…there is no shortage of significant shit going on with the world that is all too real
Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place [Guardian]
Renewable energy and nuclear power will meet almost all of the growth in global demand for electricity over the next three years, according to a report released today by the International Energy Agency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/08/renewables-are-track-satiate-world-appetite-electricity/
[…]
“The world’s growing demand for electricity is set to accelerate, adding more than double Japan’s current electricity consumption over the next three years,” [IEA Executive Director Fatih] Birol said. “The good news is that renewables and nuclear power are growing quickly enough to meet almost all this additional appetite, suggesting we are close to a tipping point for power sector emissions.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/nevada-lithium-mine-wins-ruling-green-energy-fights-rage
In early February I spoke with Thunberg, who was in Sweden, over Zoom, about why she believes it is now a trickier time to be a climate activist than when she began, why it’s no longer sufficient to listen to the scientists, the necessity of systems change and whether she still believes in the basic goodness of people. The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/opinion/greta-thunberg-climate-change.html
‘A national scandal’: how US climate funding could make water pollution worse [Guardian]
There are a few points to make on all this from organisations that have looked at the global numbers. The International Energy Agency made plain nearly two years ago that no new oil and gas fields should be opened if the world were to have a chance of keeping 1.5C in play.
And an expert group set up by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to advise on greenwashing of net zero claims said the need to act was so great that companies should prioritise making deep cuts in absolute emissions in line with the 1.5C target by 2030, with high-quality offsets to be reserved only for cuts above and beyond that. It should be noted there remain significant doubts over which offsets qualify as high quality.
Guterres laid out his view on the implications for the fossil fuel industry in his trademark blunt fashion in a speech in New York this week in which he set out his priorities for the year.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/feb/09/fossil-fuel-companies-wont-save-us-from-climate-change-we-need-governments-to-step-up
…or potentially beyond it
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is leading a NASA mission to explore an asteroid rich with metals supposedly worth $10 quintillion that’s orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid’s name is Psyche, after the Greek goddess of the soul.
This is totally cool, but there are a few caveats on that eye-catching dollar value. First, it’s Elkins-Tanton’s own estimate, which she told me she ballparked about six years ago when reporters first came calling about the mission. (She estimated that the nickel alone was worth that much.) Second, to sell all the metal in Psyche someone would have to bring it all to Earth, which is almost inconceivable. And third, if that much metal really could be brought to Earth, there would be far more than anyone needs, and its value would crash.
The $10 quintillion figure is “fallacious in every way,” Elkins-Tanton cheerfully told me in an interview this week. So why talk about the mission to Psyche at all? Partly because the word “quintillion” is just fun. Also because it’s a teachable moment for the economics of costs, prices, supply and demand. And most important, because learning more about asteroids has value above and beyond money. As Elkins-Tanton told me: “It’s fundamental science. We’ve never visited an asteroid with a metal surface. It’s a whole new kind of object in our solar system.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/opinion/psyche-asteroid-nasa-mining.html
[…]
One flaw in the quintillion calculation is that how much something is worth is inseparable from the question of whether you can obtain it. When a young lover says, “I would give you the sun, the moon and the stars,” consider it cheap talk. (Try asking for $100 instead and see what you get.)
The seemingly outlandish concept, outlined in a new research paper, would involve creating a “solar shield” in space by mining the moon of millions of tons of its dust and then “ballistically eject[ing]” it to a point in space about 1m miles from Earth, where the floating grains would partially block incoming sunlight.
[…]
Bromley and two other researchers considered a variety of properties, including coal and sea salt, that could dim the sun by as much as 2% if fired into space. The team eventually settled on the dust found on the moon, although millions of tons would have to be mined, sifted and loaded into a ballistic device, such as an electromagnetic rail gun, and fired into space each year into order to maintain this solar shield.Getting this mining and projective equipment to the moon would be a “significant project”, Bromley conceded, and might also require the positioning of a new space station in an area called the L1 Lagrange point, found between Earth and the sun, in order to “redirect packets of dust on to orbits that could provide shade for as long as possible”.
Such an approach would act as a “fine-tuned dimmer switch, leaving our planet untouched”, Bromley said, an advantage over other solar geoengineering proposals that have raised concerns about the environmental impact of spraying reflective particles within the Earth’s atmosphere.
The moon dust would have to be continually propelled into space in order to take the edge off global heating, however, or risk a so-called “termination shock” whereby temporary cooling is abruptly stopped and the world is left to rapidly heat up. Bromley insisted that the research’s sci-fi idea is no substitute for the primary task of cutting planet-heating emissions in the first place.
[…]
Tinkering with the world’s climate, including attempts to reflect sunlight, is a controversial and still relatively fringe response to the climate crisis. It has gained some traction amid repeated warnings that countries are not slashing emissions quickly enough to prevent disaster, however, with the US government launching a research project around the concept last year.
[…]
“The idea to mine the moon or near-Earth asteroids in order to artificially block parts of the sunlight is no solution to the ongoing and intensifying climate crisis,” said Frank Biermann, professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University.“What is needed are massive cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions, which require rapid technological advancement and socioeconomic transitions. Mining the moon is not the answer that we need.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/08/moon-dust-moonshot-geoengineering-climate-crisis
…but back on terra-sorta-firma
…& I don’t know if it’s indicative of some sort of concerning pathology
“When I raised the plans of some of their members in their caucus to cut Social Security … Marjorie Taylor Greene and others stood up and said: ‘Liar, liar,’” Biden said. “Well, guess what? … I [will] remind you that Rick Scott from Florida, the guy who ran a U.S. Senate campaign, has a plan. I got his brochure right here!”
Biden names Republicans seeking changes to Medicare, Social Security [WaPo]
…or just the sort of displacement activity that helps to prevent the above kind of stuff from overwhelming folks
The Republican-dominated Mississippi house of representatives has passed a bill to create a separate, unelected court system in the city of Jackson that would fall outside the purview of the city’s voters, the majority of whom are Black.
The bill, which local leaders have likened to apartheid-era laws and described as unconstitutional, would also expand a separate capitol police force, overseen by state authorities. The force would expand into all of the city’s white majority neighborhoods, according to Mississippi Today. Jackson’s population is over 80% Black.
Speaking after House Bill 1020 passed on Tuesday evening, Jackson’s mayor Chokwe Lumumba branded the proposed law “some of the most oppressive legislation in our city’s history”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/jackson-mississippi-republicans-unelected-court-system
[…]
The bill passed largely along party lines in a 76-38 vote and will now travel to the state senate, where Republicans also hold a significant majority. The passage was preceded by an intense, four-hour floor debate in which members of the state’s Black caucus made impassioned pleas to reject the legislation and compared the bill to the state’s Jim Crow-era constitution of 1890.
[…]
The legislation was proposed by house Republican Trey Lamar, who is white and represents a district in the state’s north-west, which is majority white.
[…]
The new court district would feature two judges directly appointed by Mississippi’s supreme court chief justice, Michael K Randolph, who is white. There would be two prosecutors, appointed by the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, a white Republican. And two public defenders appointed by the state defender’s office.
[…]
The proposed bill is the latest in a line of extreme legislation in the state, which last year introduced a sweeping anti-critical race theory law, which met vocal opposition from the state’s Black caucus.
[…]
In November last year, the city’s water system was taken under federal government oversight after the Environmental Protection Agency found the city in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
…there’s also…well…this kind of nonsense
Watching Sanders toss around those extremely online terms — only months after her party badly underperformed in the midterm elections while campaigning against those very things — vividly demonstrates a problem for the GOP. Republicans are extremely skilled at grabbing attention, leveraging their formidable media apparatus to turn the spotlight on the manufactured controversy of the moment. But these days they are far less good at persuading the broader public.
Given a rare opportunity to communicate a conservative vision to the entire country, Sanders delivered a message that was, as Matthew Sheffield put it, “filled with far-right buzzwords that were likely incomprehensible to most Americans who had bothered to watch.”
Biden, said Sanders, is “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
To be moved by that argument, you’d need to know that “wokeness” refers to a constellation of contested views about race, sex and transgender rights. You’d need to know it’s a ubiquitous right-wing media trope to scoff that liberals can’t define the term “woman.” You’d need to know why this is supposed to be terribly threatening.
[…]
There does seem to be a theory guiding these efforts, one developed during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Pour enough wild accusations and feigned outrage into the discourse and whip the base into a frenzy, and swing voters might develop general unease about the opposition and the country’s direction. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg calls this the right’s “negative sentiment machine.”
[…]
Still, recent focus groups of Florida swing voters found that few could define the term “wokeness,” raising doubts about how important it was to DeSantis’s reelection. And again, similar GOP candidates lost in many places outside Florida.Yet DeSantis’s victory appears to have instilled a touch of hubris among right-wingers about the national potential of his type of cultural politics. On Tuesday night, Sanders seemed deeply in the grip of that hubris.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/08/sarah-huckabee-sanders-sotu-response-biden-woke-ron-desantis/
On Wednesday, Musk’s “Twitter Files” took center stage in a combative Capitol Hill hearing, as GOP leaders attempted to turn Twitter’s decision to briefly block sharing a New York Post story about President Biden’s son into evidence of a broad conspiracy. Conservatives have long argued that Silicon Valley favors Democrats by systematically suppressing right-wing viewpoints on social media. These allegations have evolved in nearly a half-decade of warnings, as politicians in Washington and beyond fixate on the industry’s communications with the FBI and Democratic leaders, seeking to cast the opposing party as against free speech.
“Twitter … was a private company that the federal government used to do what it cannot: limit the constitutional free exercise of speech,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, flanked by a poster displaying the New York Post story. He added that the committee now knows all of this “because of Elon Musk,” joining a chorus of Republicans praising the mercurial billionaire throughout the hearing.
The testimony of former Twitter executives repeatedly contradicted these accusations. Still, Republicans plowed ahead with unsubstantial allegations of collusion between government officials and the company’s old regime. After one former Twitter executive testified that most of his interactions with the FBI were about foreign interference, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, shot back: “I think you guys got played.”
…there’s a non-zero chance they’re playing themselves…but they do appear to be working hard at it
But the hearing was just the latest effort to advance an increasingly popular Republican narrative that Democrats colluded with social media companies. House Republicans have formed a panel to probe perceived government abuses against conservatives, including allegations of social media bias. Meanwhile, two Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri have filed a lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration is circumventing the First Amendment to censor social media.
Taken collectively, these actions represent the next phase of a GOP strategy, which contributed to the distrust among some conservatives that seeded the “big lie,” the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The early warnings that liberal employees inside tech companies tilt the playing field in favor of Democrats have ballooned into accusations that government officials actively collude with the platforms to influence public discourse.
…or at any rate the part that…if you were to think of “the base” as a contingent of carbon-based analogue bots…would be the command & control servers
Top Republican leaders have made alleged tech censorship one of their first priorities in the House, scheduling hearings and demanding reams of documents in a multipronged pressure campaign.
In January, Comer, along with House Energy Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Jordan, introduced a bill called the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act, which would penalize federal employees if they are found to be asking social media companies to take down posts. The House Judiciary Committee has formed a special subcommittee focused on the “weaponization of the federal government,” designed in part to examine the interactions between the Biden administration and major tech companies.
[…]
Though stories with a conservative slant regularly outperform those from moderate or liberal-leaning outlets, tensions escalated under Trump’s tenure. As tech companies scrambled to shore up defenses against misinformation in the wake of Russian influence operations in the 2016 election, they created policy on the fly for Trump’s often false and racist tweets. Under political pressure, Facebook tilted to the right in policies, personnel and public gestures, according to a Post investigation.
…&…of course…then there’s twitter
Roth said the release of the Twitter Files, which included his name along with those of other decision makers at the company, had “very real consequences” for his safety. “This lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and antisemitic attacks against me … of which Twitter has removed vanishingly little. And following the Daily Mail’s decision to publish where I live. I had to leave my home and sell it.”
Roth noted he was not the only one affected, saying lower-level Twitter staff around the world, including the Philippines, “had their families threatened and experienced harm equal to or greater than what I’ve experienced”.
“Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech,” he concluded.
…& those hearings
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat representing the District of Columbia, said Roth’s testimony showed the dangers of “legitimizing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the deep state, big tech and government and government censorship for political gain”.
Her point was underscored when the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who was temporarily banned from Twitter for sharing Covid-19 misinformation, used her questioning period to attack Roth, doubling down on unfounded and homophobic conspiracy theories.
“I’m so glad you’ve lost your jobs,” she said. “I am so glad Elon Musk bought Twitter.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/08/twitter-congress-hearing-homophobic-antisemitic-abuse-hunter-biden-elon-musk
From the early days of his deal to buy Twitter, Musk has signaled that he shares Republican concerns that tech companies are suppressing their views. Before closing the deal, he boosted criticism of Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, who was involved in politically controversial content-moderation decisions, including the decision to ban Trump. Republicans have summoned Gadde to testify at Wednesday’s hearing.
Since the deal closed, House Republicans have pressed Musk to hand over records related to Twitter’s handling of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden. In December, a group of handpicked journalists tweeted screenshots of internal company documents dubbed the Twitter Files, and GOP policymakers immediately teased congressional action.
[…]
“Many social media platforms are under the control of people who are hostile to the fundamental American principles of free speech,” Comer said. “Twitter was once one of these platforms, until Elon Musk purchased the company a few months ago.”Some Republicans took a hostile tone toward the Twitter leaders during their time in front of the cameras. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said she was happy that they lost their jobs, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) referred to former executives as “fascist Twitter 1.0.”
…so, with elon in charge…that’d be fascist twitter 2.0, I guess…or probably 2.4.17 or something by now…but more of that anon*…the court case thing is also an absolute crock, by the way…even the 5th circuit had to demand a do-over from a lower court that failed to give them any wiggle room on its lack of merit or substance
“This case is about the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said.
Bailey’s office has promoted emails between the White House and Facebook, in which a White House official flags posts related to coronavirus vaccinations that he finds concerning. In one message, the official says that “the top post about vaccines today is Tucker Carlson saying they don’t work.” Biden has previously called on social media companies to address coronavirus misinformation.
…there are some seriously möbian loops of circular logic at work here…real wheels-within-wheels windmills of the mind shit
“God bless Elon Musk,” said Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.). “It was Elon Musk that revealed data that uncovered a disturbing cabal.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/08/house-republicans-twitter-files-collusion/
…in the parlance of our times…that ain’t the flex you think it is, pete
“I don’t know precisely how we are going to solve the problem of private social media platforms being used for the organization of political coups and incitement of violent insurrections. But this is a grave problem confronting democracy in America and all over the world, not a phony, silly, concocted partisan issue,” ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said.
Other Democrats expressed irritation about the hearing being held at all.
“We’re wasting our time here bullying former Twitter employees,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said. “It’s calling the refs, so that way in the future when they want disinformation to be put on the internet, social media companies will be scared to call them out down the road.”
[…]
Roth said Twitter “explicitly separated” teams that interacted with campaigns from teams like his, which were responsible for content moderation.Roth said he would not agree with the characterization of Twitter removing tweets at the “behest of” the Biden campaign. Tweets could be reported to Twitter and then independently evaluated, he said.
In contrast, when asked by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) if former President Trump made a request to remove a 2019 tweet by model Chrissy Teigen that criticized the then-president, a former member of Twitter’s safety policy team, Anika Collier Navaroli, said he did.
[…]
Navaroli said she was not responsible for receiving such government requests in her role, but her supervisors let her know such a request was made from the White House to evaluate the tweet.“It wasn’t Joe Biden about his son’s laptop, it was Donald Trump because he didn’t like what Chrissy Teigen had to say about him. Is that correct?” Connolly asked.
“Yes, that is correct,” she said.
[…]
Greene used her time to berate Twitter employees present, but she did not ask them a single question.
…tell me you aren’t interested in answers without telling me you aren’t interested in answers
“Despite all their mentioning of the First Amendment, they have not even made any sort of legal or legislative argument as to what the tie here is behind a personal grievance,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Hill.
“The Republican side is not even making any sort of request, no matter how partisan it is, about what the course of action, what we’re even doing here is. Why is the Oversight Committee even relevant to Twitter’s content moderation policies?” she said.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3849864-dems-blast-gop-for-waste-of-time-hearing-over-twitter-files/
…it’s positively fractal the way that the detail of the thing is inimical to the whole narrative they’re desperately trying to shill
Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mounts.
Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.
[…]
What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”
[…]
In an email, [Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth] argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist versus postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey-based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.
Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”
[…]
In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer, significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:
One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.
Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.
The first is known as the “Braley intervention,” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”
The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/opinion/political-hatred-negative-partisanship.html
…& I am morbidly fascinated by the prospect of finding out what it looks like when we achieve a tipping point of people noticing how dead the horse they keep flogging has always been
Instead, former Twitter officials revealed on Wednesday that former President Donald Trump not only received preferential treatment for years, but he also directly requested the site remove tweets that he didn’t like. At the same time, they also noted that President Joe Biden hadn’t contacted Twitter to take down any tweets or censor content.
One tweet Trump especially wanted to be deleted: Supermodel and TV star Chrissy Teigen calling him a “pussy ass bitch” in 2019.
…yup…while MTG was busy recording her campaign fodder twitter-banned-me b-roll…this little number made it into the official record
Roth told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that the FBI sending over review requests of certain content may not have been a valuable use of the bureau’s resources and time, but it still didn’t represent any First Amendment violations. And even though Jordan disagreed, he also acknowledged that Twitter “isn’t bound by the First Amendment” because it’s a private company.
“My, my, my—what happens when you hold a hearing, and you can’t prove your point?” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) snarked in response to Jordan.
The Virginia lawmaker then brought up a 2020 tweet in which Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” or “close” Twitter “down” in retaliation for allegedly “silenc[ing] conservatives.” He then turned to Navaroli to ask about a 2019 Trump tweet heckling Teigen and her husband John Legend, both outspoken critics of the former president.
[…]
Navaroli confirmed that after Trump blasting the couple via tweet, he immediately contacted the social-media giant to demand Teigen’s tweet calling him a “pussy ass bitch” be deleted from the site.“What I was privy to was my supervisors letting us know that we had received something along those lines, or something of a request,” Navoroli replied. “In that instance, I do remember hearing that we had received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement towards the president.”
…the devil, as they say, is in the details
In a separate exchange with Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL), Navaroli actually quoted Teigen’s tweet before reiterating that the ex-president had pushed Twitter to remove it from the site. “This fell under the policy for abusive behaviors, and we evaluated it under our ‘insults’ policy,” she stated. “At that time, up to three insults were allowed. It was our job to determine how many insults were included within that phrase.”
…three…it’s the magic number…even taking each world to count as its own insult you’d have to admit that the whole added up to more than the sum of its parts in order to argue she was over the line…which…in a time of finding your laughs were you can…I’ll admit to being the stuff of potential chuckles
As the hearing was still in session, Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s demand to take down Teigen’s tweet was “hardly an isolated incident.” According to former Trump officials and Twitter staffers, prominent Republicans and the ex-president routinely asked the company to remove posts—the same behavior they’re now insisting shows Democrats and Twitter conspired to silence conservatives and restrict their free speech.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-twitter-officials-confirm-to-congress-that-trump-not-biden-tried-to-censor-tweets
…& while we’re on a bot-adjacent subject
ChatGPT is just the latest technology to fuel worries that it will wipe out the jobs of millions of workers, whether advertising copywriters, Wall Street traders, salespeople, writers of basic computer code or journalists.
But while many workforce experts say the fears that ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will cause unemployment to skyrocket are overblown, they point to another fear about AI: that it will widen the US’s already huge income and wealth inequality by creating a new wave of billionaire tech barons at the same time that it pushes many workers out of better paid jobs.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/08/ai-chatgpt-jobs-economy-inequality
…& speaking of not-so-isolated incidents
“This is just wild,” said Leon Derczynski, a professor of computer science at the IT University of Copenhagen, who specializes in online harm. “Objectification of women seems deeply embedded in the system.”
One social media company said they do not design their systems to create or reinforce biases and classifiers are not perfect.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/08/biased-ai-algorithms-racy-women-bodies
The maker of the Windows operating system is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc’s Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.
Now, Microsoft is rolling out an intelligent chatbot to live alongside Bing’s search results, putting AI that can summarize web pages, synthesize disparate sources, even compose emails and translate them into more consumers’ hands. Microsoft expects every percentage point of share it gains will bring in another $2 billion in search advertising revenue.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/microsoft-infuse-software-ai-google-rivalry-heats-up
[…]
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters in a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The US government’s new mobile app for migrants to apply for asylum at the US-Mexico border is blocking many Black people from being able to file their claims because of facial recognition bias in the tech, immigration advocates say.
Non-profits that assist Black asylum seekers are finding that the app, CBP One, is failing to register many people with darker skin tones, effectively barring them from their right to request entry into the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/08/us-immigration-cbp-one-app-facial-recognition-bias
Google’s riposte to ChatGPT has got off to an embarrassing start after its new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot gave a wrong answer in a promotional video, as investors wiped more than $100bn (£82bn) off the value of the search engine’s parent company, Alphabet.
The sell-off on Wednesday came amid investor fears that Microsoft, which is deploying an ChatGPT-powered version of its Bing search engine, will damage Google’s business. Alphabet stock slid by 9% during regular trading in the US but was flat after hours.
Bard is based on a so-called large language AI model, a type of neural network, which mimics the underlying architecture of the brain in computer form. It is fed vast amounts of text from the internet in a process that teaches it how to generate responses to text-based prompts. However, this can also lead to the chatbot repeating errors from the information that it absorbs.
[…]
“People are starting to question: is Microsoft going to be a formidable competitor now against Google’s really bread-and-butter business?” said King Lip, the chief strategist at BakerAvenue Wealth Management, which owns Alphabet and Microsoft shares.Lip cautioned that concerns about Alphabet may be overblown, saying: “I think still Bing is a far, far cry away from Google’s search capabilities.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/09/google-ai-chatbot-bard-error-sends-shares-plummeting-in-battle-with-microsoft
The new Bing, which is available only to a small group of testers now and will become more widely available soon, looks like a hybrid of a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot. Type in a prompt — say, “Write me a menu for a vegetarian dinner party” — and the left side of your screen fills up with the standard ads and links to recipe websites. On the right side, Bing’s A.I. engine starts typing out a response in full sentences, often annotated with links to the websites it’s retrieving information from.
To ask a follow-up question or make a more detailed request — for example, “Write a grocery list for that menu, sorted by aisle, with amounts needed to make enough food for eight people” — you can open up a chat window and type it. (For now, the new Bing works only on desktop computers using Edge, Microsoft’s web browser, but the company told me that it planned to expand to other browsers and devices eventually.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/microsoft-bing-openai-artificial-intelligence.html
…& this stuff might be a good idea…also eventually…but…leaving aside the baking in of bias & other corollaries of the GI:GO principle…you’d think rushing things into public release might at least cause some of these galaxy-brained prophets of the singularity to consider the caveat emptor of it all
…particularly when they actively make a song & dance about it
[…remember that * from earlier?]
…ladies & gentlemen…if you had any remaining doubts about the parallels between fascist twitter V. 2.0.who-knows-how-any-of-this-works & a certain thiel-funded process of herbification…I humbly suggest you may have no further need of them?
Maybe quit asking your “loved ones” for money, Peter.
…how can I put this delicately…some people find that their… circumstances…make it difficult for them to separate their physical relationships from a transactional paradigm?
…I guess what I’m saying is some people may not be familiar with…say…principles associated with certain sorts of people
…but frequently have a more-than-passing-familiarity with what some style the oldest profession…from which they could learn a thing or two, come to that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Graham_(Seattle_madame)
https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2022/08/lou-graham-brothel-madam-seattle-history-underground-tour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Girls
…& that’s just one town…but for whatever reason some people only think they know the words…possibly because they’re not paying attention?
So now Chrissy Tiegen’s tweet about Trump being a “pussy ass bitch” is part of the Congressional Record. The very tweet Trump wanted suppressed is now immortalized so future generations can marvel at his fine “presidential” legacy.
I’m trying to think of anything stupider than a House Republican.
…when I was bemoaning the way that the strategy of “it goes to 11” is a really poor fit for the way any of this ought to work in yesterday’s comments I hadn’t read the stuff I stitched this together out of…so I’ve honestly spent at least a whole cup of coffee’s worth of time this morning wondering if I’m adrift on some sort of confirmation bias rollercoaster
…truly it has to be the most strident example of the streisand effect to date?
Here’s a valuable piece of journalistic research undertaken by Kurt Andersen:
https://gen.medium.com/a-brief-history-of-fuck-in-the-new-york-times-993d08c31344
I had heard that the first time it appeared was when the Times decided to publish the Starr Report in full, but Andersen reveals that in fact it had appeared twice before, in book reviews.
…this seemed obligatory
…but if you’ve watched it too many times…there’s always this?
[ETA …bonus points for use of the term expletive-infixation…speaking cor-fucking-rectly is important, people]
I had no idea that the grammar term “infixation” existed. So the next time the elderly nun says to you, “Absofuckinglutely!” she is deploying an infixaton.
…on a mildly tangential note vis à vis those GOP congress-critters & the cars they’re chasing…this would be another round of bias confirmative stuff I can’t fault the reasoning of
…I guess it makes sense that if you can persuade people that there’s-absolutely-more-than-enough-here-to-charge-the-guy-but means “total exoneration” then passing off complete abnegation of responsibility for absolution must not seem like too much of a stretch
…but you’d think the sheer frequency at which these runaway trainwrecks of rhetoric jump the tracks anytime they make contact with reality would…I dunno…reduce passenger numbers?
Case in point: Bobo doesn’t understand calendars or remember who was President in 2020.
If you need a laugh, scroll through the responses.
…I do…& I thank you
King Lip is an excellent name. In a quest to find out more, I made a typo in the Google search bar and received lots of links to lip-related beauty products. He should market his own line of fillers designed especially for men. He sounds like a smart guy. Maybe he’s already thought of this.
https://kinglip.com/
…ummm…it might just be me…most likely in account of decades of overconsumption of dubious sci fi that ticks the “sounds like an interesting premise” box…in which case feel free to ignore me
…but…that moonshot idea involving shot-gunning millions of tons of the moon to make it harder to generate solar power?
…I know that isn’t the point…but…I’m finding myself wondering if any of the people behind it might have decided that one of their starting premises ought to be that we’re not going to fix shit & sea-levels are going to get uncomfortably high…because…well
…&…considering that three body problems are tricky
https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
…but we sort of know the rules
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides02_cause.html
…hypothetically…if you displaced enough of the moon’s mass…you’d ultimately lower the tideline
…pretty sure if you accept the idea that doing so might happen sooner than knocking it off with the fossil fuel bonanza then we’re all so far beyond fucked we’d be needing a new word for it…but…they’re already running with trying to make mr burns the good guy?
Sad news! Burt Bacharach has died, aged 94. According to wiki his “years active” were 1950–2023. So working right up to the end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/arts/music/burt-bacharach-dead.html
No doubt the secret to his long and productive life was a steady diet of Martini & Rossi on the rocks.
I have a project for @Farscythe
https://electrek.co/2023/02/09/this-diy-kit-lets-you-build-your-own-street-legal-tiniest-car-in-the-world/
Hahahahahaha
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/08/tech/google-ai-bard-demo-error/index.html
WTF?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/09/missouri-rejects-ban-children-carrying-guns-in-public
…can’t remember if it was in the piece I quoted but I think I saw somewhere the mistake about the webb telescope thing resulted in a $100billion dip in the alphabet market cap
…while we’re out here winning stupid prizes with artificial intelligence?
ha! a peel p50…id enjoy putting it together thats for sure
i’d have to get the gas powered one tho….especially if its a two stroke….i’d drive it around the office and gas everyone….probably laughing maniacally
crunch time doesnt make me like the office wonks better…
I, too, would very much like to have my own Mr. Bean car.
It’s a tad pricey for what you get. In Florida it’s pretty much legal to drive golf carts in the road. You can get one for a lot less than $12K.
That’s not even considering electric bikes and scooters. Those won’t keep out the weather, but most days around here that’s not too big an issue for a commute to work. Now, the afternoons are a bit more wet.
Oh that was never going to pass in Missouri.
Heaven forbid we expect minors to have supervision or want a law against random kids having guns in public.
That bit about polarization interests me, because it seems to include a sense of finally getting up the nerve to peek under the bed to look for a monster that may not even exist, after all. With the obvious risk that they may look under the bed and see the shadow of a teddy bear and decide there is a real bear.
Scholars and the press to a large extent have created “Polarization” as a boogie man, rather than a side effect of a completely different phenomenon. North Korea has almost zero polarization, after all.
So we keep getting hand wringing about two sides never talking to one another, and futile attempts to “fix” polarization by stupid appeals to first principles of respect and tolerance, followed by counterproductive seething at good actors.
In little ways, Alia Braley’s paper is a little step in the right direction. She correctly notes that you should identify bad actors and link them to specific harms.
But she is largely stuck in a dumb vision of equal blame. She describes the process of democratic collapse as a situation where two sides engage in cyclical attacks on democracy, when the reality in multiple countries is simply one side gains 51% and then crushes the other.
She correctly notes that in the US the Democrats have not matched the GOP’s fever, but then argues without evidence that they will because… well, that’s her theory. And then she concludes that Democrats can allay Republican fears by backing down from advancing democracy without considering whether Republican fears are real or just expression of power, and fails to account for the fact that the Democratic Party’s current backing for democracy is still not changing GOP attitudes.
It’s a weirdly disconnected paper that tries to address the real world with only the briefest of glimpses under the covers.
…wittgenstein famously “concluded” (in a very specific sense) that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
…& whether as “affective polarization” or by any other name it certainly seems like with the sheer numbers of voters persuaded by the pavlovian reinforcement required to pull off the turkeys-voting-for-christmas miracle of republican electoral transubstantiation it’s somewhat hard to avoid the functionally unhelpful conclusion that…given this stuff is more or less literally plain as day…but instead the truth that seems self-evident is that if manifest reality is somehow insufficient to dissuade them from their misplaced faith & kneejerk responses then there has to be a willful component to the ignorance…like the part of that beau-of-the-fifth-column clip that talks about “the cruelty is the point”…which makes it hard not to jump straight to “fuck-those-fucks-that-don’t-seem-to-give-a-fuck-about-how-this-fucking-works”
…most of us can think of times when we’ve tried & failed to take the hot air out of those sails by dint of applied logic, evidence & sound reasoning…& it’s both frustrating & a legit problem that for the most part it’s a waste of effort when we have such a steep hill to climb that we don’t have any of that to spare if we’re going to get the job done
…so the part of all the papers that collation from the times drew on that seemed particularly salient to me was the bit from the “megastudy” that found “several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions”
…a lot of those folks aren’t going to pin their ears back & listen up to all the hows & whys of just how entirely wrong-headed they’ve let themselves get to be…but it turns out that maybe you can paint them a picture…& they supposedly run about a thousand words a pop…so with democracy in the balance that seems like a steal at the price if it gets the job done…&…apparently…a pretty straightforward montage is a viable proposition
“a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”
…in terms of whatever-gets-the-job-done…it’s certainly something to think about?
P.S.
…there’s a sort-of-crib-sheet-type-thing, if anyone’s interested
https://www.strengtheningdemocracychallenge.org/winning-interventions
OMG.
One of their top scoring studies, “Reducing Political Polarization by Correcting Erroneous Meta-Perceptions” claims that Democratic fears of GOP support for political violence are exxagerated and false.
Except it does so based on an October 2020 poll in which Democrats were asked to judge how likely Republicans were to support violence, and compared that number to the percent of Republicans who stated they did in that poll.
Democrats estimated GOP support for violence at 35.5%, which the study claims is a 245% overestimate. The number of Republicans willing to say they supported political violence was only 10.3%.
A poll in October 2020. You can see where this is going.
Fast forward just three months, Trump launches an armed mob to overturn an election, and today over 60% of Republicans call it a “legitimate protest.”
Democrats didn’t wildly overestimate GOP support for violence, they underestimated it by an extremely large margin.
The fundamental flaw of this study is that it takes Republican statements at face value. That’s a hole you can drive a truck through. Twenty trucks side by side! And yet the authors of this study didn’t catch on.
Political science has known for decades that racist people wildly underreport their own support for racism. And yet these authors take it at face value that Republicans are honest when they say they don’t support political violence, even in the face of clear evidence that they do.
If anyone wonders how AI programmed by supposedly neutral coders can be incredibly biased, look at how these scholars and you can see how easily crappy thinking gets built in from the very beginning.
…laudable as they sound in terms of scientific principles the flaws in the implementation of a great deal of the underlying efforts are sadly legion from hypothesis to methodology & all the way down the line to peer review…arguably to some extent it’s the nature of the beast that the process of scientific enquiry is one of trial & error that’s heavy on the error
…& on the one hand some of the mistakes work out unreasonably well…like penicillin…though on the other the fruit of the poisonous pharmaceutical tree alone has a fairly disastrous tab to answer for…so it’s certainly a massive problem that for a variety of reasons even stuff that sails through peer review (which is a whole other can of none-too-pleasant worms in its own right) is often shown to be barely worth the paper it’s printed on as/when attempts are made to replicate it for purposes of corroboration
…in fairness to the academics, though…they generally think they’re speaking in a context where there’s a wide-ranging & generally well-understood subtext of caveats & qualifications that sit between the particulars of a study & the sort of “this means X” cliff notes that accompany speculative extrapolations…particularly in the popular press…so the claims they think they can demonstrate a foundation for are often a lot more constrained than they’re made out to be & the implied confidence in those claims on the basis of the temerity required to publish them is…tricky to quantify…you may publish & be damned but if you don’t publish then the damnation of your academic career is pretty much a foregone conclusion…& I imagine if you crunch the numbers you’d probably find that the ratio of active insurrectionists to republican voters is considerably slimmer than, say, the ratio of republican voters to people who’d conflate a belief that demonstrations on the street in the wake of george floyd’s death ought to be called riots & considered to be examples of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends…& therefore consider themselves entitled to claim that “the other side” are the ones who pose that threat…which is arguably a whole different order of compound error
…that said…I did have a brief look at some of the “interventions” listed here…& there’s one called “epistemic rescue” that’s sort of a riff on a very simplified instance of a kind of peer review…you take a quiz…it’s 12 questions long…before you take it you get assigned a “peer” with the opposite party affiliation to your own (the way they’re set up you can run through as the (D) or the (R) part in the routine) about whom you’re given some rudimentary information…then for each of the dozen questions you pick an answer, award it a % as to your confidence in it…then you get to see what theirs was (with the corresponding % score) before selecting your scored answer with it’s +2nd-opinion-adjusted level of confidence
…at the end you get told the score you probably kept track of & didn’t need to be told…but after that you get the one you might not have paid as much attention to, which is what you would have scored had you not been able to gauge your answers against those of your opposite number…when I ran through it I dropped a point…but absent the option to look over someone else’s homework I would have been down more like five…granted I might have been able to score better if I’d paid more than cursory attention, given things a second thought or bothered to look anything up…but as exercises go…I think the occasional gentle reminder that people we’d generally be inclined to disagree with are sometimes able to teach us a thing or two about a thing or two might be at least related to the sort of spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down…& I have to believe there’s some utility in that?
I think one of the (numerous) fundamental flaws of these fake centrist bits — that Braley paper is from Yascha Mounk’s home turf — is that they always act as though liberal efforts somehow can exist in isolation from right wing counter programming.
The fake centrists moan and groan when liberals don’t follow their advice in messaging to the right, but never imagine the degree to which the right has gamed out how to insulate themselves from the kinds of persuasion the fake centrists propose.
Basically, they all stand on the objectively false assumption that the modern right wants to be persuaded and doesn’t want to be irrational. They want to handwave away the existence of the Murdochs, Kochs, and GOP, and pretend there’s some kind of pristine environment for discussion, free from the ever circling vultures.
It’s why their efforts at analysis fall apart with the slightest examination. You have to admit there are vultures.
…it always pays to examine your assumptions when assessing how much you can hang on your conclusions
…a lot of economic theory is predicated on the concept of the “rational actor”…pretty much in open defiance of the preponderance of human history behaviorally-speaking…by way of a for-instance
…but it’s pretty rare for people not to be aiming to have other people conclude that they aren’t the one being unreasonable & therefore it’s only rational to take their side of whatever they’re trying to argue…arguably most of all when they do it for a living…which both politicians & journalists to a greater or a lesser extent pretty much all do?
…sort of a serious question with a side of comedy…but how many times do you think that SOTU bait&switch routine with the social security stuff would work on the against-you-on-principle caucus?
…there’s nothing like a good “buck it” list
[…aside from the part about hilary fundraising that works alarmingly well for a seven year old speech?]
James O’Keefe is “on leave” from the mess he founded.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/james-okeefe-project-veritas-paid-leave.html
There’s a strong undercurrent in reporting concerning dissatisfaction with his management, but none of it sounds all that different from plenty of skeezy organizations which goes on for years without raising hackles among funders, even though it should. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has more to do with unrelated legal problems briefly mentioned in the article.
So… the Nets became the ego filled clusterfuck everyone but the NYC sprats media imagined it would be?
I find Durant and Irving’s responses to being traded wildly lacking self awareness. They chose to play together in Brooklyn, chose their coach, fired their coach, chose their next coach, one of them chose to only play away games, etc, etc, yet both are acting like they were being held hostage by a team they were forced to play for. Then again, that has always kind of been their style. Great talents, wild off court.
I am just very happy that the Lakers did not get Irving, he will be the destruction of Dallas and the reason Luka demands a trade in a year or so.
…à propos of nothing in particular
Every reporter and editor who has swallowed the PR that someone is a genius should be forced to cover middle school sports until they get better perspective on how rare it is for someone to truly stand out.
…that might fall foul of the bar against cruel & unusual punishment
…but I can see how it might be tempting?