I fully admit that I was desperately trying to get myself hired in the tech boom of the 1990’s. I knew that things were poised to shift dramatically and I wasn’t about to miss out. Of course, I started in computer programming in the 90’s at NYU. I was well aware of the bro misogyny, the racism etc. But I figured that even with those issues, skill and competence would be valued in the merit based wonderland of Silicon Valley. Well. So here we are, 30 years into the tech transformation of the world and… tech philosophy has created so many serious threats to Democracy across the world that I’m entirely sure we can’t afford to let them believe they are a meritocracy that can regulate themselves.
Today’s article in the NY Times just cements that these are bad people, in a bad culture, with bad leaders. Silicon Valley’s Safe Space talks about Slate Star Codex, a blog that became very popular with the in tech crowd that was focused on Rationalist discourse. And of course, it was bigoted as HELL.
“Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions. And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us. At Twitter and Facebook, leaders were reluctant to remove words from their platforms — even when those words were untrue or could lead to violence. At some A.I. labs, they release products — including facial recognition systems, digital assistants and chatbots — even while knowing they can be biased against women and people of color, and sometimes spew hateful speech.”
For far too many in the tech world, they are so disconnected and so incapable of viewing minorities as people, they believe discussions on rights, access and equality to be simply a mental stimulation exercise. Even when they themselves are minorities, they align far too much to cis white patriarchy to combat the dangers it represents. To quote a woman who subsequently had to lock down her Twitter account for an obvious truth, Straight Black men are the white men of Black people. That extends to a lot of minority groups. For example, let’s look at what then general partner in Andreesen Horowitz, Balaji Srinivasan, said about doxing a journalist writing for Tech Crunch in 2013 on the links between Star Codex and Silicon Valley –
“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement. …”
Think about that. A general partner in a powerful investment firm saying that they should dox a journalist to protect their safe space to argue the pros and cons of whether women have the right temperament and intellectual heft for tech careers; if blacks have similar intellectual capacity; that affirmative action is anti-white men.
This blog is now gone. Deleted in the past, as people grew to understand the foul underbelly of Libertarian bigotry passed of as just Rationalist thinking from our best minds that has infused tech around the world. But… just because it’s gone from one space, doesn’t mean it’s really gone. The founder of Slate Star Codex is now on Substack with his old posts under a new name, Astral Codex Ten. I won’t link to it. He’s earning about $250k to do this. Have any of the people involved learned anything? No. They still think that we need to be able to discuss these disruptive ideas. So, neonazis, eugenicists, racists, misogynists should all have a platform so we can have a cozy discussion to weigh points. Except for social justice warriors who keep shutting down all this great rationalist discussion with reality. They need to stay out. Brave new future the tech world is building. Looks a lot like the autocratic past. We need to regulate tech. Fast.
WereBear
Nothing can self-regulate. It removes reality checks. As we’ve seen, with the Right Wing Echo Machine.
germy
I agree. And I’m more optimistic now that it will be. Maybe I’m being naive. I don’t know.
Yutsano
Tech does need to chill. I’m getting ads for body armour and divorce lawyers for men. I should just blame Omnes and move on.
Sure Lurkalot
Now that you put it that way…HELL YES. And break them (back) into little parts first and maybe even littler parts.
Ruckus
ruemara!
Glad to see you back on the front page. Hope everything is good.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: I have never done divorce work.
Major Major Major Major
What sorts of regulations?
Ruckus
Most things human, when they get too big, they tend to follow one direction, and that almost always isn’t good for a large number of people in some manner. Conservatives think that the world will be bad for them if they can’t have only their direction. Which is what happens when you can’t see farther than the inside of your colon.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ruckus:
I think a lot of that is conservatism and human society more broadly has been traditionally hierarchical
PJ
I haven’t read the NY Times article, but it sounds like “Rationalist” thinking isn’t very rational, and is instead a cover for old-fashioned bigotry.
I am of the opinion (a minority one, I know) that the world would have been better off, all told, without the internet. But if we’re going to have it, tech companies have to be held responsible for what they do and what they allow other people to do (undermining democracy, spreading disinformation, encouraging genocide, etc.) If that puts an end to social media and blog comments, so much the better.
Yutsano
@Major Major Major Major: Honestly? Just break them up. Facebook doesn’t need to own Instagram and in fact they have sucked the value out of it. Cleave YouTube from Google. Why should what is basically an advertising company get its own forum for its ads? Things like that. Trying to police how they handle content is a bridge too far for me. Just cut some of their obvious overreach.
Elizabelle
Great topic, ruemara. And good to see you here. No kitteh photos, though.
I am just wiped from watching the foregone conclusion in the impeachment trial. Although: maybe it will turn out to be a hinge in history. One always hopes.
Your topic is an interesting one, and I’ll try to read the article and this thread later.
Agree that self-regulation is insufficient regulation. Boeing is a textbook case of that.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
You can see this in a bunch of other areas too, such as fandom. Holy fuck, the most toxic fans I’ve ever come across are Star Trek and Star Wars fans. Many of their arguments boil down to disingenuous cherry-picking about how such and such is unrealistic or how liberal/feminist ideas (read: the most boilerplate corporate message imaginable, like “Don’t act like an asshole”) are decried as propaganda destroying our favorite franchises! That SJWs has RUINED STAR WARS/STAR TREK FOREVAR!!11
And none of them ever learn when their predictions don’t pan out. Certain ST fans have been predicting Alex Kurtzman would be FIRED any day now as executive producer. I think he recently stepped down to do something else still involved with ST and they then declared victory. Even though they had nothing to do with it
A lot of these people are reactionaries who just can’t accept that they don’t like the new direction some of these properties are going and just say, “This isn’t for me. I’m going to do something else.” All of the old movies and tv shows are still there to go watch. The problem, besides these people’s prejudices, is that they’ve made consuming media their entire personalities and feel attacked when sometimes creators turn the mirror on the fans
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Yutsano: Not sure it is that simple, but anti-trust action seems generally warranted in many cases. Also seems like these companies want to be publishers without having the responsibilities usually required of publishers… so maybe we need to revise Section 230 so they that those responsibilities more seriously.
I’d be interested to hear what Senator Wyden thinks about these topics today.
MomSense
@Yutsano:
At least that weird spiked QTip is gone.
Major Major Major Major
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Count yourself EXTREMELY lucky.
ColoradoGuy
They actually saw techno-feudalism, a common trope in cyberpunk science fiction, as a *good* thing, with themselves as the leaders (of course).
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: No luck involved. I actively avoided it.
debbie
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Really? Hold the companies responsible, not the jerks who posted the content?
Roger Moore
@PJ:
The problem is that reason is GIGO. If you start with flawed premises, reason will lead you to convincing sounding but wrong conclusions. You need a way of testing your initial beliefs against reality and a willingness to admit when you were wrong to start with. Reason, arrogance, and bigotry make a really nasty combination.
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
There is a lot of social power in living in a world in which people make things for you (or at least you think that they do). Being a valued customer, a tastemaker, is a position of influence and gives people a sense of esteem. What they are realizing is that they are not as valued as they thought they were. Sure, someone will still take their money and not be openly antagonistic, but the people who make those properties are increasingly likely to move those properties in directions that others prefer.
Being a valued demographic has been a really good substitute for legal white male supremacy for a lot of chumps. They are sad to see that go.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Do you think the next time the GOP has control of the WH and Congress they’ll try to repeal 230? I don’t think that would be able to be passed with 50+1 votes without nuking the filibuster and won’t fly under reconciliation. I know McConnell made noises about “reforming” reconciliation, but I’m not sure they would do that given they needed it to pass the Trump Tax Cut
People like Madison Cawthorne getting elected and asswipes like Hawley drafting bills to ban the Democratic Party have me absolutely dreading the day the GOP is in a position of power again. They’re not moderating and are working to ensure the US will be a de facto one party dictatorship
Chet
Everyone says “regulate ’em” but that’s meaningless without an actual proposal for what conduct you would sanction.
I’ve heard a proposal to make it illegal to algorithmically promote content – to ensure that everyone’s social media timeline is literally just a timeline of the aggregate activity of their follows – but the problem with that is that any system that transports content from a producer to a consumer electronically is using an algorithm.
Sister Golden Bear
Truth, ruemara. (Speaking as someone who works in Silicon Valley.) It’s no accident that invitation-only social networking Clubhouse app — to provide a safe space for the cool kids away from the uncool ones — is a toxic cesspool of sexist, racism, ageism, classism, and homophobia/transphobia — and has some rather hair-raising privacy problems.
Most definitely true.
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
It’s part of a larger mindset that expects all the rights and privileges, and none of the responsibilities and accountability — much like cats and teenagers. There’s a lot of tech bros who seem to have not matured past age 14.
And for all the self-proclaimed maverick-ness, the Valley — especially its venture capitalist — are really herd followers. <side-eyes all “blockchain for everything” hype>
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
People complaining about Star Trek being taken over by SJWs are just idiots. It was created by a SJW and has always been run by SJWs; they were just too stupid to see it. It’s like Paul Ryan being a Rage Against The Machine fan; he loves the sound but is too stupid to realize he’s the Machine they’re raging against.
gene108
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I do not think they really grok the message either franchise is has been trying to send, since their inception.
Star Trek is literally about a multi-ethnic planet Earth living in peace and prosperity, where people want for nothing and racism is no longer a thing.
The original series had a Russian, Japanese, and female African-American bridge officers featured prominently in the show.
Star Wars Ep 4-6 are about SJW’s fighting a repressive government that literally is willing to blow up a planet to send a message to every other system out there to fall in line. The Rebellion was not fighting to become the next warlord or empire, they wanted to restore a just Republic to the galaxy.
Tenar Arha
@Major Major Major Major: Besides breaking up their obvious anti-competitive intersecting social network sites? Like I’m beginning to think they should probably break up things like Amazon selling cloud services, & streaming movies, & then making & advertising their movies based on viewer data they collected via the streaming data collected from the cloud & what gets streamed on their service. I’m definitely for breaking up the loop where people buy a lot of some 3rd party’s products on Amazon, then those products get tweaked & get manufactured by Amazon, & then they sell those first on Amazon.
I think you’ve mentioned previously, & pretty sure you’re right— I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle, but I do think the social networks need some kind of size limits, bc policing content at scale in a monopoly situation is hard, & easy to game. Maybe re-engineering social media so it reverts to the discussion board model. Something where there’s some way, much like how Reddit now handles subreddit communities that become dangerously toxic, it can be snipped off without harming the entire network? Or the way Mastodon instances work? (Which I’m pretty sure you talked about).
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): 230 “reform” is already being discussed. It’s a bipartisan impulse. Brian Schatz is the senator to watch.
Roger Moore
@Sister Golden Bear:
I think the current group of tech giants have been really toxic for the industry, not so much by any specific decisions they’ve made as by showing that monopoly is both possible and the route to riches. VC is no longer interested in building interesting companies that can participate in the market. They’re trying to build monopolies that can control the market and milk it for all it’s worth. That’s the direction the herd has moved, and it’s incredibly destructive.
gene108
@MomSense:
I keep getting that add.
sigaba
Emphasis mine. It always reduces down to “We need an open forum to talk about how science proves poor people are dumb and deserve to be poor, and which groups of people aren’t human enough to enjoy our level or rights and privilege.”
You let these people alone to talk with each other long enough and that’s where it ends up, every time. Herbert Spencer today, Herbert Spencer tomorrow, Herbert Spencer forever.
MisterForkbeard
@Roger Moore: I watched the most recent season of Discovery and it felt odd to me that they were really pushing trans folk. Like, more than I thought they would. The first non-binary crewmember is in a relationship with a trans man, which I thought was a little too on the nose.
But that’s the thing: There’s nothing wrong with it! And the couple ‘works’ in the show. Other characters are supportive, and pronouns are a thing but absolutely not harped on. The nonbinary character just asks once to be called “they” and that gets stuck to instantly without question.
And yes, Trek has a history of ‘sjw’ ness. They’ve always tried to be inclusive, this isn’t new.
Major Major Major Major
@Tenar Arha: I did write about it! I definitely think some sort of distributed social network system (more Masto than Reddit) would be a wonderful thing. Twitter is even investing in that space. If you make portability/interoperability the norm, you remove a lot of potential for badness.
Smaller “big players”, possibly through antitrust, could also help, though maybe less than people think. I’m far from an expert on that.
We really need to do something about the infrastructure level, it is not okay that Google and Amazon have such a stranglehold on back-back-back-end services.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I’m a bit less sold on Star Wars than you are. Yes, the rebels are trying to destroy an evil empire, but the basic situation is pretty nasty; it’s set in a universe where ancestry is everything. Luke and Leia are who they are because they have the right blood lines, and there’s a lot of not so subtle racism threaded throughout Lucas’s work.
A Ghost to Most
In 1985, I was named technical lead of a software team at GE. I designed, and the team and I built, the first commercial network switch written in C. It had the hot new Motorola chip (6800?), but more importantly, it had a C compiler. All our previous network switches had been in assembly.
That code propagated to a hundred different network switches, and I often think of how noble it felt then, and how dirty it’s become.
Nutmeg again
Thank you for this ruemara! When I see people being lazy and falling back on Rational Choice for every-damn-thing, I do grind my teeth. Ceteris paribus, as if you can hold all of life’s vagaries constant. As if there is such a thing as an uninflected “pure” scientific view of anything, at all. Because only white men lack a point of view, amiright? The rest of us are carried away by the corrupting effects of our experience.
I wonder how this stuff is related to what happened to Timnit Gebru?
RSA
Thanks for the pointer, ruemara. The article had some nice insights. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs, out of order:
I’ve followed AI and ethics for a few years now. There are important ethical issues raised by the widespread use of AI, but these issues aren’t well-understood or well-addressed by the people who build the systems. Philosophers have been thinking and writing about ethics for millennia, with only rough agreement about foundations. Systems are being built and released by people and organizations that haven’t given very much thought to the commitments the systems are making to specific ethical positions. (And some of those people—Rationalism sounds like warmed-over Objectivism, from the description. in the article—are the last people you’d want to be evaluating safety and ethics.)
An example is autonomous vehicles. A few years ago the head of Mecedes’s assisted driving group said that their future self-driving cars would prioritize the safety of passengers over pedestrians, every time.
I don’t know how we can address such pervasive, systemic challenges.
Tenar Arha
@Major Major Major Major:
@Tenar Arha:
ETA Ran out of time, it’s pretty clear repealing Section 230 would be dangerous, bc it would cause these current monopolies to restrict speech for everyone. But if we can reduce their reach & network effects by atomizing them, both their power to sell & propagandize, as well as their power to restrict free expression goes down…maybe.
Baud
SV has gotten high on their own supply. It’s something that seems to happen to a lot of successful industries.
Searcher
@sigaba: The extent to which the poutrage latched on to “it’s about ethics in journalism” gave me flashbacks and was, I think, telling.
Woodrow/asim
@MisterForkbeard: Trek has decades of neglect around Gender issues to make up for, and I think you’re seeing some of that with this season of DISCOVERY
That’s aside from the inanity that is the behind-the-scenes of Trek. From Gene Roddenberry hiring the woman he was sleeping with out of wedlock for the Pilot, to the many reports of Berman killing progressive storylines and pushing “sexy woman” main characters in the TNG era, to Berg and Harberts being fired from DISCOVERY amid reports of harassing the writing staff (shades of Whedon), Trek has a long, sad history of putting (mostly) progressive values on the screen, while failing those same values in so many other ways.
As a lifelong fan, it’s…frustrating.
sigaba
@Woodrow/asim: The interesting phenomenon of late is fandoms being unequivocally being more progressive or inclusive than the creators and condemning them in real-time, as with J. K. Rowling. I’m sure it’s possible in the future that Harry Potter fans could go Gamergate on some future iteration of the franchise that tried to interpolate trans characters or themes but it’s hard to imagine.
There are definitely Rowling supporters, as there are probably Whedon supporters, but they come from wider politics.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Look at history, it’s not just the type/direction of governing structure, it is the size of the population. People have to be forced to live/work in one direction when it goes against what they want. They react in many ways, a lot of them destructive. When you get enough people together there will be more than one direction. The more you try to separate them into opposite directions, the harder they will try to obstruct, and change that direction. Read the comment by YY_Sima Qian in this mornings Covid post, #4. Notice how much China is changing and how much they have to work to maintain the structure that is desired by those in power. This is not really different from what we need to do here, we just attempt it in a different manner because our structure isn’t built to be that style. Not that our conservative side would complain if we went to that style of government, as long as they were on top. The liberal side is a different style altogether and requires understanding that and compromise. Which a lot of people have no notion of. The last 4 yrs and especially the last couple of months has shown that conservatives have been led to “think” that they can have the style of government they want, if they are willing to take it by force. Which of course is the method used for eons.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I would like to offer up a defense of Rationalism. It’s NOT what these chuds at Star Slate Codex say it is:
From RationalWiki:
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yeah. I think it gets a bad name because conservativew use it as a cloak for their odious viewe. Kind of like how they use religion.
gwangung
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It’s those starting set of axioms that leads to much of the trouble, because don’t examine their founding axioms, thereby missing how culture-bound some of them are
And that leads some of the so-called Rationalists to be Rationalizers.
Mary G
O/T, but Nancy SMASH is on fire:
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Sister Golden Bear: It’s like they’ve never heard the story of Spider-man. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Searcher
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Rationalism could be phrased as “trying to think without making mistakes”.
The problem with rationalism as a hobby is when it starts eating its own tail and spending all of its time thinking about thinking. It’s like when a programmer gets too into metaprogramming and crawls up his own asshole writing concise Haskell parsers in Haskell. Without the anchoring of an external problem to solve, it degenerates into complicated nonsense.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): SSC wasn’t even particularly chuddy. Most of the drama in this piece is about the comments section, or unrelated VCs, or unrelated rationalist communities.
I did learn from the NYT piece that Musk and Grimes met because they were both interested in Roko’s Basilisk, lol. (Be warned that you will be infected by a meme if you read this link.)
Bill Arnold
Do not assume that the people involved in this are intellectual lightweights. They are not, well at least not the top levels. They can chew progressives (“SJWs”) without a solid intellectual and philosophical foundation apart.
Also, the article does not adequately express the anger felt by many about the author’s (Cade Metz) writings on the subject. (I’m no fan of RW rationalists but I’m pretty pissed off at Cade Metz.)
(Oh, and the NYTimes piece is worth reading, just to be clear; thanks for the link and FP piece.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Nick Land has gone a little soft in the mind IMO (needs a big Bayesian priors reset :-), but here’s Nick’s current twitter:
https://twitter.com/Outsideness
Here’s a current center of discussion. (There are some gems, some drek.)
https://www.lesswrong.com/
Mary G
Martin
So, I’ll offer up a few viewpoints.
Much of the ‘monopoly’ that we speak of is the ownership of the social graph. Platforms like Facebook exist in the manner that they do because social graphs only have value if they are complete.
There are 2 other social graphs that we operate with – postal mail, and phone number. The former is free, much like Facebook, but it wholly owned and regulated by the federal government. The latter is not free, but enjoys substantial government subsidy to make affordable to all, but is also heavily federally regulated.
Part of the regulation of both of these is a certain guarantee of valid identity. Postal addresses are public, as are phone numbers. Every year you used to get this massive book on your doorstep that would dox every phone number and address.
Social graphs must be monopolies to work, but they need not be private monopolies, or unregulated monopolies. There are countless laws on the books about what you can and cannot use the postal system and the phone system for. But because of that, what we tend to think of as monopolies and remedies don’t make sense in the case of social graphs. You can’t break Facebook up into regional social graphs. You can force them to divest from Instagram, a competing social graph, but the remedies need to make sense with respect to the nature of what they are. They aren’t shoe manufacturers or oil companies and can’t be treated as such. At the same time, you can pursue remedies that wouldn’t make sense to other industries.
Toward that, keep in mind that Section 230 only applies to civil suits. It extends no protection for criminal acts. I like the concept of the Senate proposal to eliminate Section 230 protection for paid content, and I agree with the criticisms of that proposal that it’s poorly written.
One problem with the internet is that jurisdiction is ambiguous. Things that would normally, easily be handled by local law enforcement are either impossible or impractical to do. If I harass my neighbor, we call my local police. But if I do it over the internet, with an anonymous handle, nobody knows which police to call. Now, it’d almost certain elevate to an interstate matter, but the FBI is not remotely equipped to take over every such local jurisdictional matter as are handled by 700K local law enforcement. This is simply a byproduct of how the internet works. And if your harasser is international?
So one thing that could help here is to require that social media platforms be mandatory reporters. Rather than doing the usual after-the-fact moderation of reported content, mandate that the social media company report legal violations to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. This doesn’t require eliminating the anonymity of the internet beyond social media’s ability to point my handle to my person in a non-public way. That would help slow down matters considerably.
And related to that, slow down the ability to create new accounts. Having a bit of friction is often a good thing as it can help prevent millions of russian sock-puppet accounts from spreading propaganda. Lots of ways to accomplish this that don’t add costs.
As for the effect of ML, it’s good to have concerns about it, but I will tell you straight out that ML will be a vastly more transparent way of adjudicating policies than any existing process. I’m not saying it won’t be flawed and have it’s own biases, but those biases are more easily seen than in alternative systems. If it seems like there’s more bias in ML, that’s because it’s easier to measure. I’ve spent a fair bit of my career writing policy and overseeing implementation, and every time that I’ve sat down to measure bias in a human based system, I found it – a LOT of it. It’s not because it didn’t exist previously (it was almost certainly worse previously) it’s that nobody took the time to measure it because it’s hard to measure and because measuring it presumes you’re prepared to fix it, and often they weren’t.
I understand the fear of using ML for these things, but a good set of policies around the use of ML would exploit their ability to constantly and instantly measure their own biases and make them available for everyone to see. It’s such an improvement over what we have now. I mean, systemic racism is a thing, and it’s been a thing for centuries entirely in meatspace, and in centuries we’ve been able to smooth over the edges but not root it out entirely. Rethink what ML can do, and exploit its benefits.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
FWIW many rationalists, RW and not, are fans of RationalWiki
Major Major Major Major
@Bill Arnold: Metz obviously just wanted to write about Balaji and should have stuck to that. This is not a great article as currently constituted.
RSA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
This is problematic, from “the strict philosophical standpoint,” in that (as the RationalWiki observes) there’s significant disagreement about how to connect logical statements to the real world in a rigorous way.
As an example, see Gettier problems and the more general issue of analysis of knowledge. See also Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Blackburn has a nice book-length treatment as well, Truth: A Guide.
C Stars
@ColoradoGuy: Yes. That is the scary thing to me. And it is so real; living in SF from 2003-2018 I heard that kind of rhetoric so often from people who simultaneously thought of themselves as very decent, moral (and genetically/intellectually superior, natch) people.
Like: “It’s up to us to lead all these poor dumb suckers into the new world—in which we will, of course, be making all the decisions for them.”
RobertB
@A Ghost to Most: 68000 I bet. Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST all ran on 68000 chips. 6800 was way older. Granted, it takes a while for chips to end up in embedded systems.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: also like, Gödel, Tarski, and Church kind of poked some holes in logic itself, which I rarely hear mentioned.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
My personal experience the typical High Tech engineer or programmer has problems understand other people are people. I shudder to imagine their views on women since they apparently interact with them so few times. Just about every cubical farm I’ve seen resembles a monastery it’s so all boy. I mean I’ve been playing DnD since the 70s and I look down on them as NERDS and yes, these are the people who are making our Brave New Tech Future since the 70s, and someone just noticed that? Any whoot, a lot of these autistic edge lords raised in Skinner boxes are East Asians now, at lest in actual 408, 510 and 650 area codes. speaking about perpetuating stereotypes.
Oh and the girls aren’t any better – we had one white woman engineer I called Mss Personality, white as the walls, who wrote me an e-mail once that I was about to take her to HR the tone was so vile when my Chines coworkers started teasing me that I am Mss Personalities sweetheart. Later I was shocked to see that yes, she really did treat East Asians like shit and was much nicer to me.
ruemara
@Bill Arnold: I am not assuming, I am making that judgement based on their positions. Thanks for explaining to me what I’m thinking. I guess next time I should write out my thought positions carefully so you read my thoughts on what was in the article and the mentioned positions, instead of telling me what I think based on your thoughts.
Marc
@A Ghost to Most: In 1976 I was part of a small team that wrote the code for what became known as the ARPANET ELF nodes, basically PDP-11/40s running RSX-11D, that talked to the IMP (Interface Message Processor) on one side, emulating a standard IBM remote job entry station on the other. Pretty much all of the IBM, CDC, and Cray systems on ARPANET from ’77 on used this system to connect. 100K lines or so of PDP-11 assembly language, with some Fortran IV-plus on the front end. Consider yourself lucky to have C to work with.
And, more on topic, I was then 22 years, black, and had been kicked out of college four years prior for hacking the school’s timesharing computer. I still work in the tech industry writing code (by choice). It always amuses me to contemplate how the field (outside of IBM) went from being a low paid occupation during the 70s with many women, blacks (most learned programming in the military), and other minorities, to high paid nearly all white men during the 80s, then diversified (a bit) during the 90s with the arrival of Indian and Chinese venture capital.
And, yes, I’m sometimes quite discouraged by the direction things have gone since the 70s. This isn’t the future I imagined.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
With Star Trek, while some fans will get pissed about what they perceive as “SJWs” invading the shows, many of them seem to focus on dumb criticisms such as the new Trek shows “being too dark” and “betraying Gene’s Vision”. Some even go so far as to say that Patrick Stewart just never “got” ST or his character as evidenced by the new Picard show as well as how 80s action star he went in the old movies (tommy gunning the Borg)
Basically, it boils down to them wanting the old aesthetics and plots of the Berman era where everything gets wrapped up by the end of the episode and StarFleet are once again morally victorious. Where humans, especially in the first and second seasons, were “evolved” and perfect. Even the same filming techniques and set design they used on 90s television back then.
I also think a lot of these folks think of themselves as liberals, but the “Left” left then behind (at least in their opinion). If they see Discovery as “SJW schlock” and accept fairly progressive shows for the time like TNG, they only do so because the issues talked about in TNG aren’t controversial anymore. Also at the end of the day, these shows’ casts were still dominated by white men. Even in DS9 the commander/captain was still a man, albeit a black man. That’s another thing about the new Trek shows that sets these people’s lizard brains off
PJ
@Roger Moore: Some people get attracted by the aesthetics of a work of art without ever acknowledging the themes, which, in the case of Star Trek (at least the original series – I haven’t seen much of the others) and Rage Against the Machine, are hit-you-over-the-head obvious. This is an indication that these people will never grasp the messages that real life presents to them because they have a deep-seated desire to deliberately avoid them.
This is what makes them angry – in all of our lives, we see the harm done by, say, racism or sexism, but they can’t allow themselves to acknowledge it (which might cause them to change their behavior, or worse, give up some of their grievances), so when their favorite TV show reiterates those anti-racist or anti-sexist messages, it’s like sticking a dog’s nose in the mess they’ve made. Who do these artists think they are, confronting them with concepts which they’ve successfully avoided dealing with in their personal lives?!!!
J R in WV
Your post is great, on point, I dunno how to fix Techno arena with regard to RWNJ folks doing what they do. Very hard to assess Techno skills in a new technology just erupting.
Tenar Arha
Yeah.
Funny, not funny, that my first experience reading about the Well and it’s many toxic moments, just seem to rhyme all the way into the present.
Frans
@A Ghost to Most: I built my first microcomputer in 1977 with the Motorola 6800. In the early eighties, you might have been talking about a 68020. Really curious about the exact processor!
PJ
@Bill Arnold:
My assumption, and it has not been shown to be wrong yet, is that anyone who gets their ideas from the internet is pretty much the definition of an “intellectual lightweight”. In fact, pretty much anyone who considers themselves an “intellectual” is probably going to be a moron high on their own supply.
Brachiator
@PJ:
They said the same thing about the printing press. Probably true.
Agree, but this will be tough to do.
Including Balloon Juice???
Marc
Who will come up with this good set of policies? I currently work with engineering PhD students at one of the elite Silicon Valley universities. Many now work with ML (the other big thing is blockchain), some will start their own ML-based companies when they graduate. They often have no clue about the biases in the data sets they use for training until it is pointed out, quite a few simply don’t care.
PJ
@Brachiator: It’s the worst!!!!
Cameron
I don’t know if the “rationalism” espoused by these knobs has anything to do with philosophy. It sounds a whole lot more like Ayn Rand’s “rationalism,” which (to use the expression of the great David Crosby) has the intellectual depth of a birdbath.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill Arnold:
Eh, they have book smarts and are fond of arguing. They’re good at constructing arguments that are superficially appealing if they can get you to miss that the premises are bad. But the title of the OP is relevant.
Doug R
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Yeah, I’m thinking if you take $ for something, that makes you a publisher.
Which puts a big onus on hosts to keep an eye on their ads and promoted content, I can see having a much higher standard for deleting free commentary.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ve come around to thinking that people can’t be held free of responsibility for what they allow to fester in their comment sections. If the comments get colonized by a bunch of bigots, everyone else gets driven off and it’s a bigot blog.
Ruckus
@RSA:
My way of asking how else would a human design a autonomous system? Survival is built in, very few humans will willingly give up their own lives for others. Even people who have jobs, like say fire fighters, that require a high level of personal risk, not all of them have unlimited levels of health of the greater good. Many do but it is not something that anyone will just do. We almost all rate the risk first, and many/most will choose personal survival if it is possible.
Brachiator
@PJ:
I have a low opinion of everyone, including myself.
I set the bar very high.
PJ
So I read the NY Times article, and, as when I usually read things about the tech world, I have the same question: do people go into tech because they are smug, unempathetic pricks, or does the tech world turn them into smug, unempathetic pricks?
I know that you can encounter smug, unempathetic pricks in all walks of life, but other industries seem to inculcate a certain degree of humility on the way up the ladder due to the vicissitudes of a particular trade. This quote is from a tech journalist but it just typifies the way of thinking:
“Prove statistically which side was right”? Who the fuck thinks like this?
Martin
@Marc: Oh, don’t give it to engineers. Not saying engineers can’t do it, but they aren’t trained to, so if you find one that has the sensibility for it, that’s an exception.
I mean, ML is policy. Give it to policy people. Have them demand the engineers demonstrate how that policy can be enforced and measured through their tools.
Understand, none of this is new. You give policy authority to actuaries and you get redlining and pre-existing condition bans.
The problem that ML presents is that you’re turning policy decisions over to engineers if you don’t have domain experts conversant enough in ML to direct that activity. This is the space that I live in. You want a healthcare IT project to work right, give it to a healthcare policy person to oversee the IT work. Not an easy person to find, but that’s how we need to change education.
I’m strongly of the view that you have to keep your eye firmly on the job to be done, and not on the mechanism used to do it. Put the experts on the former in charge, not the experts in the latter.
Major Major Major Major
@Doug R:
This would at most make them a publisher of advertisements. Also the platform/publisher thing is not a real distinction https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter
Major Major Major Major
@PJ:
IMO there’s something about being a tech journalist that makes you decide to elevate a minority of loud assholes so that people think they’re representative of the whole industry. Do people go into tech journalism because they’re disingenuous polemicists with an ax to grind, or does it turn them into disingenuous polemicists?
Raven Onthill
I am an old bird, and I remember when tech was liberatory. We were proud, once, that women were accepted in senior positions in computing. Once, hippies became software engineers, and brought a new openness to technology. Virtual reality. The web itself. (The turmeric laser!) And then, and then…
What happened?
There is a history to be written. Some of the old spirit of liberation survives still: it is in things like showing police racism and brutality for all to see. In this blog. In things like antifa outing white supremacists. And just the plain fun of social media, before it was commercialized and dominated by addiction algorithms. That still survives in the quieter corners of the internet, but it is drowned out by the commercial internet.
But…
Just last night, literally, I responded to a remark on Twitter, “This is why I urge people NOT to think about Bitcoin in political terms. Do NOT view it as an evil libertarian plot to bring down government.” My reply: “Bitcoin is, exactly, a libertarian plot to destroy central banking and taxation. Read the Cyphernomicon. I used to know Tim May, the author of the Cyphernomicon. He died alone in his home in California. No-one noticed he had died for days.” May…May probably had as little empathy as any person I have ever known. He wasn’t violent. His manners were perfectly good (as long as your skin was light and you were male and not disabled.) But…but…he wasn’t capable of or interested in empathy. He was a quiet anti-Semite when I knew him. I have read that he later became a loud one.
To the article you cite. I wouldn’t say that Slate Star Codex was central to anything but Silicon Valley libertarian cranks. Citing David Friedman as a source? I know him, too. He is Milton Friedman’s son, and believes his father’s ideology implicitly. Scott Aaronson? He is famous for blaming feminism for his difficulties in his sex life. (One cannot make these things up. Truly, one cannot make these things up.)
We talk about regulation. I wish I knew what that would entail. I do not see how the current Roberts Court, which shows every sign of being the worst since Taney, is likely to allow effective regulation that would address the old imbalances of power that technology plus powerful sociopaths have brought to the world.
And there are worse possibilities. Consider that China has an intensely regulated internet, all aimed at enforcing conformity and the power of the state.
I…don’t know how to end this. We can talk about this until our mouths go numb. But where is the program that will lead us forward?
Major Major Major Major
@Raven Onthill: almost all the ‘Codex readers I know are boring liberals and leftists, and IIRC he did an informal poll that showed the same result. It’s really a bizarre article.
The Moar You Know
@PJ: Irony of ironies, I’m a techie who does IT security and digital forensics for a living and I could not agree with you more. It’s not that the benefits of the internet are overstated; it’s that they’re actually non existent. It’s taken millions of jobs, it hasn’t saved one scrap of paper, and in every work environment I’ve been in, it kills productivity.
It’s given us none of the benefits or freedoms that it promised, and is rapidly destroying society.
So, thanks for the house and the car and the lifestyle, internet. I don’t want to be ungrateful. But we would have all been far better off if you never existed.
Gvg
Matt McIrvin
@PJ:
Most of the people I’ve known in the industry were pretty standard liberals or old hippies. Those who weren’t were more likely to be libertarians than other kinds of conservative. But basically when people think of tech as populated by libertarian sharks with weird Randian ideas, they’re thinking of the billionaire CEOs, not the people doing the work. And I suspect the fact that they’re billionaire CEOs has a lot to do with that.
Matt McIrvin
@PJ:
The antinatalist philosophers believe the world would have been better off without people, because existence is harm. I kind of feel like that’s the direction this kind of speculation is going.
I don’t know. The world managed to convulse with massacres, genocides, fanatic movements, plagues and millions of bad ideas without the Internet. We just didn’t hear about them as quickly.
RSA
@Ruckus: Good questions. I would say that I (and we, meaning society in general) don’t have good answers, at least in general. People are making progress on a few fronts, such as empirical ethics, but there’s still a leap to general principles.
JimV
Huh? I’ve read Star Slate Codex several times, maybe once a month over the past half-dozen years. It was mostly focused on various drugs for psychiatric treatment, and the evidence pro and con for them. They were long, technical posts that showed a lot of research and preparation. Not very interesting to me so I just skimmed them. Every now and then he would make a prediction about the course of current events, and at the end of the year discuss how well they did or didn’t pan out. Not a lot of emotion seemed to be involved, so again, not the most gripping reading. But the times I went there I didn’t see anything to object to. So I would have liked to see like some specifics.
I like to read science blogs, and his blog was recommended by another (better) one, so I put it in my bookmarks for when I was desperate for something to read. I think we all have biases so I’m sure he had some, but evil? I guess I must be then, and probably we all are.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I get that. For many of the people who rise to the top (Zuckerberg, et al.), to the extent they have a sense of ethics or morality, it’s whatever is going to benefit them and their pals. Whatever impact their products or the ideas or beliefs promoted by their products have on real life is purely an abstract problem. There’s no right or wrong, as long as they are getting richer – “hey, it’s not our fault democracy is undermined by the misinformation or racism we are pushing, it’s just the free exchange of ideas.”
The robber barons of ages past were also largely assholes, but most of them at least had a sense of noblesse oblige (thus the Carnegie libraries).
Raven Onthill
@Major Major Major Major: the NYT author did an inadequate job of research. A while back, I read articles from SSC now and again, though I never followed it. I stopped when I realized how deep down how many ratholes the author and his commentators were.
Psychotherapists…I have had experience with a psychotherapist who was a would-be cult leader. There’s something about psychologists that tends towards priggery. It’s not all of them, or even most, but some of them have the worst attitudes. When Scott Alexander was finally outed as Scott Alexander Siskind I remember thinking that, wow, privileged jerk has had his privilege threatened. (I think someone may have written an article on it.) Scott Siskind is a smart talented writer, but, after all, so was William F. Buckley, Jr. He is very much caught up in privilege, in the idea that somehow he is above the general run of humanity, and definitely above women and people of color.
Raven Onthill
@JimV: the problem is, when he left his field of expertise, he turned out to be a well-mannered right-wing crank. And that, in turn, casts doubt on his writing in his own field. Possibly his prejudices did not affect his thinking on his field, but his field is human minds, so more likely they did.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin:
Kind of a big leap between eliminating the internet and eliminating existence.
The fact is that the internet has facilitated the destruction of industries, democracies, and peoples. You seem to argue that these things would have happened anyway (hard to know, but in some cases I think it’s false), but for certain it has accelerated the destruction and made it much easier. And I can’t think of any benefits the internet has brought that offset that destruction.
ETA: And with that, I am logging off for a while . . .
Major Major Major Major
Last summer’s New Yorker article about SSC was much better IMO if you want a read with fewer unrelated axes to grind. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media
bjacques
@Major Major Major Major: Oh, balls to Roko’s Basilisk. Someone with too much time on their hands plagiarized Pascal’s Wager and Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” and came up with a campfire tale for techies addled by weeklong stretches of nonstop coding. If mainstream religions can’t effectively hold onto their adherents by threatening eternal damnation these days, what chance does the Unborn God have? Piss on the Dark Enlargement in general—just what the world needs: more philosophical justification for assholery.
EDIT: The Internet’s treated me well. Coming up on 25 years as the digital equivalent of a plumber.
RSA
@PJ:
I don’t have an answer to this question, but I’ll share a thought I had a while ago:
When you learn how to program and how a computer system works and even how an entire infrastructure of computer systems works together, it’s empowering. You’re in charge of this rich, complex environment, and you can make things happen. Anything you like! Within reason, of course. There are rules that govern your environment, what can and can’t be done, and often you spend a good amount of time aligning your understanding with those rules. But still, what you do can be enormously rewarding, in a psychological sense.
I suspect that this experience can potentially give someone a kind of tunnel vision about the real world. “If everyone followed these two simple principles, the world would be a better place.” “The problem is that not enough people recognize the basic rule of X.” “The solution is simple…” “People are just not being rational.” The idea that people are more than logic machines is abstracted away. (Not entirely, though–there’s always the concept of lusers.)
All this is without any evidence aside from introspection and experience on my part. But I wonder.
SFBayAreaGal
@Martin: What is ML?
Major Major Major Major
@bjacques: yeah it’s very silly. Good origin story for their marriage.
Matt McIrvin
@PJ: Without the Internet, almost nobody would have been able to stay at home over the past year. I wouldn’t be surprised if COVID deaths in the US would be in the several millions by now.
JimV
Scott Aaronson (the guy who recommended Star Slate Codex to me and others) was involved in the NY Times story and has a post up about here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310
Spoiler: NY Times reporting strikes again.
Bill Arnold
@ruemara:
I liked your front page piece. I apologize for my antagonistic tone.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin:
Teleconferences and masks were a thing long before the internet. And besides, without the internet, it’s much more likely we wouldn’t have had Trump as President, and federal reaction to Covid-19 would have been completely different (competent even!), and we would have had hundreds of thousands of fewer deaths.
And, yes, I lied about logging off, but now I really mean it . . .
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
How about if the real problem is not the internet but the users?
Reality is that we have always communicated with each other. Grunts, finger painting, shouting nothings, language, written word, printing press, telegraph, telephone, internet, cell phone….. All just means of communicating. Both the good and the not so good, equality and racism, greed, hate….. The big problem is not what we say, but what we say that causes us to do harm to each other and to ourselves, our fears and expectations. And of course all those other people, some of whom do not agree with ME.
I think we are at a crossroads, as I said above. There are too many of us to be greedy, to be – not survival of the richest but survival of the ME. We’ve warmed the planet, stripped it of it’s oil, which we’ve burned an awful lot of it, made some rich beyond all reason, many poor beyond all reason. We are animals, we will fuck and we will reproduce. A massive portion allows that “god” created the earth and us and will do with us as he pleases so enjoy, live it up, end up in heaven. What if none of that is anything more than superstition and wishful thinking? What if our goal as humans is supposed to be to make the planet actually better, or at least livable for all the creatures great and small and not be selfish assholes? Just a thought.
Raven Onthill
@RSA: people go into engineering because they are interested in engineering, not people. But when many engineers gain enormous wealth, and influence over the lives of millions, they are in no way equipped to handle it. Mark Zuckerberg might be just an engineer with a bit of a creepy streak, if he hadn’t successfully developed and marketed Facebook.
Bill Arnold
@Raven Onthill:
Donald J. Trump is about as far from being an engineer as is possible. He has considerable talent and skill in people-manipulation. He doesn’t have any more emotional empathy ability than M. Zuckerberg, at least from appearances.
Bill Arnold
@JimV:
Re that Scott Aaronson piece
Yeah, that triggered me too. As one who does not have an internal running verbal monologue[1] and has to translate from non-verbal thinking into writing like this, and was taught a primitive form of Bayesian reasoning (basic metacognitive judgements) by my father as a young child, I found it offensive, though probably not intended by the author.
[1] Seriously, why do neurotypicals allow their mind to be parasitized by a thing running a verbal monologue? :-) (You are aliens. [2] :-)
[2] DIE ANTWOORD ft. The Black Goat ‘ALIEN’ (Official Video), Jun 4, 2018 ( lyrics )
Ruckus
@PJ:
If you are still around…
Learning and technology has shuttered a lot of business. Amazon for example. Not the best company for sure but. How big would a store have to be to be able to show you all they carry? Do you need 95% of what they sell? Can’t you purchase most of what they sell in your local big all around store, what’s the name of that place…. Life is different since I was born, just over 70 yrs ago. Which is a flash in the space time continuum. Cars actually last a while, don’t overheat regularly, tires go tens of thousands of miles, get far better mileage…. To call someone I dial their number, to call out of my area when I could first use a phone I had to dial 0 and ask. And paid per minute of use. Medicine can cure most cancers, many diseases have vaccines, a heart attack is often not fatal. Etc, etc, etc.
The point is that life changes as time passes by, and it changes faster than it did not all that long ago. Like population. I was born in LA county and once again live there. The population the yr after I was born was just over 4 million. Today it’s over 10 million. the US population when I was born was 157.8 million, has increased to 331 million.
Nothing is the same as it was 100 yrs ago or 500 yrs ago. Except human beings, can still be as stubborn, ignorant, narcissistic, beautiful, ugly, brilliant……
Raven Onthill
It occurs to me that I actually wrote something relevant a bit over two years ago. It concluded:
We twist and turn, trying to defend the capitalist model of social media. I think we’re quite wrong.
RSA
@Raven Onthill: This matches my experience but only to some extent. I don’t think it generalizes to women, POC, or people with disabilities that I’ve known.
Ruckus
@RSA:
I’ve made metal products with my hands for 6 decades. Some of the early stuff was crap, OK most of it was, damn it I was learning. But since then it has ranged all over the place. In my young teens I made molds for Barbie dolls. I think the dimensions of those scarred me for life…. In the last year I’ve made parts for tools that are being used for something to do with Covid, and no, I have no idea what. And many, many different tools inbetween. The concept is similar, move metal, but the details of how and how well have changed much. The concept of change of process is one I’ve been involved in all those decades. We’ve changed technology faster in the last 75 yrs than in all the centuries before that. My docs office decades ago was still using paper charts, my healthcare now is entirely computerized. I can read my chart at home on the internet. It’s not all about blogs and politics and philosophy and whatever. Is it better? Well it’s made a lot of things/people available far, far more than even 30 yrs ago. It’s made us part of the world and the world part of us. I think we have to respect that.
J R in WV
@Marc:
Dual PDP-11/40 was the first computer I operated, running a system to create newspaper output.
Then I learned to code on an Amdahl plug-compatible IBM setup using PL/1 and then on a VAX star. Those were the days…
Bill Arnold
@PJ:
Mixed.
The first is probably true at least for the US, since the anti-COVID-19-non-pharmecuetical interventions disinformation would probably have had a harder time spreading just with Fox News and AM radio and Newmax and The Federalist and Breitbart and etc.
The lack of fast communication of scientific information and papers and etc would have slowed down medical research by at least 6 months. (my estimate). I mean, I, an interested person with very little formal biology training and no specialized library access, read (and understood, at a transactional level of expertise) well over 100 papers (some peer-reviewed, some preprints) on and related to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, and many scientists working in the area read/digested far more. Many data sets were freely available. 6 months of vaccine delay would kill hundreds of thousands of people Americans, and millions worldwide. (estimate again.)
Marc
@SFBayAreaGal:
Machine Learning, basically sophisticated statistical techniques for analyzing large sets of data (photos of cats and dogs, speech, radio signals, whatever), and break them up into various categories based upon whatever distinguishing features tend to provide the desired answers. Sometimes you tell the system the “correct” answers during the training process, sometimes you use it to break things up into clusters that us humans have yet to recognize. The problem is that the answers are quite dependent on the type of data you use to train it in the first place.
Marc
@Martin:
Hmm, have you spent much time in large universities lately? The one I work for is fundamentally a venture capital firm masquerading as an educational institution. The endowment is consists of stock from various startups (many now huge corporations) going back to the 60s. Policy is nice, engineers that have ideas that can be funded, whether or not they make sense, are where the money is at, and the primary focus of the professors in engineering land. I feel sorry for those in the humanities side, they don’t get much love from the administration.
Parmenides
I’ll never understand people who get really into a lot of these ideas. Mostly because I’ve always been a generalist, and recently diagnosed with ADHD, there are a lot of domains of knowledge that just blend like a slurry of fish guts in my head. So Eugenics seems like something that makes sense when you start from dog breeding, but the moment you realize that human gestation and maturity rates, along with some odd quirks in great ape and homo genetics (or better put the oddity of dog genetics) you wouldn’t get any recognizable results for at least far longer than you will live. I’m not sure you’d get any real results unless you kept going for around 10 generations. (There have been around 9 generations since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Then we get to that fun category called culture which seems to be that which people do. It makes for an oh so fun nonsense variable that you can blame for everything, claim credit for everything, but which doesn’t actually have a definition that bounds it to any reasonable discourse. This is not to say that Anthropologists haven’t worked on this for years but your regular dude bro probably hasn’t thought to deeply about categories when it comes to people.
Anyway it mostly seems to be people with really limited educations and interests making themselves feel better about themselves by shitting on the rest of the human race. But our fun American if you’ve got money you must be smart and good and all that nonsense.
Marc
Odd, I worked for what became a large well known software company just north of San Francisco in the early 90s, and they had their share of old hippies, but many were Rand-friendly Whole Earth reading libertarian hippies, typically with a fetish for drugs, swords, and/or guns. One of my most amusing moments at that company was the time I showed up at a party wearing a Nelson Mandela t-shirt, I did not stay long.
RSA
No disagreement. Shout-out to Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. From his 1989 proposal:
Bill Arnold
Digital siege: Internet cuts become favored tool of regimes (KELVIN CHAN, February 11, 2021)
Not sure that’s an argument for or against the internet.
J R in WV
@SFBayAreaGal:
I think it is Machine Learning, which is a category of Artificial Intelligence. Facial Recognition is a branch of ML… I think.
RSA
@Marc: In case Martin doesn’t return: I believe he is a professor in the computer science department of a major public university.
Major Major Major Major
@Marc:
Ah, Marin county.
Poe Larity
Three years ago Cade was saying ML bias was not a thing at conferences and now he’s an expert on AI and writing a book.
Marc
@RSA: To put things in perspective, I’m a clueless software guy who barely managed to graduate from high school, but accidentally ended up working as a research engineer for the past 20 years (and stayed, as I was sick of dealing with what we now call tech bros in industry). So, I may see things a bit differently.
I understand what the professors think they’re passing on to the students, but what I see on a day to day basis is often quite different. Most of the grad students I work with have a limited understanding of machine learning technology (most take one or two courses), yet they graduate and end up applying this technology in the real world. Policy and ethics are often not of great concern to those who aren’t aiming at an research or academic career.
Chris T.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve heard more than one or two other people refer to it as the “star” (or the 750 as the “comet”)…
Daniel
@Major Major Major Major: yeah the blog post about SSC that I thought really nailed it was “people in the #slatestarcodex feed are either blocked or followed”. I loved SSC but hoo boy some of the commenters were gross.
Roland Stone
Scott Alexander has a response to the linked NYT article: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
If you’re interested in his point of view. Disclaimer: I’ve read some of his stuff at his previous site and at this one, and I don’t find him objectionable.
Know Little
Also Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith have respective reactions to the NYT article and SSC:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists
I tend to find both of them insightful.