…one way or another we know kind of an amazing amount about stuff that’s so far out of our element it seems incomprehensible…so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when it turns out our comprehension of it is…not as well-understood as we think…but…in some ways this is kind of a big deal?

Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.

…it’s…actually it’s kind of an interesting piece that deserves better than this sort of treatment…but…needs must & what-have-you

A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.

It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel [NYT]

…still & all…shaking the very foundations of some folks’ worlds might be no bad thing about now?

The Trump administration often defaulted, as Ahmari laments, to warmed-over Reaganite policymaking. But Trump’s victorious campaign really did kill off, for a time at least, the Tea Party-era emphasis on entitlement reform and hard money. And Trump did follow through on elements of his economic nationalism — while the Biden administration has embraced similar ideas on trade and infrastructure, to the point where it’s fair to say that both parties have been reshaped by Trump’s ’16 campaign.

Meanwhile, a populist intellectual ecosystem exists on the right, through think tanks like American Compass and journals like American Affairs and Ahmari’s own Compact, where before the Trump era there was little more than a scattering of gadflies. The Hawley-Rubio-J.D. Vance faction in the Senate is small, but more influential than any past equivalent. And Trump himself, the Republican front-runner, is still making promises — new cities! new tariffs! flying cars! — that smack more of industrial policy than supply-side economics.
[…]
You can blame Covid for deepening this era of bad feelings. You can argue that our social malaise just shows economic improvements haven’t gone nearly far enough. And you can pin blame for certain social trends — internet addiction among teenagers, say — on bad actors in big business.
[…]
Cultural conservatism absolutely needs an economic policy, and corporate power absolutely shapes the culture. But our own social crisis feels a little less economically determined, a little more essentially cultural, in 2023 than at any previous moment in my adult life.

Should Right-Wing Populists Despair? [NYT]

…should they? …I dunno, honestly…& I doubt it would make much difference if I did…but…do they? …because it sure seems like their whole weaponised-grievance substitute for actually having a political philosophy in any constructive sense screams that they spend most of their lives in the grip of various flavors of despair…& it’s safe to say…they do not deal with it well

Adolescent despair has been copiously analyzed in recent years: the harm from social media, microtargeting algorithms that inflame envy and conflict and divisive politics, unending school shootings, Covid sequestration, a planet devoured by flames and floods, a “never enough” achievement and consumer culture, anxious adults creating a jittery atmosphere, a digitally connected yet emotionally disjointed and spiritually unmoored society.

“Young people are taking in a lot of alarming information, and due to digital devices, they — like many of us — are taking the information in all day, every day,” Lisa Damour, the author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” told me.

It goes beyond the young. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on “The Booming Business of American Anxiety” that began: “A search for ‘anxiety relief’ on Google pulls up links for supplements in the form of pills, patches, gummies and mouth sprays. There are vibrating devices that hang around your neck and ‘tone your vagus nerve,’ weighted stuffed animals, bead-filled stress balls and coloring books that claim to bring calm.”
[…]
“A lot of my friends with adult children have themselves had to get into therapy because they are so stressed out because of their kids’ problems,” Steinberg noted.

Anxiety in the Age of Barbie [NYT]

…& we all seem to be having to contend with the fallout from a bunch of (mostly) dudes who are all snivelling because the world doesn’t think they’re as big of a deal as they like to think they are…sure…there’s more to it than that…but…there seems like more than enough of that that…it kinda makes you wonder what the world would look like if the assholes had competent levels of emotional self-regulation…but…who has time for that kind of away-with-the-faries thinking…even on a sunday?

The research found that, despite voluntary commitments to take action against Russian propaganda by the largest social media companies, including Meta, Russian disinformation against Ukraine, thrived. Allowing the disinformation and hate speech to spread without limits would have violated the Digital Services Act, the E.U.’s social media law, had it been in force last year, the year-long commission study concluded.

“Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” the study found. “Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.” The social media platform was recently renamed X.

…assholes with influence…how come those don’t respond to the laws of supply & demand?

The E.U. has taken a far more aggressive regulatory approach to government-backed disinformation than the United States has. The Digital Services Act, which went into effect for the biggest social media companies Aug. 25, requires them to assess the risk of false information,stop the worst from being boosted by algorithms and subject their performance to auditing. Separately, European sanctions on Russian state media have prompted YouTube and other platforms to ban the likes of RT, the Russian news outlet formerly known as Russia Today that was once one of the most-followed channels.

The study is the starkest indication yet that the legal and voluntary measures are not getting the job done, following June warnings from E.U. Commissioner Thierry Breton that X had work to do to avoid potentially massive fines under the DSA. The research was conducted by nonprofit analysis group Reset, which advocates for greater oversight of digital platforms.

Without full access to data held by the companies — data that must be made more available under the new law — Reset relied on public information, such as the number of interactions that problematic content drew from people who had not been following the account that posted it.
[…]
“In absolute numbers, pro-Kremlin accounts continue to reach the largest audiences on Meta’s platforms. Meanwhile, the audience size for Kremlin-backed accounts more than tripled on Telegram,” since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, the group wrote. “We found that no platform consistently applied its terms of service in repeated tests of user notification systems in several Central and Eastern European languages.”
[…]
The researchers said the law and the social media companies were not equipped for a full information war of the type Russia has been waging across state-owned official accounts, aligned accounts and others. Russian interests also coordinated actions by volunteers on Telegram channels, such as Cyber Front Z, urging simultaneous posts to manipulate the formulas that boost popular content. They filed false mass claims that pro-Ukraine accounts were violating platform rules to get them suspended, and they intimidated others with doxing and other threats.
[…]
“No [social media] platform introduced policies addressing all or even most Kremlin-operated accounts,” they wrote. “In addition, platforms fundamentally ignored cross-platform coordinated campaigns.”
[…]
Though the main period of study was 2022, “the reach of pro-Kremlin accounts has increased between January and May of 2023, with average engagement rising by 22 percent across online platforms,” Reset found. “However, this increased reach was largely driven by Twitter, where engagement grew by 36 percent after CEO Elon Musk decided to lift mitigation measures on Kremlin-backed accounts, arguing that ‘all news is to some degree propaganda.’”

Musk withdrew his social media platform from the voluntary code of conduct for combating disinformation that was widely propagated in June 2022, and he has eased content rules and cut enforcement staff.

Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, E.U. says [WaPo]

…it’s not like there aren’t worse people out there

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/world/americas/mexico-iguala-students-kidnapping.html

…but the whole perma-tantrum thing is fucking tiresome, y’all

The Justice Department sought to block Trump from being compelled to answer questions about the handling of text messages between FBI attorney Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok that exposed their opposition to his candidacy and their personal relationship. The two are suing the Justice Department, not Trump, but say the former president was inappropriately involved in how they were treated.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson allowed for the two-hour deposition earlier this year, saying that Trump’s repeated public statements about the pair justifies further probing of whether he pressured the Justice Department to retaliate against them after the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
[…]
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday denied an emergency petition from the Justice Department to block Berman Jackson’s ruling. Absent another appeal, Trump’s deposition will now go forward. The former president has not intervened to prevent the deposition.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/09/01/trump-deposition-strzok-page-fbi/

…mind you…as the saying goes…to err is human…but to really fuck shit up requires a computer

The trick hadn’t really worked, or so I thought – ChatGPT’s questions were mostly generic talking points. I’d asked it to try a bit harder. “Certainly, let’s dive into more specific and original questions that can elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman,” it had trilled. The results still weren’t up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind in 2019). “How do you envision AI’s role in supporting mental health care in the future,” I ask – and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I’ve got right to the heart of why he does what he does.
[…]
This is one aspect of the sunlit uplands of AI; the shadow side is largely what preoccupies Suleyman in his new book, written with the researcher Michael Bhaskar and ominously titled The Coming Wave. Even if you have followed debates about the dangers of artificial intelligence, or just seen Black Mirror, it’s a genuinely mind-boggling read, setting out the ineluctable forces soon to completely transform politics, society and even the fabric of life itself over the next decade or two. I tell Suleyman that it’s “sobering”. “I mean, that’s a polite way to put it,” he says. “And, you know, it was hard to write – it was gut wrenching in a way. And it was only because I had time to really reflect during the pandemic that I mustered the courage to make the case. And, obviously, I hope I’m wrong.”

Me too. The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He memorably calls this “the plummeting cost of power”. If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.
[…]
Second, there’s what Suleyman terms hyper-evolution: AI is capable of refining design and manufacturing processes, with the improvements compounding after each new iteration. It’s incredibly hard to keep up with this rate of change and make sure safeguards are in place. Lethal threats could emerge and spread before anyone has even clocked them.
[…]
Finally, there’s “autonomy”. Unique among technologies so far in human history, AI has the potential to make decisions for itself. Though this may invoke Terminator-style nightmares, autonomy isn’t necessarily bad: autonomous cars are likely to be much safer than ones driven by humans. But what happens when autonomy and hyper-evolution combine? When AI starts to refine itself and head off in new directions on its own? It doesn’t take much imagination to be concerned about that – and yet Suleyman believes the dangers are too often dismissed with the wave of a hand, particularly among the tech elite – a habit he calls pessimism aversion.
[…]
For Suleyman, the only powers realistically capable of acting to contain AI are states, and despite the gallows humour, he’s deeply worried about how fragile they are becoming. This doesn’t seem very Silicon Valley, somehow, at least as represented by the likes of Ayn Randian radicals such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. “I mean, I couldn’t disagree more with their politics. I’m extremely against them, if I’m extreme about anything. I think this idea that we need to dismantle the state, we need to have maximum freedom – that’s really dangerous. On the other hand, I’m obviously very aware of the danger of centralised authoritarianism and, you know, even in its minuscule forms like nimbyism. That’s why, in the book, we talk about a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness. That is the big governance challenge of the next century: how to strike that balance.”

“I think we’re in a generational transition at the moment,” he continues. “There’s the existing leaders who are in their mid-50s, have spent 25 years in Silicon Valley and risen up through the ranks either as founders or executives. And they have an outlook which is probably closer to the libertarian tendency. So Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook] and Larry and Sergey [Page and Brin, the co-founders of Google]. But there’s this new crop leading AI companies, like Sam [Altman, CEO of OpenAI] and myself. And I think that we’ve been talking about the potential dangers for a long time.”
[…]
Isn’t he worried The Coming Wave’s grim predictions will just set off another round of dismissals – that pessimism aversion he talked about? “The book is a provocation,” he says. He wants attention for his containment plan, and suggestions to improve it. Does that mean we shouldn’t take his warnings at face value? “I think the cool thing about what I’m doing is that I’m predicting something. And I think a lot of people don’t have the courage to predict things. I don’t think I’m wrong, but we do have time to intervene.” It sounds as though, having seen one version of the future, he’s desperately trying to change the timeline, like a real-life Marty McFly. “Exactly,” he laughs. Let’s hope he’s not too late.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/02/i-hope-im-wrong-the-co-founder-of-deepmind-on-how-ai-threatens-to-reshape-life-as-we-know-it

…either way

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

…the heat is on…&…fucking up all kinds of shit

To say it’s been a hot summer would be an understatement. According to Nasa scientists, July was the hottest month ever recorded. Off the coast of Florida, surface ocean temperatures soared over 101F, bleaching coral reefs. In Arizona, Phoenix residents sweated through a record 31 consecutive days above 110F. Even animals that spend much of their time in the sky, like birds, struggled to keep cool in the sweltering heat.
[…]
As extreme heat scorched the oceans, land and skies, it affected our food system underwater, on the ground and in the air. But the ways that it did so were unpredictable – not every crop suffered, though many certainly struggled, and not every region was affected equally. If there was any takeaway, it may have been that previous scientific models for extreme heat failed to capture the full scope of what heatwaves of this magnitude could cause – and that farmers, fishers and pollinators should be prepared to adapt to an uncertain future.

“It’s really problematic if we use past disasters as the basis for which we plan for the future,” says Erin Coughlan de Perez, a professor focused on climate risk management at Tufts University. “The future is not going to be the same as the past.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/02/farming-food-supply-climate-change-drought-rain

…same as it ever was?

The Silicon Valley elites who have been quietly buying up northern California farmland for several years have gone public with their vision for the utopian city they hope to build from scratch on 55,000 acres in Solano county.

This week the group behind the effort, Flannery Associates, launched a website for the initiative and released a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

The sudden launch of a public campaign comes as the group, backed by a cohort of billionaire Silicon Valley investors, had faced growing criticism over their shadowy agenda.
[…]
In all, the group spent nearly $1bn and became the largest landowner in the county, even buying property around the nation’s busiest air force base. The mystery reportedly drew the attention of the US military and FBI.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that Flannery Associates was backed by a group of prominent Silicon Valley investors and aimed to build a new city, operated using clean energy, that would create thousands of jobs while offering residents reliable public transportation and urban living.

Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled [Guardian]

…how do you reckon that’s gonna work out?

Burning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud [Guardian]

…if you can’t stand the heat…put your feet up?

…it’s sunday after all…so…the hell with it…I’m gonna find some tunes…& more coffee…&…ummm…back away from the keyboard before butcher despairs of me forever?