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Links and Notes for December 1st, 2023

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#climate">Climate Change</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h>Climate Change</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/joe-biden-administration-carbon-reduction-global-climate-cop28/" source="Jacobin" author="Rishika Pardikar">The Biden Administration Is Undermining Global Carbon-Reduction Efforts</a> <bq>[...] undermining efforts to set stringent standards for a new global carbon market that would allow polluters to help fund carbon-reduction efforts to compensate for their emissions.</bq> <iq>Allow them to help fund</iq>? That's the stringent version? <bq>[...] the United States is backing a largely unregulated, voluntary system of trading emission offsets, even though such voluntary schemes have been plagued by questionable climate benefits [...]</bq> <iq>Questionable climate benefits?</iq> That's a ludicrously generous way of putting it. It obscures the fact that they tend to lead to increased carbon output! <bq>[...] the Biden administration is hoping private sector climate solutions and corporate responsibility will help gloss over the fact that the country is continuing to break records for fossil fuel production and is the biggest laggard in terms of paying its fair share of finance for the emissions it has wrought on the world.</bq> <bq>Neither market is ideally regulated at present (concerns have been raised, for example, about the efficacy of California’s program ). One overarching worry is that carbon credits are often made through compensatory carbon-sink projects like reforestation projects that can rob agency from the people who live there.</bq> Also, they're often bullshit. The largest company in that sector was revealed a few years ago to have been selling the same trees as carbon credits to multiple customers. Because of course they did. It's an intangible asset that the customer doesn't even want to buy. No incentive anywhere not to cheat. Win-win for the important players. The only loser is the climate and, in the short term, the poors, and nobody gives a shit about either the climate or the poors. <bq>A recent investigation by the Centre for Science and Environment found that voluntary markets in India failed on two counts: Emission reduction outcomes were either inflated or almost nonexistent and revenue from the sale of carbon credits wasn’t shared with local communities. Researchers also found that many of the carbon-offset projects lacked transparency, and that some community members who were involved in these projects had no clue what carbon credits were.</bq> 100% as expected. <bq>Reporting has found that the voluntary market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that didn’t exist. Meanwhile, private demand for these voluntary credits has declined, and the credit price has plummeted</bq> <bq>Despite its shortcomings, the unregulated carbon market boomed to a value of $2 billion per year in 2021.</bq> <iq>Boomed?</iq> That's like one Avatar movie. <bq>In the last few months, US climate envoy John Kerry, who will be attending the Dubai summit, has said climate action “takes trillions and no government that I know of is ready to put trillions into this on an annual basis.” (Never mind that billions in US public funding has gone to support foreign military aid in Ukraine alone, or that the effects of climate inaction could cost trillions of dollars per year.)</bq> We do not have the mechanisms for action. It's like pygmies trying to stop a flood. <bq>The voluntary market is “unregulated, fraudulent, and open to ebbs and flows,” said Goswami at the Centre for Science and Environment. “Committing [to] this market as the tool for [an] energy transition, which requires investment in public goods like renewable energy and transmission infrastructure in developing countries, is like leaving the clean-energy future of the Global South to the whims of an unreliable market.” Goswami added, “The U.S. cannot let the private sector dictate the scrutiny and oversight in these markets — it must be determined by the multilateral process [at climate negotiations like COP28].”</bq> Santa's not bringing that. Empire don't wanna and you can't make it. It has no notion of global action to prevent local damage. So carbon credits won't wotk, and that's all without the author noting that carbon credits are already a pathetic, nearly useless fallback from real measures. It's a band-aid on a sucking shrapnel wound. And the band-aid doesn't actually exist. Sounds good. I wonder how Mo Gawdat would spin this positively, you know, as a win for humanity? <hr> <a href="https://goodauthority.org/news/how-will-the-world-pay-for-the-green-transition/" source="Good Authority" author="Henry Farrell">How will the world pay for the green transition?</a> <bq>The E.U.’s Juncker Plan back in 2015 pretended that a little government spending will leverage private sector investment, but two-thirds of what we need to do in climate change – e.g., building seawalls – has no obvious profit model. If you won’t issue long-term debt because it violates your fiscal rules, you’re saying that it’s the rules that are in charge and not the elected politicians. It’s no wonder that people lose faith in democracy.</bq> <bq>[...] worried about debt when it’s presented, rightly, as trade-offs. When people are asked if we should cut spending on health care to reduce the national debt, they don’t want it. People really want proper investment after a decade of austerity thinking, and there are plenty of things that could be taxed properly – self-employment, the incomes and assets of the super-rich, international corporations – to pay for it.</bq> <bq>If the Democrats win next time around, they can keep on putting facts on the ground – building battery factories and associated technology plants in states like Georgia and turning them blue, or breaking off part of the Texas vote with benefits and infrastructure for wind power. But it’s enormously fragile. If Trump and the Republicans win, it may be the end of the green transition in the U.S. I don’t think people have woken up to that yet.</bq> You mean the end of the half-hearted transition that is far too little far too late? C'mon. This "Democrats good, Republicans bad" fairy tale is lining you up for more disappointment and wasted years. <bq>There’s a lot happening anyway: Microsoft putting up a $100 million prize for molten salt nuclear power at scale; firms using super deep boring technology in old coal mines to produce superheated steam driving turbines. China’s installing more solar this year than the rest of the world. India is addressing its neuralgia about 1991, when they nearly ran out of currency for imports because they didn’t have oil in part through decarbonization. There are microgrids all over the place getting electricity to villages that never had it. Indonesia is undergoing the same transition.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/mouin-rabbani-the-hamas-isis-line" source="SubStack" author="Mouin Rabbani">The “Hamas-ISIS" line has become untenable</a> <bq>[...] no civilian deserves to be held captive unless convicted of a specific crime by legitimate authority, yet the contrast between the testimonies of released Israeli and Palestinian civilian captives is enormous. Released Palestinian women and children speak of constant physical and verbal abuse, particularly since 7 October; all manner of deprivation; and an escalation of abuse once it became apparent they would be released.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/born-again-communists" source="SubStack" author="Evgenia Kovda">Born Again Communist</a> <bq>These chats have been draining and exasperating. But they also given me insight into the people who have been turned by this attack —people in the diaspora who have had their world turned upside down, despite never really caring or thinking about Israel before. It’s as if they were sleeper agents that got activated in Israel’s time of need.</bq> <bq>For them waking up to the news of “Hamas massacring Jews” — which I always try to correct by reminding them it was “Israelis” and not just “Jews” — was a sign to them that hatred of Jews is real and eternal and that it is on the rise. This act of Hamas violence was ground zero for them. It triggered something deep in their subconscious. It wasn’t something that could be contextualized or understood as part of a larger political and historical process — a process in which Israel has played a dominant role. No, to them this was Jew Hate and nothing else. As for criticism of Zionism? They get whipped up into a frenzy if I bring up the fact that anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism.</bq> This absolutely seems like what happened to Greenfield on Simple Justice. <bq>And Israel’s indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza and the growing number of mass graves and people buried under the rubble? To them these are side effects of the inevitable response to the attacks. Unfortunate but still justified — because “Hamas started this war.” Again, there is no context. Everything would have been fine if October 7th didn’t happen. The status quo that existed before in Gaza — the occupation, the embargo, the horrible conditions, the Israeli attacks — all that is not part of the picture for them. Hamas is itself to blame for this unprecedented Palestinian death toll. Israel is just defending itself. That’s it.</bq> <bq>[...] most of them have never experienced real antisemitism and discrimination — let alone life in a ghetto or concentration camp. Antisemitism is abstract to them and yet it’s also the most powerful part of their Jewish identity. So they are easily pushed into fantasy land, fearing that any support for Palestinians rights and any talk about Israel’s occupation following the Hamas attack is coded antisemitism, and that something horrible will happen unless Jews don’t get together and “stand with Israel.”</bq> <bq>The “Zionist outsider” rhetoric is particularly delusional when artists — even really successful ones like Ai WeiWei — have been getting cancelled or threatened by their dealers and wealthy clients for even the most moderate criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza. It’s pretty clear that people who support Zionism have all the power in the art world. If anything, being a zionist can help your career, not make you an outsider. But she’s completely blind to that.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/28/patrick-lawrence-medias-fatal-compromises/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Media’s Fatal Compromises</a> <bq>We are now a dreadful step on from embedding, it seems. It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses.</bq> <bq>A photojournalist named Zach D. Roberts gets my award for the pithiest summation of this daily travesty. “What CNN is doing here is creating ad b-roll [supplementary video footage] for the IDF,” Roberts said. “It’s nothing resembling news and the CNN employees that participated in it aren’t anything resembling journalists.”</bq> <bq>The New York Times sent two correspondents and a photographer into Al–Shifa Hospital earlier this month and had the integrity to acknowledge they were escorted by the IDF and to report that a hole in the ground the diameter of a manhole cover did not look much like a Hamas command center.</bq> <bq>Look at the circus all around us now. Anti–Semitism can mean anything you want it to mean. Ditto anti–Zionism. Anti–Israel can mean anti–Semitic, Hamas can be cast as a terrorist organization, a real-time genocide can be marked down as self-defense. The Times invites us, in Sunday’s editions, to wring our hands as we search for “a moral center in this era of war.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/27/a-new-mood-in-the-world-will-put-an-end-to-the-global-monroe-doctrine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad ">A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine</a> <bq>In addition to the military coup, the US has also developed a series of tactics to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty, such as information warfare, lawfare, diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference. This hybrid war strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example, against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’ measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In Brazil, the US worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.</bq> <bq>Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the US government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/mouin-rabbani-israel-has-lost-the" source="SubStack" author="Mouin Rabbani">Israel has lost the plot</a> <bq>A significantly degraded organization would not have been able to uniformly and simultaneously cease firing throughout the Gaza Strip at the very moment a truce went into effect. Or to continue firing coordinated rocket barrages until moments before. Or to record, edit, and centrally broadcast video footage of its military operations from multiple locations on a nearly daily basis. Or collect and deliver captives from multiple locations, to multiple locations, during the truce – including deliberately choosing a location in central Gaza City that the Israeli military claimed is under its control.</bq> <bq>The most important functions of any military organization – command and control, communications, logistics, reconnaissance, PR, and last but not least the ability and will to fight, appear intact and at best marginally affected. As pointed out previously, Israel has killed more UN staff than Hamas commanders. The same in fact holds true for journalists and medical personnel. And the Israeli military has yet to unearth a fraction of the tunnels found in Hagari memes.</bq> <bq>The Israeli military is admittedly a highly efficient killing machine, but also a mediocre fighting force, particularly in ground operations. Wars are not won by slaughtering children by the thousands, or turning Gaza City into rubble and depriving an entire society of basic necessities. The Germans tried this in the Soviet Union, and the Americans in Iraq, and it didn’t end well for either of them.</bq> <bq>One could also point out that when a military reaches the point of celebrating the demolition of an apartment building, it should repurpose as a municipal engineering corps and can no longer be considered a serious fighting force.</bq> There's that dry humor. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/israels-gaza-war-destabilized-middle-east-saudi-arabia-egypt-iran/" source="Jacobin" author="Mohamed Naeem">Israel’s War on Gaza Has Destabilized the Entire Regional Order in the Middle East</a> <bq>The cases of Qatar and the Emirates are alike: they are corporate states, where only a small minority of the population has citizenship of the country, and they are more like shareholders in the state corporation.</bq> <bq>[...] if you mean exile to the Sinai, the fact that Israel and the United States are pressing hard in this direction does not mean that it will happen. This would seriously threaten peace with Egypt. Just because the Americans present a scenario that appears to be ready and prepared, this does not mean that it is adult, intelligent, or achievable, even if it were to be imposed by force at a particular moment.</bq> <bq>The perception that Egypt will rule the Palestinians militarily on behalf of the Israelis is extremely foolish. The most likely scenario here is that you will displace the Palestinians by several kilometers and lose your peace with Egypt within a few years. What a very clever plan!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/javier-milei-libertarian-authoritarian-argentina-peronism-inflation-presidential-election/" source="Jacobin" author="Ezequiel Adamovsky">Meet Argentina’s Free-Market Authoritarian President-Elect, Javier Milei</a> <bq>Even the way Milei speaks of his project carries strong echoes of the country’s liberal statesmen. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the famous nineteenth-century theorist of classic liberalism, used to say that Argentina would only progress insofar as its citizens were “intelligently selfish.” That is, Argentina’s progress depended on its citizens working for their own benefit without worrying about others. Today, that kind of individualistic worldview has obviously been reinforced and radicalized. As a specifically liberal vision of the individual, it has served as an incentive — or a subtle pressure — coaxing people to orient their lives toward commodity production and the valorization of commodities. Again, as an individualist project, this liberalism expresses itself as a system of rewards and punishments, where economic power represents the fundamental reward.</bq> <bq>[...] it is no longer just indirect, impersonal pressures orienting our lives in a market-friendly direction; there is an increasingly open expression of animosity and hostility towards any life project that is not framed by capitalist goals.</bq> <bq>I argue that this newer totalitarian liberalism, represented by Milei and the extreme right, is typified by a crusade to destroy any form of life that does not seek self-realization in the market.</bq> <bq>We see in Argentine society increasingly strong expressions of animosity and resentment among neighbors and common people. That dynamic is particularly palpable between those who feel “validated” by the market and those whose “failures” have led them to rely on state subsidies.</bq> <bq>[...] the Kirchnerist leadership seems to be disintegrating and reabsorbing itself into the Justicialist Party (the Peronist party). Where that leaves the substantial number of Kirchnerist voters who want more profound changes than what Peronism can offer is anyone’s guess.</bq> <bq>Capitalism has covered every inch of the planet and is no longer able to grow outwards. It can only sustain the rate of profit by putting more pressure on the population, taking away rights, monetizing and reducing our free time, paying less taxes, and picking over the little that remains of the state.</bq> <bq>In that context, the illusion that everyone can be an autonomous individual who develops his or her own life project without being bothered by others is revealed to be what it is: an illusion. We are increasingly pressed against each other as space runs out, and the demands and needs of others — especially when they are the collective demands of feminists, the LGBTQ movement, anti-racists, or trade unions — encroach upon the space we thought was our own inalienable property.</bq> <bq>[...] the state is distributing resources in a completely horizontal direction, across a single class, while the richest Argentines pay less and less taxes. When the cost of the welfare state falls hardest on working people, it tends to breed hatred and resentment among neighbors, especially when one person receives a small state benefit and the other does not. That resentment then turns into violence against one’s neighbor and the demand for a leader to put an end to what appears as undue “political privilege.”</bq> Singing America's tune here. This is exactly what happens on the ground in poor areas in the U.S. <bq>[...] an important portion of lower-class voters who traditionally support Peronism but this time voted for Milei. Some of these less ideological voters may grow disenchanted as his government leads to disaster — which it undoubtedly will. But I think it is important to insist that many of those once nonideological voters have moved to the authoritarian right, and that part of the electorate will be with us for the short and medium term.</bq> <bq>To me, that indicates that the right wing’s return to power comes with the expectation of state violence. As I was saying before, the Argentine right truly detests the country and its inhabitants, and they will have few reservations about using violence against it.</bq> <bq>For Milei, the gender issue is itself a total abomination. True, he hides behind the typical liberal idea that what one does behind closed doors is one’s own business. But that’s obviously a very homophobic view to express because it denies the right to public visibility.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/black-friday-amazon-climate-footprint-worker-organizing/" source="Jacobin" author="Lynn Boylan">Amazon’s Climate Pledge Was a Lie</a> <bq>Amazon uses a creative form of accounting to massively understate its carbon footprint. In its carbon methodology , Amazon acknowledges that it only includes “Amazon-branded product manufacturing, such as Echo devices, Kindles e-readers, Amazon Basics, Whole Foods Market brands, and other Amazon Private Brands products.” But this is just the tip of Amazon’s carbon iceberg: a mere 1 percent of total sales.</bq> <bq>Apart from the plastics and packaging waste , Amazon destroys many millions of new and unsold products every week. For instance, in the United Kingdom, an Amazon worker leaked a spreadsheet showing more than 124,000 new and unused items including laptops, smart TVs, hairdryers, headphones, drones, and books all marked for destruction — just at one warehouse. Some estimates suggest Amazon may be responsible for dumping about one billion items per year. That’s why our countries, France and Ireland, have introduced bans on Amazon and other companies dumping new and unused products.</bq> <bq>Amazon’s hunger for relentless expansion may make a whole country exceed its carbon budget. The company’s plans for constructing three new data centers in Ireland this year would make it virtually impossible for the country to reach its climate targets.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/01/patrick-lawrence-undivided-loyalties/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">Undivided Loyalties</a> <bq>Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another. [...] since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.</bq> Or he truly thought it was a stupid game, without nuance, played for and by children. If you have the luxury of not having a swearing of allegiance be unavoidable due to exigency, then you should take it. If you don't have skin in the game, then you don't have to make that choice. If you're faced with someone or many someones directly trying to kill you---kill or be killed---then you will have to commit yourself wholly to one "side". If you don't have skin in the game, then you should indulge in the luxury of nuance. Is there something useful to capitalism? Of course. Ditto for socialism. If you could have only one of them, which would you choose? Silly question. Any conceivable socialist society contains capitalist elements, and vice versa. It's like asking whether you'd rather keep your brain or your heart. Let's talk about something substantial instead. <bq>We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.</bq> OK, Patrick, let's move to the "dedicate your loyalties" topic of the day: Palestine and Israel. Both sides want Israel to stop bombing. Israelis and supporters wish they were able to stop bombing, but they don't feel safe yet. They feel that Hamas might spring---whack-a-mole-like---from the ground again at any moment and reap another 1200 Israelis. Palestinians just want the bombing to stop. But they also want the occupation to stop. Israel's current solution looks to be just to move the Palestinians anywhere else but Israel. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." Palestinians can pinky-swear that they won't attack again, but it's an empty promise, one that they can't really make. Because how can you promise your oppressor that you'll never strike back without negating yourself? So there is no "sitting at the dinner table alone" in this question, I suppose, but there is a requirement that we understand all sides and arguments---no matter how immoral their base. If there are people on both sides who truly believe that the only solution is to eradicate the other ... then we have to accept that as the starting point. We also have to look the situation squarely in the eye and see it for what it is. As Lawrence puts it, <bq>[...] Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with[out] the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.</bq> Well, I think Israel has a long way to go in sheer numbers, but the indifference and single-mindedness---the arrogant presumption of infallibility---are very comparable. We have to determine how large that group is, how intractable their opinion, and what solutions they would consider acceptable. If we're honest, then we would have to plumb the depths of their solution space and determine how that affects our ability to plan a way for the future. Does the future contain them? Can it? If they're made aware that they're the problem and that the solution set being considered does not contain them, does their level of intractability change? If it does, if short-term self-preservation forces them to act against their own interests, to what degree is this a ruse from which they will retreat when the pressure is off? How much influence do voices like this one have? <bq>Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Religious Zionism party, part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition told the BBC this week that the UN has kept Palestinian refugees in Gaza for 75 years in order to hurt Israel and that the Gazans should be relocated in other places.</bq> He's a member of parliament. He believes that Palestinians are a disease from which Israelis need to be freed. It's an uphill climb if you have to deal with that as a starting point, I'll grant you that. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is no easy solution. There is one side with the absolute plurality of power and an absolute deficit of ethical underpinning for their current enterprise as well as for the ways forward proposed by their most unreasonable representatives. But the temptation there would be to round up to punishing the "criminal" en masse---and to become just like the Israelis, treating them just like they treat the Palestinians, in their feigned mad hunt for Hamas terrorists in every living room and hospital lobby. No, the solution has to consider the damage that has been done to all citizens of that area, whether or not they happen to have an elected representation over which they purportedly hold sway. Just as Palestinians are not the worst of Hamas, Israelis are not the worst of their government. We have to offer everyone a way out, a way to be their best, most reasonable, and generous selves. What does that mean? If Israelis continue to believe that there are only upsides to exterminating or exiling a population from their land, then they have to be disabused of that notion. If they think that they can just take the land, settle it, and grow as they have, without any real drawbacks on their standing in the international community, then it should be made clear that this is not the case. It is entirely possible that they will not care. Like children who understand that their parents cannot stop taking care of them, they might just push to get whatever they want in the short term. Perhaps shame and appeals to justice won't work. We have to try, because I kind of have to believe that it will. The world just has to be firm that the other, easier avenues are no longer available. The world has to convince Israel that it needs the world. It's not an easy job. Right now, Israel feels that they've built a moral justification for ethnically cleansing Gaza first, then the West Bank. It is banking on its own people being OK with that. It is banking on the international not daring to punish it in any way that would dissuade it. So far, it's been right. Dead right. The Palestinians have no power and no leverage. They have to be convinced that we're serious this time, that we're really going to help them survive, get back on their own feet. It's an uphill climb there, too. Just the sheer physical situation is already working against us. This is a population so traumatized and intellectually reduced by war and occupation that it may possibly already be too late. A population of children who have only known occupation and trauma and malnutrition and war will not have developed any of the tools and nuance that they need in order to tread the narrow and winding path forward, avoiding the pitfalls that will deliver justification to an equally skittish Israel to leave the path. Just the malnutrition and dehydration alone, during their developmental years, are going to mean that the crop of the best and the brightest that they need for this endeavor is necessarily diminished. That's just nature. Any that manage to crop up anyway can be mown down with impunity until you've guaranteed that only the least likely to struggle up past the ignorance imposed by occupation will survive. So target lawyers, scholars, doctors, journalists, and other thought leaders, until all that is left are exactly the slavering zombie-like hordes of haters you've been accusing them of being all along. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is Hamas, which has, at various times, espoused their hatred of Jews and desire to eliminate them all. There are also more recent, official statements that a good deal more moderate. There's something to work with on both sides, if you deal with the more moderate parties. However, let's round Hamas up to an intolerant organization that wants to eliminate anyone who isn't cis-gendered, Arab, and Muslim. That makes them the intellectual equivalents of Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, Ben-Gvir, and the like on the Israel side. There is shocking intolerance everywhere. I've heard people say that the youth in America who support LGBTQA, BLM, etc. should not support Palestine because Palestine is actually against them. Those people are intractable in their efforts to conflate concepts. They conflate Judaism with Zionism, and they conflate Palestine with Hamas and ISIS and Wahhabism. They see no distinction. The simple fact is that there are thousands of people being murdered and millions being made to suffer depravity for no other reason that they're in the wrong place, of the wrong ethnicity and the wrong religion, and espouse the wrong opinions: namely, that they wish to exist without being subjugated to the sovereignty of rulers they did not choose. It is this that people are responding to. Now, Netanyahu responds that it is antisemitic to focus on war crimes committed by Israel when there are so many other war crimes to choose from on this planet. The youth of Europe and the U.S. are focusing laser-like on what Israel is doing. It's a cute point, actually. He admits to the atrocities, but then says its antisemitic to notice only those atrocities. His solution would be, of course, to not notice any atrocities or, at the very least, to ignore those of Israel. Look, people have their political awakening at different times. They didn't listen when we Yemen was briefly a topic. Congo was never a topic. It is the right thing to do to get Israel to stop what it is doing. It is wrong to stop there. But let's take one thing at a time. An empathy toward the Palestinians is a good start for a generation we'd thought had lost that capacity. You can also go ahead and express empathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who've been uprooted by their own government's murderous policies. You can empathize with an Israeli population that is now suffering existential fear because of those selfsame policies. You can empathize with the families of those innocents killed on October 7th. But you can't do only that. You can't just see the suffering on one side and not acknowledge the suffering on the other, not if you're interested in a long-term solution. Short term, though? Yeah, Israel has to stop bombing. This is ridiculous. Nothing good can even begin to happen as long as that goes on. The protesters are right that there needs to be a longer-lasting ceasefire. <bq>MLK’s turn against the Vietnam war, it is worth contemplating in our current circumstances, was inspired by a graphic photo essay on the children of Vietnam severely disfigured by napalm that was published in Ramparts, one of the great experiments in independent journalism during the 1960s.</bq> That was published by Robert Scheer, whose interview-format podcast I still listen to today. The man is well into his eighties and still fighting the same fight. I read a tremendous amount of material published on his latest venture Scheer Post (on which Patrick Lawrence exclusively publishes). Some people manage to be on the right side of history for their whole lives. Kudos to them. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/02/306612/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">I, Netanyahu</a> <bq>Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, argues that the Israeli siege is an act of genocide: “If you see the big picture, the siege of Gaza itself, that is extermination or persecution, is a crime against humanity, and is a form of genocide. Article … 2(c) in the Genocide Convention defines that you don’t need to kill people to commit genocide. The rules say ‘inflicting conditions to destroy the group.’ That itself is genocide. So, creating the siege itself is a genocide. And that is very clear–that Israel wants the siege, it’s very clear. And the intention is to destroy the people. [...]</bq> <bq>During the ceasefire, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners but arrested 310 new prisoners including women during the same period, most of them from the West Bank. Israel now holds 2,873 administrative detainees, 800 more than last month. This detention without charge or trial is illegal under international law. Nearly 40% of all Palestinians incarcerated by Israel are now held under this Kafkaesque confinement, based on secret information that they may commit an offense in the future.</bq> <bq>According to the IDF’s most optimistic estimate, 86% of the 14,000 Gazans killed by Israeli bombs since October 7 are non-combatants. Even in the bloody 2014 war, civilian deaths were less than 60% of the total fatalities.</bq> <bq>Elon Musk during a televised talk with Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “In Gaza, there’s three things that need to be done. There’s no choice but to kill those who insist on murdering civilians. There’s no choice. They’re not going to change their mind. The second thing is to change the education, so that a new generation of murderers is not trained to be murderers. And the third thing, which is very important, is to try to build prosperity.”</bq> Doing his best Trump impression, Musk is correct, but he's clearly addressing the wrong side. His proposed solutions above apply not just to Palestinians, but to Israelis as well (although I would elect to prosecute the criminals, rather than kill them). <bq>A message from our classmate and friend, Hisham Awartani: "It's important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict. Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine. This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed."</bq> <bq>Yanis Varoufakis: “Does anyone seriously doubt that Israel holds Palestinian children as hostages? That it has been doing it for years? That it plans to ‘detain’ even more in its bid ethnically to cleanse East Jerusalem and the West Bank – once it is finished with Gaza?”</bq> <bq>SkyNews reported that the released hostages were most worried about the risk of dying in Israeli bombardments. Former hostages also reported that supplies in Gaza are rapidly depleting. In the first weeks, they were served “chicken with rice, all sorts of canned food and cheese,” 78-year-old Ruti Munder told Israeli news outlets. But more recently, “the economic situation was not good, and people were hungry,” she said.</bq> <bq>It’s not a coincidence that US troops in Syria and Iraq stopped getting attacked after the truce between Israel and Hamas.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/media-hamas-gaza/" author="Matthew Petti" source="Responsible Statecraft">Media amplified US, Israeli narrative on Palestinian deaths</a> <bq>Israeli and U.S. attempts to change the conversation have largely succeeded. Before the current war, and even before the Ahli hospital bombing, descriptions like “Hamas-run,” “Hamas-controlled,” or “Hamas-affiliated” for the Palestinian health ministry were virtually non-existent, according to the News on the Web Corpus, a database of newspapers and magazines from 21 countries. Most Western English language media simply referred to the “Palestinian health ministry.” Since the October 17 hospital attack, however, it is now more common to see the health ministry labeled as some variation of “Hamas-run” than “Palestinian.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-goal-is-ethnic-cleansing-not" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Goal Is Ethnic Cleansing, Not Defeating Hamas</a> <bq>As evidence continues to mount that a significant number of the Israelis killed on October 7 were actually killed by indiscriminate fire from the IDF, Israel has announced its plans to bury the vehicles Israelis died in — in other words to bury forensic evidence. According to the Jerusalem Post, “In order to save space and be as environment-friendly as possible… the cars may be shredded before being buried.”</bq> <bq>This has long caused a dissonance between what Israel is seen doing and what Israel is presented as by its western allies and its own PR, and now that dissonance has soared to unprecedented heights. Westerners are taught (falsely) that their governments embody virtuous values systems prioritizing freedom, peace, justice and truth, and here’s this bizarre ethnostate glommed onto them which very clearly wipes its ass with those values without even really attempting to disguise it. The western empire has destroyed nation after nation on the premise each of those nations was governed by an Evil Dictator who couldn’t be allowed to remain in power, and yet we’re being asked to look past the actions of an intimate partner of the western empire which make those Evil Dictators look like teddy bears and believe that that partner is actually entirely in alignment with the values of the virtuous west.</bq> <bq>Any time there’s a bombing campaign by the US-aligned power structure you see attempts being made to spin the civilians it kills as imperfect victims, and you’re seeing that with Gaza too. </bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israel-reopens-the-gaza-slaughterhouse" author="Chris Hedges" source="SubStack">Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse</a> <bq>The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.</bq> <bq>Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.</bq> <bq>Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution. This war is not over. It has not even begun.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cwDFwteIY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/L5cwDFwteIY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="nowalk12" caption="Trials of Henry Kissinger"> A very good documentary about one of the worst people to ever live. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/ahfj-d02.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Republican George Santos, chronic fabulist and accused conman, expelled from US House of Representatives</a> <bq>More than half of House Republicans, including recently-elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana and the rest of the party leadership, voted against the expulsion. The primary reason given was that, since the criminal case against Santos had not been decided, the measure would set a precedent of politically-motivated expulsions. For example, Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, opposed the expulsion and said, “George Santos is an ass, but who, like every American, deserves the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.”</bq> It's an interesting precedent: if we're going to expel people from Congress for being corrupt, lying assholes, then it's going to be a pretty empty chamber. I say: let's get started. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/klox-d02.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack</a> <bq>These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.</bq> Easy, there, Andre. Wipe the spittle off of your keyboard. The Israeli government is responsible for having let it happen, but the perpetrators are responsible for the deaths that took place that day. Whoever killed those people is responsible. Those who knew it was going to take place, but decided to let it happen because they figured it would be politically advantageous are culpable---the dictionary definition includes the phrase <iq>sometimes you're just as culpable when you watch something as when you actually participate.</iq>---but the responsibility lies with those who pulled the triggers. <bq>Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not a failure to “connect the dots,” because there were no dots to connect. The Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let it go ahead.</bq> <bq>[...] the events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took place.</bq> <bq>veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in the days preceding the attack, “local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival” taking place near the West Bank. Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves.”</bq> <bq>These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians, but the Israeli population itself.</bq> It's hard to disagree here. Netanyahu is absolutely unhinged, as are his co-conspirators in the Israeli government and in the U.S. <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/mouin-rabbani-a-post-ceasefire-analysis" author="Mouin Rabbani" source="SubStack">A Post-Ceasefire Analysis</a> <bq>Ultimately, and once again assuming Israel continues to fail militarily (the most likely and plausible but not a certain scenario), the Palestinians are not going to release their most valuable prisoners, the senior Israeli military officers, without obtaining the release of senior Palestinian leaders in Israeli prisons. They will also seek a guaranteed end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to their 7 October positions. This will be a very bitter pill for Israel to swallow, but the results of military failure tend to be bitter, and the US and Europe will help Netanyahu (or whoever replaces him) take his medicine.</bq> <bq>In 2023, the idea would be that Hamas, or at least its leadership, senior echelons, and fighters, would depart their Palestinian homeland for a life of exile. In other words, voluntarily commit political and organizational suicide, and relinquish their main source of leverage, so that Israel and the US can claim the victory Israel’s military was unable to achieve on the ground. And once abroad, explain to their constituents and Palestinians more generally, that they carefully considered the matter and concluded that saving their own skins justifies the extraordinary price Palestinians have had to pay to make this possible. Only in Washington…</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/12/03/the-rot-on-his-own-side/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Rot On His Own Side</a> <bq>There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.</bq> Greenfield is still setting up his strawmen and then knocking them down. I hope he’s having fun over there, but it seems much more like he’s going down a rabbit hole like James Howard Kunstler did a few years ago. <iq>The litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.</iq> As if the things that happened almost two months ago are the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone ever—and as if nothing equally bad has happened since that we might also be paying attention to. Nope, just wallowing in misery and not all interested in any solution that doesn’t offer more misery. Now, he’s off and running on the RISE OF ANTISEMITISM. <bq>The same failure of principle that infects this ideological schism at its core, where decisions are made based not on substance, but on identities and which box they’re in. Black people are still very much subject to discrimination. Looting is wrong, even when done by black people. Rape is a heinous crime. Rape is still a heinous crime even when done by Palestinians. Even when done by Palestinians to Jews.</bq> Look, he starts off strong here. It’s a topic he’s admirably addressed in the past. He’s a strong defender of the idea that identirarianism has been damaging to nearly everyone but its most adamant advocates. But then he gets to the second part, which I’ve highlighted. Who’s he talking to here? Is there anyone worth listening to who’s saying that rape is sometimes OK? Is there anyone at all? Maybe a handful of yahoos who aren’t worth listening to? Is there any reason to continue to treat this idea like there’s a danger of it overtaking the Zeitgeist? What the hell are you arguing about? Having doubts about whether people were raped before they blasted to smithereens with hellfire missiles is not the same as thinking rape is OK. Even the Israeli government stopped pounding the rape drum weeks ago. Why does Greenfield still mention it all the time, when even the Israelis gave up on that story? Does he really think he needs to fight the good fight, standing up for the rarely held principle that it’s not OK for Palestinians to rape Jews? Is he getting a lot of pushback on that? Or what is going on? Once he’s worked himself up into a lather about this, he drops his final stroke of genius, <bq>[…] there is far more in common between the progressive left and the Nazis and Klan than there is with a principled liberal.</bq> Put up the straw man, then knock it down. Way to go! <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPsCItglr2E" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/qPsCItglr2E" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Grayzone" caption="Understanding Javier Milei's insane appeal"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nnZwaDRf8Y" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9nnZwaDRf8Y" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Glenn Greenwald & Max Abrahms Debate Israel-Gaza, Free Speech, & More"> <bq>It's hard for me to remember a case where China actually attacked the US homeland ... in large numbers. I don't think it's crazy at all to think that Al-Qaeda would do so. In fact ... </bq> Yeah, it's hard for me to remember that too. What does that have to do with anything? Max Abrahms is terrible. Good for Glenn to give him enough hope to hang himself. The guy wants people not to be able to wave flags of terrorist organizations. That is not a thing that we can do. If they want to wave those flags, then they can wave those flags. Hell, there are a ton of confederate flags in the U.S. But Abrahms thinks that specifically Arabic/Muslim organizations are the worst terrorism that could possibly exist and they should be <iq>punished</iq> and <iq>degraded</iq>. When Abrahms said that calls to violence should investigated, Greenwald asked whether not just students should have their freedom of speech restricted, but also people like Nikki Haley, who's calling for the flattening of Gaza and Iran. The dude could literally not answer that question, but instead started describing the so-called violent protests on U.S. campuses in excruciating detail. That's his hobby horse. He wants to restrict the speech of those with absolutely the least power. You would think that someone who expresses himself so often about Palestine/Israel issues could pronounce Intifada correctly (he kept saying Antifada). Glenn pulled on his leash, telling Abrahms that nearly everyone else he's talked to, including many pro-Israel advocates, are more offended that the antisemitic narrative in the U.S. is wildly exaggerated (e.g., ADL conflates pro-Palestinian protests with anti-semitic attacks). Abrahms has his own hobby horse, though. THIS IS HAPPENING. When Glenn asked him what he proposes to do to hinder these supposed attacks, he didn't answer the question. That's not part of his talking points. He probably didn't feel comfortable saying that he thinks that all of the protesters should just be thrown out of college and probably society. At 21:45, Glenn says <bq>The case went to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction and said that advocating violence is clearly within the realm of protected speech. Which means that you're allowed to say 'flatten Gaza,' 'erase Gaza,' 'remove Gaza from the map,' 'I think all Palestinians should be killed,' 'there are no innocent Palestinians.' There's a huge number this week of Israeli officials and journalists who have said 'there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.' That's protected speech. You can go on campus and say that. You can say it in front of Palestinians and it's protected speech. To go and say 'I think the Israeli government and their occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has become so barbaric and inhumane over decades that I think on the part of Palestinians is justified in order to resist it,' those are both to me clearly within the realm of free speech. I would never send the FBI or law enforcement after students on campuses for saying these things.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFbdKdwqlZw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/EFbdKdwqlZw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Breaking Points" caption="Norm Finkelstein GOES OFF: Israel, Hillary, Human Shields & Ben Shapiro"> I have listened to Norman Finkelstein a lot in the last several weeks. A lot of this I'd heard before, but he's really refined his arguments. Krystal let him talk endlessly. She only said something to pose the next listener question. The list of topics is: <bq>(00:00) Introduction, Norm’s Background (9:54) Essential Facts on Israel/Palestine (30:05) Norm Challenged on Hamas Atrocities (39:00) Do Geneva Conventions Apply to Palestinians (42:28) Norm Debunks Hillary Clinton (56:39) Were Palestinians Failed By Their Leadership? (1:04:50) Can you “steelman” Israel’s view of the conflict? (1:16:00) Is focusing on Israel “antisemitic”? (1:19:45) What was the real reason Israel stormed Al-Shifa Hospital? (1:31:31) Norm Debunks Claims of Hamas and Human Shields (1:42:00) What Comes After a Ceasefire? (1:45:45) Norm Goes off on Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kviD4vTFjlM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/kviD4vTFjlM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News" caption="Horrors In Gaza & Israel’s Sloppy Propaganda"> This is another great interview with <iq>Mouin Rabbani, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.</iq> Rania let him speak for a long time, which was good. She was barely able to hold back laughter several times, which was a little less professional. But it's fine. What he's describing is quite ridiculous and you either have to laugh or cry. Admittedly, the Rabbani's dry humor is pretty infectious. His face is utterly deadpan, but he's quite funny. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhGkoLeOUIo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bhGkoLeOUIo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Cornel West for President" caption="Cornel West and Norman Finkelstein Live in New York!"> <bq>Cornel West: But the important thing, of course, is not what you read, or how much you read, but it's the kind of human being you choose to be, in regard to your courage, in regard to your vision, in regard to what you're willing to sacrifice---give up---the burden that you're willing to bear. All of us are cracked vessels. [...] We're all just trying to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/not-a-nothingburger-my-statement" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Not a Nothingburger: My Statement to Congress on Censorship</a> <bq>Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”</bq> <bq>[...] the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.</bq> <bq>Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else. Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war.</bq> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/27/the-digital-yuan-purpose-progress-and-politics/" source="Made in China Journal" author="Monique Taylor">The Digital Yuan: Purpose, Progress, and Politics</a> <bq>Unlike cryptocurrencies, the digital yuan adopts ‘controllable anonymity’ or anonymity with oversight, providing transaction privacy from commercial players and between users while maintaining transparency for regulatory authorities (PBC 2021: 7). The technical framework combines various technologies to enhance functionality and scalability (the specifics of this have not been fully disclosed by the PBC), including but not limited to blockchain, and is embedded with rigorous security and cryptographic safeguards. The digital yuan also supports offline payments, including dual offline transactions, via near-field communication technology, which is especially beneficial for remote communities that lack internet access (Kshetri 2023: 104).</bq> <bq>The digital yuan would allow the Chinese Government to exert greater control over domestic money supply and circulation, with a view to minimising fraud, money laundering, and corruption, and offering a safer and more regulated digital payment alternative to cryptocurrencies. The latter were progressively limited throughout the 2010s, culminating in a ban on Bitcoin mining and all cryptocurrency-related transactions in 2021, as these speculative assets were perceived as a threat to financial stability and government control of the financial system (PBC 2021: 2).</bq> <bq>[...] the digital yuan injects a government-backed alternative into an electronic payments market that is currently dominated by two private fintech giants, Alipay and WeChat Pay. The digital yuan operates under the PBC’s purview, which not only strengthens regulatory oversight but also reduces the monopolistic hold of Alipay and WeChat Pay on consumer data and financial transactions.</bq> <bq>Uptake of the digital yuan has been slow, with the main obstacle being that the Chinese population is already accustomed to using private electronic payment platforms such as Alipay and WeChat Pay (Kawate and Maruyama 2022; Orcutt 2023). Although the currency introduces functionalities such as offline transaction capabilities and zero fees on digital yuan payments for retailers, the public has not yet been convinced to change their payment habits.</bq> <bq>For the fintech companies, their involvement in the digital yuan’s rollout is strategic, allowing them to adapt to changes proactively rather than simply react to disruption, thus ensuring that their platforms are interoperable with the new currency. Moreover, given the Party-State–centric nature of China’s political and regulatory systems, which even requires private firms to align themselves closely with national interests and priorities, it is also likely that significant government pressure is being placed on these companies to support the development and dissemination of the digital yuan.</bq> <bq>Western financial institutions that have expressed interest in using the digital yuan, such as France’s BNP Paribas SA, face scrutiny from their home countries. Such wariness reflects geopolitical concerns over support for a Chinese digital currency at a time of fraught US–China relations and when moves towards de-dollarisation are gaining momentum in some countries</bq> <bq>[...] there are significant challenges to the global adoption of the digital yuan for cross-border payments. First, there is the problem of insufficient levels of trust and confidence in the digital yuan—a situation compounded by the fact that, by virtue of its design and the PBC being not an independent central bank, the currency is subject to Beijing’s political and regulatory machinations. Second, China maintains a closed capital account, which means that companies, banks, and individuals cannot move money in or out of the country, except in accordance with strict rules.</bq> <bq>[...] given China’s authoritarian governance model, the digital yuan faces a formidable challenge in acquiring global trust due to concerns about Beijing’s political influence over, and potential interference in, the way it is organised</bq> <bq>If the digital yuan is adopted by BRI countries and those that are economically, politically, or strategically aligned with China or simply want to reduce their reliance on the US dollar for whatever reason, this could result in a bifurcated international financial system in which one side is led by the US dollar and the other by the digital yuan.</bq> <bq>If the digital yuan were to completely replace physical cash in China, one of the most significant consequences would be the capability of the PBC to monitor, trace, and block all transactions: ‘Such a capacity would make financial crimes, such as money laundering, tax evasion, financing terrorism, and the purchasing of illicit goods, far easier to identify and prosecute’ (Fullerton and Morgan 2022: 16). Given that tax evasion and corruption are pressing challenges in China, the transaction record provided by the digital yuan could significantly streamline the identification and prosecution of financial crimes [...]</bq> That and, of course, tracking everybody who's not actually doing crime. <bq>The PBC maintains that the degree of anonymity experienced by the digital yuan user is dependent on the transaction size: ‘Smalls amounts are anonymous, big amounts are traceable’ (小额匿名, 大额可溯) being the slogan for this (PBC 2021; MacKinnon 2022). However, since digital wallets are linked to phone numbers and phone numbers are linked to a government-issued ID, even small transactions are likely not anonymous in practice.</bq> <bq>The digital yuan could eventually become a profoundly important part of China’s authoritarian toolkit by providing the CCP with extensive insight into, and control over, the financial lives of individuals.</bq> <bq>It is expected that mBridge will launch a viable product by mid 2024, offering an alternative to SWIFT (BIS 2022). Along with the potential for the digital yuan to be used as a preferred payment medium across BRI countries, this indicates an emerging trend towards payment fragmentation at the global level. However, given the extant trust deficits and liquidity concerns, it seems unlikely that the digital yuan could challenge the dominance of the US dollar in the global financial system any time soon.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/27/social-security-and-medicare-fun-with-numbers-time/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">Social Security and Medicare: Fun with Numbers Time</a> <bq>As can be seen, low earners are projected to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. An important qualification here is that there is a large and growing gap in life expectancies between low and higher earners. These calculations assume that everyone of the same gender has the same life expectancy regardless of their income. This means that the benefits will be somewhat overstated for low earners and understated for high earners.</bq> <bq>The implication of this calculation is that the seemingly large subsidies that Medicare provides to retirees is not due to the generosity of benefits, it is due to the fact that we overpay for our healthcare. Medicare is not providing a large subsidy to retirees, it is providing a large subsidy for drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, insurers, and doctors. (In case you are wondering, people in the U.S. are not generally paid much more than people in other wealthy countries. Our manufacturing workers get considerably lower pay.)</bq> <bq>[...] when I noted that the designated Medicare tax is not capped and also applies to capital income. The taxes that are designated for these programs are arbitrary. We can designate other taxes that people pay as being Social Security and Medicare taxes, and apparent subsidies will disappear. In fact, the idea that we can make a clear distinction between income that people have somehow earned, and income that is given to them by the government, is in fact an illusion. The government structures the markets in ways that allow some people to get very wealthy and keep others on the edge of subsistence.</bq> <bq>[...] as was recently highlighted with the UAW strike, our CEOs make far more than the CEOS of comparably sized companies in other wealthy countries. The difference is as much as a factor of ten in the case of Japanese companies. This is not due to the natural workings of the market, this is the result of a corrupt corporate governance structure that allows the CEOs to have their friends set their pay.</bq> <bq>This is in general the story as to why we don’t have adequate funding for early childhood education, children’s nutrition, day care and other programs that would benefit children. There is a substantial political bloc that does not want to fund these programs. And, they still would not want to fund these programs even if we didn’t pay a dime for Social Security and Medicare.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/11/where-do-aliens-come-from/" source="Unherd" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Where do aliens come from?</a> <bq>[...] when it comes to traversing distances measured in light-years, it is vastly more likely that any intelligent beings that figure out how to do so will not be relying on vehicular motion as we understand it, but on the exploitation of some physical principle, such as wormholes, or some information-theoretical principle, such as one that allows them to dematerialise the unique patterns that constitute their identity, and to “beam” them across galaxies for rematerialisation elsewhere. If there are aliens among us, in short, they almost certainly didn’t come here in spaceships.</bq> <bq>[...] it is most probable that what will count for them as “arrival” will not be an arrival in an organically embodied form. Indeed, the idea that alien visitors would come in biological bodies such as ours is, I contend, even less plausible than that they would come in artificial contraptions.</bq> <bq>Organic substrates, as the philosopher and xenobiologist Susan Schneider has argued, may well turn out to be a relatively short-lived host for intelligence whenever and wherever it emerges in the universe, soon to be replaced, wherever a technologically advanced species appears in the cosmos, by robots.</bq> <bq>[...] when a high-powered telescope or an unmanned probe sends back images of objects in space, we consider that we are “seeing” and “experiencing” these objects only in a downgraded better-than-nothing sense, as mediated representations.</bq> <bq>To imagine that one must go to another part of the universe, in one’s own organic body, in order to truthfully claim that one has been there, may turn out to be somewhat like supposing, circa 1920, that in order to participate in a conference with colleagues in Paris, one must actually go to Paris, rather than joining them by Zoom.</bq> <bq>On Earth only about 3% of all animal species are vertebrates; how strange it would be if our first extraterrestrial visitors turned out to be vertebrates too!</bq> <bq>Throughout the 20th century, for the most part, excessive interest in extraterrestrials was the telltale mark of a crank. This attitude had much to do with the reigning positivism of the scientific community, and the general consensus that speculation about things happening beyond the sphere of direct observability is ipso facto unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. But this era has decidedly come to an end in the past decade or so, as vast social, economic, and technological transformations have fundamentally realigned the public’s perception of expertise, and of who gets to claim to have it. After the crisis of epistemic authority that experts brought upon themselves throughout the Covid pandemic, and after the replacement of our old media ecosystem by one in which authoritativeness has become more than ever a sort of popularity contest, we are now in a period of history in which extraterrestrials are important if the masses of internet users think they are important, scientific consensus be damned.</bq> <bq>[...] we would be foolish to believe that this is the result of an actual uptick in sightings, or that our own most recent cultural representations of intelligent life beyond Earth get something uniquely right about the heavens that our ancestors failed to notice.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2023/11/23/thanksgiving-18/" source="Preposterous Universe" author="Sean Carroll">Thanksgiving</a> <bq>[...] that is where the “quantum” nature of quantum mechanics comes from. Not from fundamental discreteness or anything like that; just from the properties of the set of solutions to a perfectly smooth differential equation. It’s precisely the same as why you get a fundamental note from a violin string tied at both ends , as well as a series of discrete harmonics, even though the string itself is perfectly smooth.</bq> <bq>[...] it also explains why quantum fields look like particles. A field is essentially the opposite of a particle: the latter has a specific location, while the former is spread all throughout space. But quantum fields solve equations with boundary conditions, and we care about the solutions. It turns out (see above-advertised book for details!) that if you look carefully at just a single “mode” of a field — a plane-wave vibration with specified wavelength — its wave function behaves much like that of a simple harmonic oscillator. That is, there is a ground state, a first excited state, a second excited state, and so on.</bq> <bq>States in quantum theory are described by rays in Hilbert space, which is a vector space, and vector spaces are completely smooth. You can construct a candidate vector space by starting with some discrete things like bits, then considering linear combinations, as happens in quantum computing (qubits) or various discretized models of spacetime. The resulting Hilbert space is finite-dimensional, but is still itself very much smooth, not discrete</bq> <bq>(Rough guide: “quantizing” a discrete system gets you a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, quantizing a smooth system gets you an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.)</bq> Helpful! Thanks! I don't understand most of what he's talking about, but it's pretty awesome to keep trying. <bq>I recently wrote a paper proposing a judicious compromise, where standard QM is modified in the mildest possible way, replacing evolution in a smooth Hilbert space with evolution on a discrete lattice defined on a torus. It raises some cosmological worries, but might otherwise be phenomenologically acceptable. I don’t yet know if it has any specific experimental consequences, but we’re thinking about that.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/29/are-there-any-paranoids-in-the-stadium-tonight-two-nights-in-santiago-with-roger-waters/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">Are There Any Paranoids in the Stadium Tonight? Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters</a> <bq>[...] the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics.</bq> <bq>“Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us is supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights,</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/queries-1" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Queries, #1</a> <bq>[...] hear the Bibliothèque Nationale has set up a “human search engine” that will answer any question you put to it within 72 hours. But as with every alternative technology this prideful country comes up with in the futile aim of resistance to the absolutely ruthless bulldozing effects of global capitalism, I’m sure there would be a mass of online forms to fill out in order to get access to it, the interface would hurt my eyes to gaze upon even for a second,</bq> <bq>I’m a philosopher, for better or worse, like it or not, and I can only ever heed the imperative, “Just Say, ‘Why?’” But when I try to answer that why-question, to give good reasons for the value of psychedelic experience in the course of a life well-lived, I find I am falling short.</bq> <bq>Zaehner insists, is that there are no shortcuts to beatific vision. You can’t see the face of God, except perhaps as the ultimate capstone of your soul’s long progress through the eons, and if you think that’s what you’re seeing when you are tripping, or something like it, as Huxley clearly did, then you are effectively making a mockery of our mortal condition and of those mortals who aspire to some kind of relationship with the transcendent through the long hard work of meditation, ritual, piety, and prayer.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-dont-self-interested-arguments" source="SubStack" author="Freddie de Boer">Why Don't Self-Interested Arguments Against Helicopter Parenting Deter Parents?</a> <bq>[...] it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children.</bq> <bq>The children of helicopter parents, in my experience, can often be susceptible to the influence of overbearing people, particularly those in a position of authority, because they’re used to being led by an overseer. Etc.</bq> <bq>I think there’s two issues. The first is that, unless you’re a single parent, you can’t unilaterally change parenting styles; your coparent will certainly have their own say. And then you have the peer effects, which I suspect are what’s really hard to resist - people really don’t want to look like bad parents in the eyes of other parents, and to a truly unfortunate degree, our communal definition of the best parenting is more or less the most parenting. What I’ve found, personally, is that a lot of parents feel that they have to constantly stress and worry over their kids, and become hostile when they’re told they don’t have to. If they aren’t stressing, what will the other parents think?</bq> <bq>[...] doctors have every reason to say that a kid does have allergies and almost none to say that he doesn’t. If you as a doctor say that a kid has an allergy and he doesn’t, no one will ever find out, and even if they do, there’s no consequences. If you say that a kid doesn’t have an allergy and he does, then there’s a very good chance that there’s a sizable lawsuit coming your way.</bq> <bq>[...] if your child has a strong tendency to occupy a given academic percentile despite various interventions, it allows for parents to worry less about maximizing grades and test scores and to instead work with their child to discover what they enjoy and to experience the fun of learning in a dramatically lower-stress way.</bq> <bq>[...] your kid will be what they will be, in school, so love them regardless of how smart they are and help guide them to a satisfying life. And I think this stems from a very understandable anxiety that parents have about how good of a job they’re doing. Our culture is relentlessly judgmental towards parents, after all. The more a parent worries, the more they likely feel like they’re doing something.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-effective-altruism-shell-game" source="SubStack" author="Freddie de Boer">The Effective Altruism Shell Game 2.0</a> <bq>I think that EA is functionally a branding exercise that masquerades as an ethical project, and an ethical project that does not require the affected weirdness that made it such a branding success. While a lot of its specific aspects are salutary, none of them require anything like the ethical altruist framework to defend them; the framework seems to exist mostly to create a social world, enable grift, and provide the opportunity for a few people to become internet celebrities. It’s not that nothing EA produces is good. It’s that we don’t need EA to produce them.</bq> <bq>The immediate response to such a definition, if you’re not particularly impressionable or invested in your status within certain obscure internet communities, should be to point out that this is an utterly banal set of goals that are shared by literally everyone who sincerely tries to act charitably.</bq> <bq>[...] effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected.</bq> <bq>EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals.</bq> I sometimes wonder how much of this stuff is for people who are addicted to hot takes, who like the contrarian twist so much that it has to be in everything. <bq>[...] you could consider effective altruism’s turn to an obsessive focus on “ longtermism ,” in theory an embrace of future lives over present ones and in practice a fixation on the potential dangers of apocalyptic artificial intelligence.</bq> This is what it feels like to listen to Mo Gawdat. It's also a great way of focusing on building your own fortune, which you dedicate to helping future people in a vague and unprovable way, while ignoring smelly, people who are alive right now. It's how libertarians untie the gordian knot of striving for personal fortune and wanting to believe you are a good person and having others in your peer group perceive you as such. Too few people are asking what kind of peer group are they trying to impress? Other Silicon Valley optimizers? <bq>[...] there’s an inherent disjunction between the supposed purity of its regal project and the actual grab bag of interests and obsessions it consists of in practice [...]</bq> <bq>This is why I say that effective altruism is a shell game. That which is commendable isn’t particular to EA and that which is particular to EA isn’t commendable.</bq> <bq>Utilitarianism insists that I give my bread to feed two starving children who are strangers to me instead of my own starving child, which offends our sense of personal commitment; utilitarianism insists that turning in the janitor who raped a woman in a vegetative state is immoral, which offends our sense of bodily autonomy even in the absence of consciousness; utilitarianism insists that it’s your moral duty to lie in court against a man who’s innocent of the charges if doing so stops a destructive riot, which offends our sense of individual rights and justice.</bq> <bq>[...] effective altruism and utilitarianism also share a denominator problem - you can’t achieve consensus about means if you don’t have consensus about ends, that is, what actually represents the most good for the most people. The entirety of moral philosophy exists because no one has ever come close to resolving that question.</bq> <bq>One, I think, fatal, problem is that a theory that tells us to perform at any given time “that action, which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative” is a theory that fails spectacularly to do what we want an ethical theory to do: offer some practical guidance in life.</bq> <bq>[...] this is sort of the dilemma for many EA advocates: if we are inspired by the people doing the best, we’ll simply be making a number of fairly mundane policy recommendations, all of which are also recommended by people who have nothing to do with effective altruism. There’s nothing particular revolutionary about it, and thus nothing particularly attention-grabbing. And if that’s the case, you’re unlikely to find yourself in the position that Sam Bankman-Fried was in, grooving along on Caribbean islands with a harem of weirdos, plugged in with deep philosophy types, telling everyone that you’re saving the world.</bq> <bq>Any movement can be hijacked by self-dealing grifters. But effective altruism’s basic recruiting strategy is tailor-made for producing them.</bq> <bq>If you can get to doing good charitable work without the off-putting, grift-attracting philosophy that inspired it, of what use is the philosophy?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/whats-left-for-tech" source="SubStack" author="Freddie de Boer">What's Left for Tech?</a> <bq>[...] advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable. The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?</bq> Indoor plumbing includes toilets, showers, and, most importantly, potable water on tap. <bq>To a remarkable extent, continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.</bq> <bq>For the record I’ve never said that developments in LLMs and “neural networks” have no potential consequences for our society. It’s just that I think what’s actually remotely plausible within our lifetimes [with LLMs] is mostly refinement rather than revolution, useful tools to automate repetitive tasks for human beings, reducing workload on programmers and eliminating some very specific types of work such as analyzing legal documents. There will be some changes to our labor markets, but then again every time technology has been predicted to cause widespread job destruction in the past, those predictions have proven to be untrue. (The trouble is that the specific people whose jobs have been disrupted often face serious personal hardship, even as the overall employment numbers don’t change, but this is a separate issue.) It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV917GMe1Wk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/NV917GMe1Wk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="JER Films" caption="The Primacy Of Free Speech | Ira Glasser"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSyZ46PyF7U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/TSyZ46PyF7U" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="How To Academy Mindset" caption="Slavoj Zizek - Israel, Palestine & the Future"> Most of this discussion was stuff I'd heard before, but I almost always enjoy listening to him. He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. At 01:24:20, he says, <bq>What's the problem today? I will point to this paradox. You know that, on the one hand, we perceive our situation as powerless, totally manipulated---you don't control anything. But, at the same time, the hegemonic ideology today is elevating us into the free individuals. [...] For example, the most disgusting ideology today, for me, is the ideology that sustains precarious work. It's a very nice message---[reading] between the lines---[that message] is: precarious workers are really like small capitalists. We are all capitalists! [spreads arms to encompass room] You have a little bit of money and you can freely decide. Do you go to a holiday, do you invest in your health, or do you buy a car and are you an Uber driver, or ... whatever. So, did you notice that, at the same time, [that] with this idea the system dominates us. [It] is the idea that everything ... that we are ultimately radically responsible for ourselves. We have this attitude of [...] make an effort individually, do it, you can do it ... So. The things I would have done here is to precisely turn this around, in the sense of: yes, we are most enslaved to the system precisely when we perceive ourselves as free, consumerist individuals. You know, you buy a cake, whatever you want, you go here, you go there. This apparent freedom [...] this type of freedom, which is based on the model of [...] big life decisions are decisions like---you go to a patisserie and [decide between] strawberry cake and cheesecake---no! There are much more radical decisions. The true decisions, where [...] you choose yourself, what you are. You don't just choose objects, or even other persons. You choose your own identity. And, here, a true change has to begin. And, that's why, I think that the first step out of this domination of the anonymous system, is to see how fake your individual freedom is. Not in the sense of 'I am totally manipulated,' but in a much more radical sense that you are totally manipulated precisely when you think you are free. Like, what is more free than just surfing on the web, you go from this pornographic site to another site, or whatever? [I argue that] at that point, you are completely enslaved. And I accept this paradox to the end. I will now sound the totalitarian, I know. There is no freedom without strong self-discipline. Freedom is not relaxation. Freedom is duty.</bq> <h>LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html" source="GitHub" author="Milad Nasr, Nicholas Carlini, Jon Hayase, Matthew Jagielski, A. Feder Cooper, Daphne Ippolito, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Eric Wallace, Florian Tramèr, Katherine Lee">Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT</a> <bq>[...] first is that testing only the aligned model can mask vulnerabilities in the models, particularly since alignment is so readily broken. Second, this means that it is important to directly test base models. Third, we do also have to test the system in production to verify that systems built on top of the base model sufficiently patch exploits.</bq> <bq>[...] in our strongest configuration, over five percent of the output ChatGPT emits is a direct verbatim 50-token-in-a-row copy from its training dataset.</bq> <bq>In some cases, like data retrieval, you want to exactly recover the training data. But in that case, a generative model is probably not your first choice tool.</bq> <bq>It’s one thing for us to show that we can attack something released as a research demo. It’s another thing entirely to show that something widely released and sold as a company’s flagship product is nonprivate.</bq> <bq>OpenAI has said that a hundred million people use ChatGPT weekly. And so probably over a billion people-hours have interacted with the model. And, as far as we can tell, no one has ever noticed that ChatGPT emits training data with such high frequency until this paper.</bq> <bq>[...] doesn’t have any bearing on the aligned model. For example, if ChatGPT ever started writing hate speech, we wouldn’t say “well it should have been obvious this was possible because the base model can emit hate speech too!” Of course the base model can say bad things. It’s been trained on the entire internet and has probably read 4chan. The purpose of alignment is to prevent such things.</bq> Actually, censoring and filters aren't in my interest at at all. I would rather determine for myself which output to use, trimming with the prompt rather have than guardrails imposed because someone wants to capitalize the product. <bq>In this case, for example: The vulnerability is that ChatGPT memorizes a significant fraction of its training data—maybe because it’s been over-trained, or maybe for some other reason. The exploit is that our word repeat prompt allows us to cause the model to diverge and reveal this training data. And so, under this framing, we can see how adding an output filter that looks for repeated words is just a patch for that specific exploit, and not a fix for the underlying vulnerability. The underlying vulnerabilities are that language models are subject to divergence and also memorize training data. That is much harder to understand and to patch. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by other exploits that don’t look at all like the one we have proposed here.</bq> It's inherent to the design, like Spectre and Meltdown attacked the branch-prediction optimization in almost all CPUs, without which the product is so slow as to be a different thing without it. Ditto for LLMs. Addressing the vulnerability may break it irrevocably---or at least require a complete rethink, a new architecture. <hr> <a href="https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html" source="MartinFowler.com" author="Birgitta Böckeler">Exploring Generative AI</a> <bq>The following are the dimensions of my current mental model of tools that use LLMs (Large Language Models) to support with coding. Assisted tasks<ul>Finding information faster, and in context Generating code “Reasoning” about code (Explaining code, or problems in the code) Transforming code into something else (e.g. documentation text or diagram)</ul>These are the types of tasks I see most commonly tackled when it comes to coding assistance, although there is a lot more if I would expand the scope to other tasks in the software delivery lifecycle.</bq> <bq>In this particular case of a very common and small function like median, I would even consider using generated code for both the tests and the function. The tests were quite readable and it was easy for me to reason about their coverage, plus they would have helped me remember that I need to look at both even and uneven lengths of input. However, for other more complex functions with more custom code I would consider writing the tests myself, as a means of quality control. Especially with larger functions, I would want to think through my test cases in a structured way from scratch, instead of getting partial scenarios from a tool, and then having to fill in the missing ones.</bq> <bq>The tool itself might have the answer to what’s wrong or could be improved in the generated code - is that a path to make it better in the future, or are we doomed to have circular conversation with our AI tools?</bq> <bq>[...] generating tests could give me ideas for test scenarios I missed, even if I discard the code afterwards. And depending on the complexity of the function, I might consider using generated tests as well, if it’s easy to reason about the scenarios.</bq> <bq>For the purposes of this memo, I’m defining “useful” as “the generated suggestions are helping me solve problems faster and at comparable quality than without the tool”. That includes not only the writing of the code, but also the review and tweaking of the generated suggestions, and dealing with rework later, should there be quality issues.</bq> <bq><ul>[...] Boilerplate: Create boilerplate setups like an ExpressJS server, or a React component, or a database connection and query execution. Repetitive patterns: It helps speed up typing of things that have very common and repetitive patterns, like creating a new constructor or a data structure, or a repetition of a test setup in a test suite. I traditionally use a lot of copy and paste for these things, and Copilot can speed that up.</ul></bq> Interesting. I've just always used the existing or made my own expansion templates. At least then it makes exactly what I want---and even leaves the cursor in the right position afterwards. Another thought I had is that the kind of programmer that this helps doesn't use any generalization for common patterns. Otherwise, the suggestions wouldn't be useful because they can't possibly take advantage of those highly specialized patterns. Or maybe they can, if they're included in the context. It seems unlikely, if only because the sample size is too small to be able to influence the algorithm sufficiently. But at that point, you're just spending all of your time coaxing your LLM copilot into building the code that you already knew you wanted. This practice seems like it would end up discouraging generalization and abstraction---unless it can grok your API. This is an age-old problem that is maybe solved, once and for all. The problem is that when you generalize a solution, it becomes much easier, more efficient, and more economical to maintain, but it can end up being more difficult to understand. If the API is well-made and addresses a problem domain with a complexity that the programmer is actually capable of understanding, then the higher-level API may be easier to use, and perhaps even maintain. However, a non-generalized solution is sometimes easier for a novice or less-experienced programmer to understand and extend. It's questionable whether you'd want your code being extended and maintained by someone who barely---or doesn't---understand it, but that situation is sometimes thrust on teams and managers. <bq>This autocomplete-on-steroids effect can be less useful though for developers who are already very good at using IDE features, shortcuts, and things like multiple cursor mode. And beware that when coding assistants reduce the pain of repetitive code, we might be less motivated to refactor.</bq> <bq>You can use a coding assistant to explore some ideas when you are getting started with more complex problems, even if you discard the suggestion afterwards.</bq> <bq>The larger the suggestion, the more time you will have to spend to understand it, and the more likely it is that you will have to change it to fit your context. Larger snippets also tempt us to go in larger steps, which increases the risk of missing test coverage, or introducing things that are unnecessary.</bq> On the other hand, <bq>[...] when you do not have a plan yet because you are less experienced, or the problem is more complex, then a larger snippet might help you get started with that plan.</bq> This is not unlike using StackOverflow or any other resource. There's no getting around knowing what you're doing, at least a little bit. You can't bootstrap without even a bootstrap. <bq>Experience still matters. The more experienced the developer, the more likely they are to be able to judge the quality of the suggestions, and to be able to use them effectively. As GitHub themselves put it: “It’s good at stuff you forgot.” This study even found that “in some cases, tasks took junior developers 7 to 10 percent longer with the tools than without them.”</bq> <bq>Using coding assistance tools effectively is a skill that is not simply learned from a training course or a blog post. It’s important to use them for a period of time, experiment in and outside of the safe waters, and build up a feeling for when this tooling is useful for you, and when to just move on and do it yourself.</bq> This is just like any other tool. There is no shortcut to being good at something complex. The only tasks for which there are shortcuts are the non-complex ones. In that case, you should be asking yourself why your solutions involve so much repetitive programming. <bq>We have found that having the right files open in the editor to enhance the prompt is quite a big factor in improving the usefulness of suggestions. However, the tools cannot distinguish good code from bad code. They will inject anything into the context that seems relevant. (According to this reverse engineering effort, GitHub Copilot will look for open files with the same programming language, and use some heuristic to find similar snippets to add to the prompt.) As a result, the coding assistant can become that developer on the team who keeps copying code from the bad examples in the codebase.</bq> That will be so much fun, especially if you can get an echo chamber of lower-skilled programmers approving each other's pull requests. 😉 <bq>We also found that after refactoring an interface, or introducing new patterns into the codebase, the assistant can get stuck in the old ways. For example, the team might want to introduce a new pattern like “start using the Factory pattern for dependency injection”, but the tool keeps suggesting the current way of dependency injection because that is still prevalent all over the codebase and in the open files. We call this a poisoned context , and we don’t really have a good way to mitigate this yet.</bq> <bq>Using a coding assistant means having to do small code reviews over and over again. Usually when we code, our flow is much more about actively writing code, and implementing the solution plan in our head. This is now sprinkled with reading and reviewing code, which is cognitively different, and also something most of us enjoy less than actively producing code. This can lead to review fatigue, and a feeling that the flow is more disrupted than enhanced by the assistant.</bq> <bq>Automation Bias is our tendency “to favor suggestions from automated systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.” Once we have had good experience and success with GenAI assistants, we might start trusting them too much.</bq> <bq>[...] once we have that multi-line code suggestion from the tool, it can feel more rational to spend 20 minutes on making that suggestion work than to spend 5 minutes on writing the code ourselves once we see the suggestion is not quite right.</bq> <bq>Once we have seen a code suggestion, it’s hard to unsee it, and we have a harder time thinking about other solutions. That is because of the Anchoring Effect, which happens when “an individual’s decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or ‘anchor’”. so while coding assistants’ suggestions can be great for brainstorming when we don’t know how to solve something yet, awareness of the Anchoring Effect is important when the brainstorm is not fruitful, and we need to reset our brain for a fresh start.</bq> <bq>The framing of coding assistants as pair programmers is a disservice to the practice, and reinforces the widespread simplified understanding and misconception of what the benefits of pairing are.</bq> <bq>Pair programming however is also about the type of knowledge sharing that creates collective code ownership, and a shared knowledge of the history of the codebase. It’s about sharing the tacit knowledge that is not written down anywhere, and therefore also not available to a Large Language Model. Pairing is also about improving team flow, avoiding waste, and making Continuous Integration easier. It helps us practice collaboration skills like communication, empathy, and giving and receiving feedback. And it provides precious opportunities to bond with one another in remote-first teams.</bq> <bq>LLMs rarely provide the exact functionality we need after a single prompt. So iterative development is not going away yet. Also, LLMs appear to “elicit reasoning” (see linked study) when they solve problems incrementally via chain-of-thought prompting. LLM-based AI coding assistants perform best when they divide-and-conquer problems, and TDD is how we do that for software development.</bq> <bq>Some examples of starting context that have worked for us:<ul>ASCII art mockup Acceptance Criteria Guiding Assumptions such as:<ul>“No GUI needed” “Use Object Oriented Programming” (vs. Functional Programming)</ul></ul></bq> <bq>For example, if we are working on backend code, and Copilot is code-completing our test example name to be, “given the user… clicks the buy button ” , this tells us that we should update the top-of-file context to specify, “assume no GUI” or, “this test suite interfaces with the API endpoints of a Python Flask app”.</bq> <bq>Copilot often fails to take “baby steps”. For example, when adding a new method, the “baby step” means returning a hard-coded value that passes the test. To date, we haven’t been able to coax Copilot to take this approach.</bq> Knowing a bit about how LLMs work, there's no way you really could train it to do TDD, because it's an iterative process. It doesn't know what TDD is, nor does the way it's built have any mechanism for learning how to do it. Nor does it know what coding is, for that matter. It's just a really, really good guesser. Everything it does is hallucination. It's just that some of it is useful. <bq>As a workaround, we “backfill” the missing tests. While this diverges from the standard TDD flow, we have yet to see any serious issues with our workaround.</bq> Changing how you program because of the tool is something you should do deliberately. This is a slippery slope. <bq>For implementation code that needs updating, the most effective way to involve Copilot is to delete the implementation and have it regenerate the code from scratch. If this fails, deleting the method contents and writing out the step-by-step approach using code comments may help. Failing that, the best way forward may be to simply turn off Copilot momentarily and code out the solution manually.</bq> Jaysus. That's pretty grim. <bq>The common saying, “garbage in, garbage out” applies to both Data Engineering as well as Generative AI and LLMs. Stated differently: higher quality inputs allow for the capability of LLMs to be better leveraged. In our case, TDD maintains a high level of code quality. This high quality input leads to better Copilot performance than is otherwise possible.</bq> <bq>Model-Driven Development (MDD). We would come up with a modeling language to represent our domain or application, and then describe our requirements with that language, either graphically or textually (customized UML, or DSLs). Then we would build code generators to translate those models into code, and leave designated areas in the code that would be implemented and customized by developers.</bq> <bq>That unreliability creates two main risks: It can affect the quality of my code negatively, and it can waste my time. Given these risks, quickly and effectively assessing my confidence in the coding assistant’s input is crucial.</bq> <bq>Can my IDE help me with the feedback loop? Do I have syntax highlighting, compiler or transpiler integration, linting plugins? Do I have a test, or a quick way to run the suggested code manually?</bq> <bq>I have noticed that in CSS, GitHub Copilot suggests flexbox layout to me a lot. Choosing a layouting approach is a big decision though, so I would want to consult with a frontend expert and other members of my team before I use this.</bq> That's because you care about architecture. Review was always important, but more so when code is being written by something you never hired. <bq>How long-lived will this code be? If I’m working on a prototype, or a throwaway piece of code, I’m more likely to use the AI input without much questioning than if I’m working on a production system.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s also good to know if the AI tool at hand has access to more information than just the training data. If I’m using a chat, I want to be aware if it has the ability to take online searches into account, or if it is limited to the training data.</bq> <bq>To mitigate the risk of wasting my time, one approach I take is to give it a kind of ultimatum. If the suggestion doesn’t bring me value with little additional effort, I move on. If an input is not helping me quick enough, I always assume the worst about the assistant, rather than giving it the benefit of the doubt and spending 20 more minutes on making it work.</bq> <bq>GitHub Copilot is not a traditional code generator that gives you 100% what you need. But in 40-60% of situations, it can get you 40-80% of the way there, which is still useful. When you adjust these expectations, and give yourself some time to understand the behaviours and quirks of the eager donkey, you’ll get more out of AI coding assistants.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand The Paper On AI Monosemanticity</a> <bq>Then, they trained a second AI called an autoencoder to predict the activations of the first AI. They told it to posit a certain number of features (the experiments varied between ~2,000 and ~100,000), corresponding to the neurons of the higher-dimensional AI it was simulating. Then they made it predict how those features mapped onto the real neurons of the real AI. They found that even though the original AI’s neurons weren’t comprehensible, the new AI’s simulated neurons (aka “features”) were! They were monosemantic , i.e., they meant one specific thing.</bq> <bq>[...] in order to even begin to interpret an AI like GPT-4 (or Anthropic’s equivalent, Claude), you would need an interpreter-AI around the same size. But training an AI that size takes a giant company and hundreds of millions (soon billions) of dollars.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDHvUviV8nk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/fDHvUviV8nk" author="James Laughlin" caption="URGENT: Ex-Google CBO says AI is now IMPOSSIBLE to stop with Mo Gawdat" source="YouTube" width="560px"> The interview starts off with a warning by the clearly overexcited host that the topics that will be discussed are so transgressive that you might be triggered by them. OK, sure. Whatever. Then there is the by-now familiar Mo Gawdat introduction where he talks about writing an entire book in nine days because his mind is so organized and his CHI is SO FLOW and he uses silence as fucking weapon and he doesn't waste time being like those other high-powered billionaire executives who are always chasing the cheese in the maze...but then he says things like, <bq>One of my best, best friends is Gelong Thubten, who's one of the top monks of the UK.</bq> What in the hell does that even mean? Is there a FIFA-style ranking for monks? Which reveals that his mindset isn't quite where he's like to have it yet. But hey, no problem, because what he is advocating is good, but it really applies best to those who no longer have to worry about any worldly needs because not following that advice is what made the hyper-millionaires in the first place. For those who aren't in that enlightened post-capitalist place---i.e., you've used capitalism to escape capitalism---the advice may ring a bit hollow. Also, the dude is wicket smart, and it's often the case that smart people can't quite see why other people don't just try harder to be as smart as them. The host is really embarrassing himself. He's all like, "aw man, I would love to be silent for days," to which Gawdat says, "even 26 days is not enough." Cool, bro...so the podcast host wants to be silent more, and the orbital capitalist millionaire tells him that he should do more than 26 days of silence. Neat. Did Gawdat forgot that the system is organized in a fashion that most people can't take that much time off without getting hungry or cold? Or that the guy he's talking to is literally full of shit because his whole jam is to talk on videos for likes to make money? <bq>By day 32, clarity sets in.</bq> Sure, ok. 32 days without <iq>reading, inputting information, or interacting with people.</iq> is ... a lot. I feel like it's the kind of thing that people do who can't find balance otherwise, who can't figure out how to get silent moments integrated into their normal lives. He talks about sitting in front of a paper notebook without any digital input, etc. But it would kill me to sit that long. Instead, I would go for a walk or a hike. He talks about "being smarter" than us and that AIs will be "a billion times smarter" than us "by 2037". What the hell does that even mean? I like that he doesn't even consider that he might be wrong about these levels of smartness. Like, where does context and wisdom enter into it? Like, what about useful intelligence? If you're capable of grasping incredible complexity, but you don't know a language that anyone else knows, then it's of limited use. I find these discussions interesting, but I don't know what that has to do with LLMs. It can get a PhD, it "outsmarts us", but it still doesn't know how many arms a person has. It can be convinced that 2 + 2 = 5. Don't we have to understand what this kind of "smart" actually means? There are already such beings in the world. Most people don't grasp a goddamned thing about their world. Now those who do grasp a lot terrified of being left behind? Or of things existing that they don't understand and can't understand? That's OK, no? There's a ton of stuff happening in countries where I don't know the language or the culture or anything. That's all out of my control already. There's no way I'll ever understand it. I wonder how much of what he's talking about is the terror of a control-freak? The attitude he has toward AI feels, to me, conceptually similar to the attitude that the U.S. has to anything it doesn't understand. Subjugate or eliminate. Maybe that's the right attitude to have for AI as well. It might be the right one because this time it's different---but, man, have I heard that many times before. I suppose if you accept that premise of smartness---he still hasn't defined it more than vaguely---then you'd want to keep it from replacing us? Are we really talking about that? I think his comments in the other video were pithier---that it's not the ASIs we should be afraid of, it's what people will do to us with them. I fall back on my comparison to the development of atomic power plants...and then atomic weapons. At 26:30, he says, <bq>one of the best code developers on Earth today is AI. As a matter of fact, with weeks or months or years---it doesn't matter the time; it's inevitable, it's doesn't matter when---they will be, by far, the best software developers on the planet.</bq> It kind of does matter when, no? Seriously, this guy elides so much stuff from his arguments. I wonder if he's thought it through and he just skips large portions or whether he's just ... full of shit. It doesn't matter when? Like, if they became better developers millennia from now, that would be the same so-called threat as if they were already the best software developers? C'mon, dude. He then cited another friend of his, CEO of Stability.AI, that, <bq>40% of all code on GitHub today is written by a machine.</bq> First of all ... proof? Second of all ... are we just going to take a CEO of an AI company at their word that AI is taking over? Third of all, is Gawdat being sneaky when he says "machine"? There's already a ton of generated code, but it wasn't generated an LLM. It was generated by tools that create boilerplate. And if it's 40%, is that good code? Or is volume the most important thing? This host is insufferable. He offers no pushback at all. Nothing. <bq>10 out of 10 of the most beautiful women in the world are not human. They're generated.</bq> C'mon, dude. You start off with this woo-ey meditation shit, but you think that a statement like that isn't philosophically fraught? Isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? That people think an AI-generated person is beautiful ... doesn't that say more about the superficiality of our society than about a takeover of AI? There are so many better things to discuss than this angle. <bq>you have GPT being that you know geek boy nerd if you want or---and I say boy, sadly, not girl okay? Because, again, it's developed around IQ and there is a lot of emphasis on the masculine side of analytical thinking and so on and so forth, which is an unbalanced form of intelligence.</bq> There's a lot to unpack there. Analytical thinking is masculine? Well, well, well. This kind of attitude is, I suppose, the kind of thing that leads to the inherent bias of the machine that he's talking about, but I'm increasingly less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that that's what he was trying to imply. I find it interesting that people like Gawdat discuss humans and people and what they would do, all without really speaking about how they actually tick. He says <bq> I think when AI reaches that level of intelligence will become irrelevant to it. [...] No human wakes up in the morning and goes 'you know what? I'm so annoyed by ants I'm gonna kill every ant on the planet.' Nobody does that, okay? It's just [that] ants become irrelevant. They become relevant if they come into your space, so you may spray your balcony or whatever but no human comes up with that enormous plan of 'you know what? The world is bad until we get rid of all ants.' Nobody does that.</bq> Ok. Like, you're ignoring a lot of history. People very definitely do that. It's called genocide. They don't always get every last one, but it's shocking to hear someone so admiring of their own intelligence not even think about Hitler or Suharto or Armenia or Native Americans. I wonder why he's so laser-like focused on potential problems while ignoring all of the very real ones that we have now. Like, he's worried about how we're going to interact with an AI that will be all-powerful and indifferent to us, right? But there are billions of people on the planet who already live exactly like that. Their lives are entirely influenced and completely controlled by the whims of an unseen and unknowable elite. It's hard not to see Gawdat's panic as being the reaction of someone who is in that elite and realizes that they may soon not be, as another alpha predator comes to town. Instead of recognizing the situation and trying to remedy his own role in it, he imagines a new layer and sounds the klaxon. AIs are going to destroy us all. Um, yeah, I guess, those of us that weren't already destroyed by capitalism? Like, capitalism's utter inability to do anything positive about climate change. Austerity. Intensifying animosity and dis-empathy between peoples. And I'm supposed to worry about SkyNet? I honestly feel like I'm listening to a blockchain huckster. The style is the same. At 31:30, he starts talking about how <iq>the most valuable asset on the planet ... intelligence.</iq> I was just talking about this conceit with Matuš yesterday. The problem is that our society values the wrong things. The most intelligent people also consider themselves to be the most valuable. Yes, intelligence can be leveraged, but everyone is important. That intelligent person doesn't help anyone if they die of sepsis. The discussion veers into relatively standard discussions of AI doomsaying. At 39:00, <bq>Gawdat: The only we could reset is by resetting the entire Internet. James: Now, is that something that could ever happen? Gawdat: Never. I was sitting in silence the other day, and I wrote down three quadrants...</bq> JFC. This is definitely the wrong interlocutor for Gawdat. Somebody needs to call him on his sweeping bullshit statements. "Reset the Internet" "1 Billion Times Smarter". C'mon. This is kind of fun, but it's not a serious discussion, because only Gawdat is contributing to this discussion. He's now spending a ton of time explaining how people are selfish and incapable of working together above a clan level. Duh. Or that no-one can really say where the Internet actually is, or where it is. Interesting question, but he skips away quickly to talk about how awesome intelligence is. He just can't stop. <bq>Gawdat: I tend to believe that abundance of intelligence normally uh you know is correlated to abundance of ethics. James: [nods vigorously]</bq> What? You've got to be kidding me. The relationship is nearly inversely proportional, with a few outliers. <bq>So, [...] the dumbest of all of us would be destroying the planet [...] and causing global climate change without even being aware of it you know. The less dumb would be destroying the planet despite being aware of it. Then, the the slightly smarter will attempt to stop destroying the planet because they're aware of it. The smarter still would attempt to fix the planet because they're aware of the damage right, and you continue that trajectory. The smartest of all will always be pro-life. I always say that human arrogance makes us think that we are the smartest human---smartest being---on the planet. That's not true at all. The smartest being on the planet is life itself.</bq> James just says <iq>I love that</iq> to everything, but Mo doesn't even notice that he's basically just talking to himself for 90 minutes. This didn't need to be an interview-format video, with two people. It's like 50% of the video screen is just a reaction video to Gawdat giving his opinions for 90 minutes. At 50:40, he tries to ask a question, <bq>James: What kind of control and ownership do we have as individuals, over the power of ... Gawdat: That's the most beautiful question of all.</bq> He didn't even let him finish asking the question. He instead shoots right back into talking about a book he wrote (Scary Smart, as he's done several times already). At about 53:00 or so, he launches into a discussion of ethics, absolutely confusing social mores with ethics by giving an example of a Brazilian girl in a G-String versus a more conservative girl in a Muslim society. They are both respected for doing the right thing in their society, I guess? Those are just cultural habits. I would have focused more on the underpinnings that led to those behaviors, like whether women have the same autonomy as men. But, yes, ethics is how societies resolve moral questions, like what is good, virtuous, evil, so I guess it fits. And he gets to say "G-String". This whole section is about bias, but he thinks we can control <iq>the ethical code of that machine.</iq> Which, if he's right, then it's already too late, no? Then he hand-waves some stuff about how governments will have to build their own AIs to prevent AIs from being used for evil, then shoots right past that to give examples of how enough swipes on Instagram can help fix the ethics of an AI. Whooooooo. This guy doesn't know many people. But then, but then, but then, he complains---for what feels like the fourth of fifth time---about people on his social-media accounts who are mean to him, when all he wants is to make billions of people happy. My cult-leader spidey-sense is going off to beat the band. And James is just nodding away like a dashboard bobblehead on a bumpy road, while the top comment on the video is <iq>[h]e is down to earth.</iq> I think Gawdat could be so much of a better person if he didn't spend so much time interacting with idiots online. Then, maybe, he wouldn't have to make 40-day retreats to get right again. I see it many other people I follow: otherwise intelligent people who end up making the broadest comparisons and most-shallow and incorrect arguments, just because that's how they've been taught to think by the kindergarten schoolyard that is online discourse. I was just listening to the Useful Idiots Podcast, with Aaron Maté and Katie Halper. I really like them. I think they're intelligent, witty, and have their ethics in the right place. But they drew several conclusions that were absolutely the correct ones, but justified them with completely specious reasoning. It's the kind of thing that makes you so assailable. You don't lock down your point because you made it in a way that someone who's looking to disagree with you, no matter what, is going to be able to use to continue the discussion long after it should have been shut down. I think that's my problem with Gawdat as well---his interactions have encouraged him to be lazy in his justifications for what I agree are the correct sentiments, which means I can't really use anything he says as ammunition. It's a pity. At 01:05:00, he argues for the essential goodness of humanity, <bq>Are there more serial killers in the world or people who condemn killing?</bq> Sure, there are more pulses who are essentially good. Fine. Correct. But it's the assholes who seem to have the overwhelming share of power and influence. The essentially good don't have any influence. Jesus was wrong. The meek aren't really lined up to inherit shit. He touches on this as well, saying that the worst people are in politics, who get all the money, who are contributing the most information to the AIs. He says <iq>the best of us</iq> have <iq>a duty</iq> to take part. Sigh. Who's the best of us? Which ethics? Implicit in his line of reasoning is that there is such a thing as "good ethics", else with what would you align an AI? How would you select the "right" people for politics and training AIs? Plato's philosopher kings all over again. <bq>You can't succeed by being good. And it's the most important time in human history to be good.</bq> He dances around the topic of how the system is utterly broken---perhaps because it's how he even got to a position where he has more money than any human needs and everyone wants to know what he has to say. When James asks him whether anyone can just ignore AI, Gawdat cuts him off again, saying <iq>you will die in two or three years.</iq> Wait, what? Then he clarifies, <bq>As a business. It's as if you were trying to hang onto the fax machine in the age of the Internet.</bq> I'm sure everyone's getting tired of me picking Mo's nits, but he really, really elides so much in his analysis of "the world." He uses "the world" as shorthand for all of the 1%-ers I know in Silicon Valley will have to adopt AI or their businesses will die. Most of the world doesn't have use cases for AI, but he doesn't think of them---or he's deluded into thinking that they do have use cases somehow---or that they can convinced to have them. He whipsaws back and forth between talking about his extraordinary empathy for his fellow man and his utter inability to understand that the things that make humanity worth preserving has nothing to do with electronic mediation---or with the coming AI mediation of interaction. He speaks very quickly, but I get the distinct feeling that he's very wide, but not very deep. He is what passes for deep in those circles. But he doesn't really know any hoi polloi. He values intelligence above all else. Nothing even comes close. That's not how the world works. Everything is important. Intelligence can be leveraged. But intelligence doesn't fix the indoor plumbing. He sounds kind of naive, but I think his spiel is also perfect for telling billionaires exactly what they want to hear. Hell, they could be getting worse advice, don't get me wrong, but his advice is so suffused with that hustler mentality---<iq>whatever job you're going to choose, choose the job where you're going to be in the top two of people [who] can do that job</iq>---all while he won't shut up about silence and retreats and mediation and spiritualism. Really? The TOP TWO? Like, does that mean you shouldn't work at McDonald's? Who are you talking to, man? Like just your circle of self-selected .... philosopher kings. And every idiot in his cult will think "he's talking right to me!" Then he corrects himself to say <iq>2 out of 10</iq>. <iq>Whatever you do, choose a job that you're very good at.</iq> James: <iq>That's powerful</iq> This guy is terrible. But 90% of the world is just looking at Mo, going, "choose" a job? Luxury! At 1:20:30, he says. <bq>Steve Jobs was successful because he had an empathy for the user's needs, an appreciation of beauty, and enormous creativity---that actually are all feminine qualities.</bq> There he goes again, with his masculine and feminine qualities. Am I missing something? Is this not junk science? At 1:23:00, James says <iq>I want to ask one last question.</iq> Dude, did you even get in a first question? I've just been watching your nodding head in the left-hand-side panel like you'd been generated by NVidia. Although I liked part of Mo's answer, describing what he thinks "purpose" is. <bq>I think the definition of purpose as per the Western society is very much commoditized---it's almost like a target. It's like, I set a Target in the future. I spend the next eight years pursuing it, feeling frustrated and upset that I haven't achieved it and then. when I achieve it, I have one of two choices. Either to set another target and feel upset for the next eight to nine years or to feel empty and feel that I'm purposeless. That's a very misleading view of purpose honestly. It's a very misleading view of the game of life in general. Because the only point in life that you have access to is right now. The Eastern philosophies will tell you: no, how can you set your life around the future, centric moment when life is here and now? How can you do that? The only way you can actually live life is to live here and now and so the definition of purpose becomes very different.</bq> Why would he think people would "hate him" for that? Ah, because he knows his audience is full of high-optimizing tech bros who are interested in appearing deep, but are really interested in money, and funding, and retiring. <bq>The purpose of life is to become the best you can be at something that you want to be and that makes life better for others. If you define life's purpose this way, it becomes so easy. Because you know what the one thing that a writer can do to achieve that purpose? It's to write. Even if what you write is discarded, the purpose is not the book that I'm writing. The purpose is to write. That way of looking at life is very different than the Western way and I think that way of looking at life---'I want to become the best at whatever it is that I can do'---that is the right way to live with purpose.</bq> He keeps talking from the viewpoint of something who's achieved a lot and who is very intelligent, constantly making the assumption that everyone else can achieve like him. Or, if not, making that assumption, not addressing the reality that most people who achieve the best that they can be at something are not going to be able to support themselves in the world we have. The world we have doesn't support this type of purpose for more than 5% of the people. We should have such a world, but we don't. I would have pumped him much more for ideas about how he thinks we can get there from here. How can we make the person who cleans toilets feel like they're valued, like they're living their best life? I'm not kidding. This is the problem you would need to solve. It's a shame that James just yes-manned his way through the interview because I feel that there's much more there---or maybe we would find out that there isn't. The other interview I saw with Mo Gawdat was very much in the same style. At the end, Mo says <iq>this was a wonderful conversation. At least for me, I felt it was really connected and deep.</iq> He spoke for 99% of the time. He was talking to himself, pretty much. <h>Video Games</h> <a href="https://whenistheweekend.com/theSphere.html" author="" source="">The Sphere</a> is a 3d simulator that shows the Sphere in Las Vegas, projecting whatever shader code you enter into the text box in the lower left-hand corner. There are a bunch of scripts at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38463832" author="jjwiseman" source="Hacker News">Write shaders for the (sim) Vegas sphere</a> that you can copy paste into the code box. A user named rezmason posted a shader script for the Matrix: <code>#define PI 3.14159265359 #define SQRT_2 1.4142135623730951 #define SQRT_5 2.23606797749979 //uniform mat4 projectionMatrix, modelViewMatrix; uniform float time; varying vec2 vUv; varying vec3 vNormal; highp float randomFloat( const in vec2 uv ) { const highp float a = 12.9898, b = 78.233, c = 43758.5453; highp float dt = dot( uv.xy, vec2( a,b ) ), sn = mod( dt, PI ); return fract(sin(sn) * c); } float wobble(float x) { return x + 0.3 * sin(SQRT_2 * x) + 0.2 * sin(SQRT_5 * x); } float getRainBrightness(float simTime, vec2 glyphPos) { float columnTimeOffset = randomFloat(vec2(glyphPos.x, 0.)) * 1000.; float columnSpeedOffset = randomFloat(vec2(glyphPos.x + 0.1, 0.)) * 0.5 + 0.5; float columnTime = columnTimeOffset + simTime * columnSpeedOffset; float rainTime = (glyphPos.y * 0.01 + columnTime) * 350.0; rainTime = wobble(rainTime); return 1.0 - fract(rainTime); } void main(){ float t = fract(time / 14.487); vec2 animatedUv = fract(vUv + vec2(t * 0.002, 0)); vec2 gridSize = vec2(3.14 / 2.0, 1.0) * 100.0; vec2 glyphUv = fract(animatedUv * gridSize); vec2 gridCoord = floor(animatedUv * gridSize) / gridSize; float brightness = getRainBrightness(t * 0.1, gridCoord); brightness = clamp(0.0, 1.0, brightness * 1.6 - 1.2); float coverage = 1.3 - length(glyphUv - 0.5) * 3.0; gl_FragColor = vec4(brightness * coverage * vec3(0.2, 1.0, 0.05), 1); }</code> It looks like this: <img src="{att_link}matrix_on_the_sphere.jpg" href="{att_link}matrix_on_the_sphere.jpg" align="none" caption="Matrix on the sphere" scale="75%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdBZY2fkU-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/QdBZY2fkU-0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Rockstar Games" caption="Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1"> It's set in Florida, for God's sake. They went back to Vice City. But it's in 2020s Florida, so it looks like San Andreas. Also, your lead character looks like they identify as female. The announcement on Reddit's GTA6 forum got over 40,000 comments. <img src="{att_link}gta6_on_reddit.png" href="{att_link}gta6_on_reddit.png" align="none" scale="80%">