Feb 012021
 
Say you lived in a small community centered around a church that provided most social services. Gross, I know, but you can’t help where you’re raised. If you became very successful and covered half the annual costs of the church, well, that’s good for everyone I guess. But if the church villifies you and people like you (gay, or black, or whatever) and every sunday preaches about how bad you and people like you are… I would kinda expect you to want to move away from that place. And if that leaves the church with a big hole in their budget… well, too bad?
The wealthiest 1% of Californians account for 46% of California’s tax revenue. And seeing how much California despises its wealthy tech industry, they’ve started moving away. I’m starting to think the combinationg of “Tax the wealthy to pay for everything” and “Villify the wealthy as monsters” may not be sustainable.
Jan 312021
 

OMG I have a year to catch up on?? What have I done to myself?

Brutal:
from last SSC – quoting a critic speaking derisively of EA/rats
> Until recently, much of the analysis and funding emerging from the [Effective Altruism] community has pointed towards a focus on extremely unlikely but potentially catastrophic risks, such as alien, asteroid or biological catastrophes.
Scott replies —
Weyl wrote this essay a few months before COVID, so his pooh-poohing of the idea that there might be a biological catastrophe is an unfortunate anachronism. But I think it’s important to note that we got this right (and he got it wrong) precisely because we “privilege rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making”. People like Toby Ord tried to calculate the risk of every kind of disaster and how bad it would be – and at the same time Weyl was making fun of us for caring about biological catastrophes, Ord was writing about how the numbers suggested zoonotic diseases from bats could cause catastrophic pandemics. This kind of work ultimately led to EA flagship group Open Philanthropy Project spending almost $50 million on its Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program between 2014 and 2019; if other people had taken a few minutes to read our arguments instead of chiding us for how naive it is to prioritize things based on rational methods, maybe the world would have been more prepared

 

Schwarzenegger 2024.

 

Footage from inside the capital building as it was being stormed.

 

“Bets and bonds are tools for handling different epistemic states and levels of trust. Which makes them a great fit for negotiating with small children!
Over time, they’ve learned that my being willing to bet, especially at large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is offer.”
 

At the level of true mastery, duels between Force-users are fought primarily inside Force Vision, in recursive precognition, in futures that both parties foresee including the effects of the other party’s foresight […] Obi-Wan mostly makes small movements of his lightsaber, to which Darth Vader responds with other small movements. […]  At the end, when it’s clear that Darth Vader wins in every visible path through the future, Obi-Wan raises his lightsaber, closes his eyes, and lets Darth Vader strike him down, accepting his loss with dignity.
This looks exactly like a duel between precognitives should look, and nothing like how a life-or-death duel should look otherwise.

 

“hospital and public officials in Riverside, Calif., have been forced to figure out how best to allocate unused doses after an estimated 50% of frontline workers in the county refused the vaccine.
55 percent of surveyed New York Fire Department firefighters said they would not get the coronavirus vaccine
approximately 60% of [Ohio’s] nursing home staff declined the shot
Frontline workers in the United States are disproportionately Black and Hispanic…the fact that [President] Trump is in charge of accelerating the process bothers” those individuals who refuse to be immunized, adding “they all think it’s meant to harm specific sectors of the population.
“I’ve heard Tuskegee more times than I can count in the past month — and, you know, it’s a valid, valid concern,” said Dr. Juvvadi.
less than 3 million Americans have received the first dose of the vaccine”

 

 

I’m agender, in that when I google ‘agender’ everything that’s said about it sounds right to me. I have no sense of internal gender, womanness feels like a suit I got put into. But the concept of telling people I’m “not cis” feels so bizarre. […] if I used they/them pronouns that wouldn’t *mean* anything. I’d still look and act like I do, and nothing else would change, and nothing about the way they viewed me would change. She/her pronouns are part of my woman suit, and like sure, whatever man.

 

The Haunted Vagina is a book that exists, and apparently it’s actually pretty interesting.

 

A fantastic short, extremely good Halloween fare. No gore, no jump scares, just existential dread.

 

Oh gosh this song is good. Billie Eilish – my future

 

Car Seats as Contraception
“Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”

 

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority – “The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why?

Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.
Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free

you think that because some extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for the extreme party.”

 

An interesting thread, “Woke anti-racism is child abuse.” It’s the story of a Mistake Theorist married to someone coming out as a Conflict Theorist. I find it relatable and heartbreaking. My main complaint is the use of the term “child abuse.” That’s bad hyperbole, and I hate it, tho I guess it’ll generate more clicks. 😕 All parents fuck up their children emotionally some how, and some ways are much worse than others. We usually reserve the term “child abuse” for the extreme end of that fucking up. (original tweet has since been deleted)

 

Coco’s Feel-Good Oppression. Good throughout, and it really ramps up in part 3.

 

Those who like government least govern worst. “When you don’t respect, or even like, the institution you lead, you lead it poorly. When that institution is incredibly, globally important — as the US government is — leading it poorly can invite global catastrophe. And sure enough, under the last two Republican administrations, it has.”

 

ROFL. Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist?

 

A great interview (in audio) with Stuart Stevens – “one of the most influential operatives in Republican politics. He was Mitt Romney’s top strategist in 2012, served in key roles on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns”

 

Jesus this song is intense and awesome. Nick Cave – The Mercy Seat 

The vicious cycle. Thanks youtube recomendations for this random horseshit. XD

 

My GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks – “I would write the title and introduction, add a photo, and let GPT-3 do the rest. The blog has had over 26 thousand visitors, and we now have about 60 loyal subscribers…
And only ONE PERSON has noticed it was written by GPT-3.
People talk about how GPT-3 often writes incoherently and irrationally. But, that doesn’t keep people from reading it… and liking it.
In fact, the very first post made it to the number one spot on Hacker News. ”

 

Burger King addresses climate change by changing cows’ diets, reducing cow farts. “The chain has rebalanced the diet of some of the cows by adding lemon grass in a bid to limit bovine contributions to climate change. By tweaking their diet, Burger King said Tuesday that it believes it can reduce a cow’s daily methane emissions by about 33%.”

 

On White Fragility – “White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.”
“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

 

Fuck yes. Colorado governor signs police accountability bill, ending qualified immunity defense in the state.

 

Scott Alexander shows that literary criticism has very little to do with the literature, and is mostly about making the critic interesting/impressive and entertaining the reader. It’s absolutely fantastic and funny as hell.
“After spending way too long investigating this, I find strong evidence [that] My Immortal is a description of the Great Work of alchemy. Its otherwise-inscrutable symbolism is a combination of three traditions: the medieval opus, the 17th century Rosicrucians, and the native German traditions encoded in Goethe’s Faust. We’ll start by going over these traditions, then delve into the text to unveil the hidden meaning.”

 

Can you own the minor scale? Why the Katy Perry/Flame lawsuit makes no sense. This answers the question “Should Todd Decker have his tongue cut out?” (Spoiler: yes.)

Best part? This video then got a take-down notice *by Warner* (the party being sued) for “infringing” on their copyrighted material. Thus implictly asserting that someone CAN own the minor scale, and they are correctly being sued for basic music-making activity. Mind-blown. This is some “sell the capitalists rope, they will use it to hang themselves” bullshit. Nuke ’em all.

 

A video
>Trump: “I think mail-in voting is horrible, it’s corrupt.”
>Reporter: “You voted by mail in Florida’s election last month, didn’t you?”
>Trump: “Sure. I can vote by mail”
>Reporter: “How do you reconcile with that?”
>Trump: “Because I’m allowed to.”

 

A great Batman retrospective (starting at 40sec)

 

On “armchair epidemiology”
“A viral article implores us to “flatten the curve of armchair epidemiology”—that is, to listen only to authoritive sources like the CDC, not random people spouting on social media. This was notable to me for being the diametric opposite of the actual lesson of the past two months.

My faith in official pronouncements from health authorities, and in institutions like the CDC and the FDA, was clearly catastrophically misplaced—and if that doesn’t force significant revisions to my worldview, then I’m beyond hope.

if I could go back in time, I’d probably send a slightly different message … DO NOT RELY ON OFFICIAL PRONOUNCEMENTS, OR REASSURING ARTICLES FROM MAINSTREAM SOURCES LIKE VOX OR THE WASHINGTON POST. THEY’RE FULL OF IT. […] THE MORE SNEERCLUB WOULD SNEER AT A GIVEN PERSON, THE MORE THEY’D CALL THEM AN AUTODIDACT STEMLORD DUNNING-KRUGER ASSHOLE WHO’S THE EMBODIMENT OF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM, THE MORE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THAT PERSON RIGHT NOW FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR AND YOUR LOVED ONES’ FUCKING LIVES.”

 

This a basic encapsulation of everything wrong with sequel/spin-off culture. No one cares about art. 🙁

 

“bringing the economic system of Denmark, Sweden and Norway to the United States would mean embracing more flexible labor markets, light regulations and a deeper commitment to free trade. It would mean a more generous set of social benefits — to be paid for by taxes on the middle class and poor. If Sanders embraced all that, it would be radical indeed.”

 

“In 1985, the typical male worker could cover a family of four’s major expenditures (housing, health care, transportation, education) on 30 weeks of salary. By 2018 it took 53 weeks.”

Can a 6 year old write better poetry than William Blake? Yes. (follow link for extra commentary)

 

Aella, again. Awesome stuff. “if you’re an extremely masculine woman (like me!), this doesn’t make you less of a woman. In the nonbinary gender framework, it seems like this *does* actually make you less of a woman. This is totally foreign to me. My conception of gender has a lot to do with common knowledge appearance – how do you read in the world, and how does the world treat you based on how you read? This mostly equals your ‘gender’. In this perspective, your gender doesn’t belong to you, but to your society. […] the word ‘gender’ is really confusing things for me. I think when I overlay the word nonbinary onto the base gender, like “nonbinary woman”, THEN it makes total sense to me.”

 

Principles for the Application of Human Intelligence – “the replacement of algorithms with a powerful technology in the form of the human brain is not without risks. Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions, we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm. […] Various techniques have been developed to reduce human bias. Unfortunately, these techniques have limited demonstrated success at scale and may even backfire. Until these human debiasing techniques reach the efficiency of our regular auditing, review, and modification of algorithms, we should not implement these human decision systems.” (much more at link)

Jan 222021
 

Does it count as interacting with Twitter if I still refuse to use Twitter, but I reply to it on a blog? Dammit, maybe I’m doing this wrong.

Karen Hao is the senior artificial intelligence reporter at MIT Technology Review. If you feel trepidation at seeing the word “reporter” used in proximity to “tech,” congrats, you’ve been paying attention to the last half-decade. Karen is no exception. In a Twitter thread she says we shouldn’t cure cancer because rich people with profit from this first. Obviously a stupid argument that isn’t worth engaging. But to further my narrative of “Twitter literally makes people stupid, we should check to make sure it isn’t actually an eldritch god trying to destroy humanity,” check out this claim:

name one technology in history that has successfully been redistributed completely equitably from the bastions of privilege and power to the have-nots in society

I can name two without pausing to think – mobile communication and vast computing power. Both used to be exclusive to the ultra rich, and now permeate even typical third-world country populations via cellphones. There are literal homeless people with cell phones. Maybe this still doesn’t pass some strict definition of “completely equitably,” but whatever. That a so-called tech reporter couldn’t come up with “cell phones” before making a public proclamation like this is mind-boggling. Avoid Twitter folks. It may be Literal Evil.

While we’re in her twitter thread, notice this smuggled premise:

Concentrating resources away from the marginalized in society to the richest in society so that the rich can then decide who to bestow those resources to doesn’t make the world a more equitable place.

Many of these techs concentrate resources to the poor, benefitting them, and the innovator takes a tiny cut. Amazon has been bad for traditional retailers, who aren’t marginalized. It’s been good for actual poor people, letting them get stuff cheaper and with less time/effort investment. This isn’t tech-reporting, it’s luddite propaganda being pushed with a kill-the-rich excuse. Only saving grace here is that by using the rich are the current hate-target that you can use to rile people up at least you’re picking a target that can do something to defend themselves, rather than stomping on sex-workers or something.

Jan 202021
 

During the past year I didn’t completely give up on getting published, continuing to send out stories and even writing another one. As a result, I had two stories published in the later half of 2020! For those interested, here they are:


 

“Give Me My Wings” is published in Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses. It’s a very short story (only 2000 words!) about not fitting into the world, and a human-created afterlife. Like most of my stories, I have very mixed feelings on the choices the protagonist makes, but this one moreso than most.

The anthology is full of optimistic stories in a bright future. Before you ask, I don’t know what’s up with that cover… the pay rates for the writers were really good, so I don’t think it’s a lack of funding? I asked about that, but I think I offended the publisher, so…. :/

 


 

“Not Fade Away” is published in Aurealis #136. It’s a piece about remaining useful even as you age and degrade. It’s one of the first stories I wrote, and it took a fair bit of polishing and rewriting to get it to the state it’s at today. I’m glad I didn’t give up on this one.

Jan 142021
 

Most people know that Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. I still have my old copy, and I decided to take a look to compare how the last 30 years actually went vs how they would have to go to get us to the neon & chrome cyberpunk future.

To the left – the cover.

To the right – what Johnny Silverhand looked like before he was Keanu Reeves.

Before we begin, one interesting note about the present’s view of the future —

The copyright of Cyberpunk 2020 is 1990/1991. That means it was considered plausible for this setting to be 30 years in our future. Cyberpunk 2077 came out in 2020, putting the plausible window for the setting 57 years into our future. That’s nearly twice as long. This means people are more pessimistic about the speed of technological improvement, and estimate that we’re progressing at HALF the rate we used to! Quite a change in the zeitgeist.

However it also means people are more optimistic about the rate of civilizational collapse, and think it’ll take us twice as long to get to Night City. Seeing as the cyberpunk genre was born before the 1990s rennasaince, when everything seemed to be spiraling, this isn’t surprising (the collapse of the USA was slated for 1996, just 6 years out from publication!). And since CP2077 was born in Trump America, this means that even in Trump America people on average didn’t feel as anxious about everything coming apart at the seams.

Anyway, on to the Timeline!

1990-1995 highlights:

First Arcology built in 1991
EU established in 1992
New York gets nuked in 1993

 

1996-2002 highlights:

Collapse of USA in 1996
Middle East destroyed in full nuclear exchange 1997
Plague kills 100s of thousands in US/Europe 2000

 

2003-2009 highlights:

Orbital war in 2008, Colorado Springs is wiped out

2010-2020 highlights:

Humans on Mars in 2011
First true AI in 2013
Human cloning in 2017
Orbital colony revolt in 2018

 

 

Jan 132021
 

It’s been a bit of a year. Not just politics-wise and corona-wise (though those have been huge), but personal-health-wise as well. But a couple weeks ago Google mailed me to say that I’m still getting 1k visitors a month to this site, and I’m like “wtf? Really? I haven’t updated it in months, who are these people?” And it turns out I have some new comments on some old posts, and well, that’s kinda cool. So I’m gonna get back into blogging. Just a little bit at a time, maybe catch up on the book club book reviews I haven’t posted, maybe archive my FB links again, maybe a rant here or there. Thanks for still being around, even sporadically. :)

I do podcast with a couple friends of mine twice a month, if anyone’s into that sorta thing, over here.

Jun 232020
 

The following is an email I wrote to New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam, whose email is pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com. Inspired by Wesley Fenza.

Dear Ms. Tam:

Yesterday I learned that one of your reporters is planning an article about Scott Alexander and his blog Slate Star Codex. In this article he plans to reveal personal information about Scott, including his true name, which could jeopardize his career, and will put both his safety and the safety of his family at greater risk.

I was appalled to discover this is the standard policy of the New York Times. Doxxing anyone is considered default harmful among all people who have taken the time to consider the question, and is not done in civilized forums without strong extenuating circumstances. That such a pro-doxxing policy is still on the books at a major institution in these days is scandalous, and I can only hope that it is the result of a lapse in attention, rather than intentional malice.

In an effort to protect himself, Scott Alexander has deleted the Slate Star Codex blog. The loss this represents is hard to overstate. The blog frequently posted in-depth reviews of highly regarded books on topics ranging from historical figures to state governance. He has described in painful detail the experience of working in a hospital and watching how the modern medical system treats those dying of old age. He frequently reviews current pharmacological research. These can be salvaged with some work through archives, but far more importantly is all the great work that will now never be produced due to this silencing.

Scott Alexander is a leading thinker of the modern day. He has produced more influential work attracting many otherwise-mutually-hostile audiences than nearly any traditional journalists. He has done more to influence my life in the last five years than any other person I do not personally know. His blog is one of the cultural touchstones of my community, and the loss of it will be felt as a bleeding wound for years. It is astounding to me that such a loss of human insight and knowledge, including all the lost future decades, is being done in the name of upholding a policy that is itself a vicious holdover from a crueler time.

Please reverse the decision to dox Scott Alexander, and update your policy to one that doesn’t perpetrate violence upon the vulnerable. Thank you for your time.

Eneasz Brodski

May 162020
 

I was remiss in sharing this when I reviewed Player of Games — A friend of mine has a reaction-style podcast where he and a friend are reading through the entire Culture series together. He’s read it before, the friend has not. For those familiar with We’ve Got Worm, it’s that style of podcast. The whole series can be followed at the Discord under the #more-art-than-science channel, or the RSS.

Feb 252020
 

If you are like me, and you love the Harley Quinn character, I strongly recommend going to see Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. I, personally, LOVED it. It was exactly what I had hoped for – a cartoonish slapstick comedy with ultraviolence throughout. :D Very reminiscent of the Tank Girl movie, which I loved for the same reason. Every minute of this was pure joy.

I had someone ask if it’s a lot like Deadpool, since that one is also a lot of cartoonish fun and violence. It sounds like they would be, but they have very different souls. Deadpool has a snarky teenage smirk. It’s fun in a jaded way. Harley takes childish glee in mayhem. It’s a purer form of emotion, IMO. I like Harley more, though I loved Deadpool too.

Anyway, this is the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in a LONG time.

Also I’m so glad they embraced an R rating. Trying to do this as PG13 would have been so pathetic.