery and exploitation. Yay, history!
Wrapping up this weekend of posts talking about the future, I’d like to ask a question.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out that the anti-SJW crowd is so cavalier towards Trump because they can’t really imagine our country ending up anywhere to the right of where we currently are. There might be some policy change in the tax rate, but fundamentally, campus activists will be arguing for corporations and the US government to stop oppressing numerous identities, and corps and the gov will condescendingly humor them.
Which sounded accurate (especially as rightists would argue I was wrong about things, but not actually deny that particular mindset,) but it raised a broader question - can any of us imagine a significantly different future than now?
Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global [liberal democratic capitalism] is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in
[liberal democratic capitalism]
. - Zizek
So what does everyone reading this think things will look like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Yes we can joke a lot about potential disaster scenarios (apocalypse, Big Brother, fast takeoff, the Social Justice Internationale) but uh, seriously, what do you think that will look like? What would living in it be like?
Do you think a fascist takeover no-for-real is likely? Will there be an underground? What will happen to the internet? Will we go backwards on racial justice and if so in what ways?
On the other side, does anyone think the forces of progressivism can win? Not just keep their head above water, but actually establish enough equality to make racism and sexism less pressing issues? What the hell does that look like?
Or even if your a techno-utopian who thinks some of these life changing developments (immortality, super AI, brain upload) will happen within 30 years, what will that uptake practically look like? Will everyone in the world get it on day 1? If not, how will it be distributed? How long will it take before more than the 10% richest people in the world benefit from it? 50%? Everyone? In the interim what does a world with radically powerful technologies in only the hand of a few look like to you?
I want to be more imaginative, and have at least some idea of what a medium-term future is that isn’t just more “Democrats and Republicans without progress fight and young people whine about it on the internet.” But do we even have the capability to take it seriously?
If you like, I could brainstorm some more exotic alternate futures.
In practical terms, however, I think the tech won’t be addressed until it is closer and looms in the public imagination. Same with lots of other issues.
Sorry if I was unclear (to @wirehead-wannabe too.) I mean what do you really think is a likely possibility for the 10-30 year timeframe.
A lot of decisions to pursue the normal career path don’t really make sense if you think within 20 years the world will look like a crapsack. And if you think fascism is really coming, writing easily search criticism of it is also a bad idea (same for if you really believed the Left was going to be sending enemies to the gulag.) Investing in retirement vehicles or long term assets would be absurd.
But most people don’t, and they act as if they are preparing for a life of perpetual liberal capitalism. I guess I can only think of survivalists or MIRI not fitting that, but I’m sure there are plenty of other groups putting their money where there mouth is.
What are non-liberal futures you see that you think might really happen, enough to consider life choices around?
Actually, as a combination of technological developments, lack of resource shortages so far, and the election of Trump, my estimates of the risks of global nuclear war and total collapse have gone down, even though my estimates of necessity of geoengineering have gone up. I was wanting to increase my level of survivability, and I still do to a degree, but less so now.
Which is basically the opposite of the Left’s reaction to him. But I’m a Nationalist (though I did not vote for Trump), and Trump’s election felt unreal - the Establishment was freaking out about him, even on the Right. So that meant it actually is possible to break out of the Establishment and its goals, possibly even lower the amount of unnecessary war, maybe.
If he is successful, Trump may shift the Republicans into a sort of Populist party that cares less about wedge social issues and less about raw exploitation and exporting all of the nation’s intellectual property/capital for short-term gains now. We’re seeing movement on the H1B issue, which was something big business desperately wanted, so while my estimate of environmental risks has gone down, my estimate of indestructible corporate oligarchy has also gone down (even as it went up for most leftists).
Don’t discount the possibility that Trump will be somewhat successful. His immigration plan is going to tighten the labor market, and non-citizen immigrants don’t get to vote. He also isn’t fundamentally committed to hard right capitalist policies economically.
The most probable non-liberal outcome for the United States is a military coup after some combination of factors. Leftists lack the power to conduct a violent overthrow of the government, and the power of the US military is immense. I don’t think it would be a civil war. I also wouldn’t expect the coup forces to be hard right or to be sympathetic to hard racism - rather to just continue to let racial problems go unresolved. Likewise, they wouldn’t be Communist, but probably some kind of Capitalist economic Nationalists with some eventual level of corruption. The coup would lower economic output, but probably not wipe out all savings.
(Edit: I think the coup forces might target Muslims, but I think other groups such as Hindus and Buddhists would be left alone. (People worry about Islam spreading and undermining all of society, but only worry about Hindus as competition for jobs, which is way less pressure.) One of the groups at risk are Chinese immigrants, depending on the actions of the PRC and if it becomes way more dangerous than it currently is, instead of starting to succumb to the problems it has allowed to build up. Gays probably wouldn’t be pushed on too hard since they’re already in the military, and might even be used as a justification to exclude Muslims. They are even some transgender veterans, though they would be at higher risk.)
It’s also possible that California may leave the Union for real - the difference in values is increasing. If they do, I think they’ll be let go, and maybe the rest of the West coast will follow them. In this case, the US will start to be split into multiple countries and will shift right politically without the heavy blue weight of California.
Wrapping up this weekend of posts talking about the future, I’d like to ask a question.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out that the anti-SJW crowd is so cavalier towards Trump because they can’t really imagine our country ending up anywhere to the right of where we currently are. There might be some policy change in the tax rate, but fundamentally, campus activists will be arguing for corporations and the US government to stop oppressing numerous identities, and corps and the gov will condescendingly humor them.
Which sounded accurate (especially as rightists would argue I was wrong about things, but not actually deny that particular mindset,) but it raised a broader question - can any of us imagine a significantly different future than now?
Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global [liberal democratic capitalism] is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in
[liberal democratic capitalism]
. - Zizek
So what does everyone reading this think things will look like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Yes we can joke a lot about potential disaster scenarios (apocalypse, Big Brother, fast takeoff, the Social Justice Internationale) but uh, seriously, what do you think that will look like? What would living in it be like?
Do you think a fascist takeover no-for-real is likely? Will there be an underground? What will happen to the internet? Will we go backwards on racial justice and if so in what ways?
On the other side, does anyone think the forces of progressivism can win? Not just keep their head above water, but actually establish enough equality to make racism and sexism less pressing issues? What the hell does that look like?
Or even if your a techno-utopian who thinks some of these life changing developments (immortality, super AI, brain upload) will happen within 30 years, what will that uptake practically look like? Will everyone in the world get it on day 1? If not, how will it be distributed? How long will it take before more than the 10% richest people in the world benefit from it? 50%? Everyone? In the interim what does a world with radically powerful technologies in only the hand of a few look like to you?
I want to be more imaginative, and have at least some idea of what a medium-term future is that isn’t just more “Democrats and Republicans without progress fight and young people whine about it on the internet.” But do we even have the capability to take it seriously?
If you like, I could brainstorm some more exotic alternate futures.
In practical terms, however, I think the tech won’t be addressed until it is closer and looms in the public imagination. Same with lots of other issues.
