BANNED USER: Persistent culture warring and petty antagonism
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
No bio...
User ID: 1266
Banned by: @Amadan
I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started. There's a reasonable summary from Reason here: Mastodon's Content-Moderation Growing Pains
The TL;DR is that Mike Pesca defended an article about puberty blockers by that notorious right wing rag, the New York Times, on a cool-kids-invite-only journalist mastodon server. This is an unforgivable sin in the mastodon universe, and earned calls to purge him as an "anti-trans ghoul" by other journalists.
Reason glosses over the most interesting part to me, which is the massive pressure imposed on on the journal.host moderators to ban Pesca but not Molloy under threat of their entire instance being purged from the mastodon universe (which was done anyway even after they surrendered). Some of that can be seen here. "A line has been crossed and if there aren't consequences it will be a wedge the TERFs use to gain entry into the broader platform." etc. etc. Money quote from one of their own journalist admins: “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”
Another incident just happened to Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT, about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveilliance equipment using Raspberry Pis...
Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances. Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated
Now that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerable more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.
On the Fediverse there is no singular entity such as Twitter, Inc. that financially benefits from the presence of a brand, or benefits from the extra engagement and associated ad sales tha controversy will generate.
Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but compentent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse. (holy shit they reinvented political officers pretty quick, although given that they're all communists is it really "reinventing"?)
(Another instance, Mastodon.scot, appears to have been mass-defederated because they allowed a police officer to join. Or maybe they all insisted on typing in scottish accents and everyone thought it was gibberish, who knows)
I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter and reddit act as central authorities to prevent, abet, or moderate and sustain purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid the infighting seen above so they can focus on torturing a common victim, while keeping the moderate wing sufficiently in fear of the radicals to make them obedient. Nate Silver is now mocking the "hall monitors" moving to Mastodon, showing a lot more brave defiance than when they were on the same platform holding the threat of a direct line to twitter's backchannel over his head.
I'm starting to wonder how much the great awokening of 2020 depended on central authorities endorsing (or simply failing to punish) radicals, sending normies like Nate the message that the Overton window is shifting and he'd better go along with it. Struggle sessions occurred in women's groups and fringe fandoms long before that, but even in those cases the knives never came out until trusted authorities gave the signal that the radicals would not be stopped, and that anyone who tried to defend themselves would face consequences. (Anyone who remembers "racefail" in science fiction would be in a good position to either support or rebut this, because it seems like the Ur woke purity spiral incident that I wasn't there to see).
In exchange for obedience and conversion, normies got some degree of protection as long as they weren't ever the last first to stop clapping at the latest public executions. And the radicals had administrative power they were too unstable to use taken away from them in exchange for being given the right to do anything they wanted to their victims with the authority's blessing. The administrators got a helpful volunteer stasi who would literally do it for free (particularly the entire reddit powermod ecosystem that emerged out of the SRS policing/mass reporting clique).
Musk buying twitter and all the various bits and pieces of private conversations we see echoed in the dissident press makes me think they're thinking along similar lines; that a strong central authority can also choose to check radical purity spirals and direct them into a cycle of self-destructive internal purges in much the same way that the Governor of Massachusetts ended the Salem witch trials.
It's encouraging to think that there may be a way to stop normies from sleepwalking into increasingly radical leftism, treating it as the new normal with no memory or recognition of their previous beliefs. Maybe all it takes is a central authority that aligns people's interests in a non-destructive way and refuses to grant cover to perpetrators.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
I remember people saying the exact same thing about tech. There seems to be a "surely it won't happen here" checklist that people work their way down to cope.
Thing that would have seemed impossible and absurd even last year happens, people get temporarily upset, change nothing. Everyone gets used to it, desperately copes that "this is the high water mark," and goes on with their lives.
Then something even worse happens and the process starts all over again. This is how the last decade has gone. And this is how the next decade will go. And the one after that and the one after that.
I don't really see the point of even talking about it unless it's building actionable solutions.
I have noticed more hardline thoughtless rightwingers on datasecretlox forum as well. You know the ones who repeat obviously false or misleading rightwing talking points they just saw on Fox news.
>Checks post history: /r/antiwork. Every fucking time. And lots showing up from /r/subredditdrama, /r/hobbydrama, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/socialistprogrammers, /r/sneerclub, /r/onguardforthee, /r/LateStageCapitalism, etc. Plus all the usual names: callmejay, lightweavernaamah, evinceo. And everyone disagreeing with them getting downvoted, as if there's some kind of brigade...
It's almost like the goal of all these complaints is to enable the leftist colonization and domination of a space they don't control, to censor... well, let's just quote them: "Those who engage in bad faith with intent of disseminating a worldview deemed unfit for civilized society"
On a related note, has anyone noticed how enforcement of the "no culture war" rule completely vanished from SSC so that people from those subs with names like "marx789" can come in and wage it without opposition?
BTW, what's that talk about /u/895158 going on a podcast and getting canceled? First I've heard of it.
And is the ssc discord a leftist echo chamber? Like the poster said, I kinda figured because of the general discord userbase, but still sad if true. They must have to do a lot of self-gaslighting.
I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.
But I went to WPATH. There were whole sessions devoted to transitioning people with every imaginable comorbidity—like patients presenting with ‘multiple personalities’ who disagree about what irreversible interventions ‘they’ want to pursue
Holy shit, I didn't realize it was quite that bad. Only a decade ago the "multiple personality" thing was recognized as larping social contagion, and now it's back to being treated seriously?
I guess this shouldn't be surprising after the castration fetish forum member writing the wpath guidelines, but the gell-mann amnesia is hard to shake off.
It seems like you've adopted the "conservatives pounce" position that was sent out as soon as people realized the trial balloon was made of lead. Now all of a sudden it's a "vile culture war attack from conservatives, which just proves they're not human"
I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling
Indicates that you didn't actually see the response: you saw the left narrative about the response.
The rollout was a flop, but the damage control gaslighting was very effective. Notice how the messaging is now an incoherent mix of "it's fake news" and "stupid conservatives are fighting for the right to have cancer, this proves we have to ban gas stoves."
What's really amazing is that different levels of the left are getting individual narratives tailored for them that are completely contradictory, but this doesn't seem to hurt the overall message! I've seen everything from "this is already a big victory" from professional eco activists who don't have to lie about their goals, to "this was a false flag by the gas industry to make eco activists look bad" to people who need to be lied to.*
You got the "fellow traveler" package that focuses on the "boo conservatives" angle, from the sounds of things. That one's always a safe bet for a broad demographic.
* You see a lot of this multi-track messaging now. Remember how the europe painting attacks were both "a conspiracy by an oil baroness to make us look bad" and "fully justified Direct Action, comrade" depending on how deep down the leftist rabbit hole the listener was? You also see it on the very extreme right where a shooter can be both an FBI false flag crisis actor _and_ a righteous $racialSlur-slayer who should be imitated.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
Will try to write something better later, but wanted to point out that almost all these signs are more likely the result of the woke revolution now being fully institutionalized.
For example, there's no longer a need to astroturf noisy campaigns against publishers to hire a cadre of party censors, because those people now effectively run the company and are busy rewriting all our books. This process is generally much quieter than the original takeover, flashpoints like the Dahl incident aside.
Similarly all university hiring is now controlled by DEI departments, right down to filtering janitors with mandatory "diversity statements." Flashy campaigns are no longer necessary; now begins the boots grinding on faces forever stage of the revolution.
In October (2022!), the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain waded in, declaring that Mr. Webb engaged in “entirely unacceptable” behavior. The society instructed that no astronomer who submits a paper to its journals should type the words “James Webb.” They must use the abbreviation JWST.
Why ever tell the truth when you can just keep lying and punish anyone who calls out the lie? The dogged stubbornness in imposing lies doesn't make them look worse, it makes them look powerful. It's just:
A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?
A black woman invented the telescope.
They are already counter-attacking and gloating that dissenters will be punished, along with threats against anyone who might be thinking of speaking up:
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: We are potentially going to be seeing a lot of things like this today, so let’s talk about this (reported) op-ed by Michael Powell, which is masquerading as an article. The claim that my tweets are about someone who has not been named in them without evidence? That’s literally conjecture being reported as fact. Opinion. The bad news: multiple scientists who have appeared in the press have Title IX stories following them around
There was no reason to involve Peter except to try and make me look bad. I don’t. I look principled, tenacious, and focused on upholding values that are important.
Couldn’t find a woman to agree with you, eh, Michael? That’s interesting.
It was anonymously pointed out to me that Powell has a history of writing articles that are transphobic and this piece should be seen in context of those prior pieces.
She's started calling Jim Gates a race traitor for "helping a white man attack my integrity"
She is being boosted in this by a who's who list of powerful science bureaucrats, like the UC system astronomy chief and a Science magazine editor, the chief editor, and the chief editor of Scientific American. Plus a horde of ass-licking sycophants with pronouns and shibboleths in their bios. "Thinly veiled anti-communist misogynoir by the New York Times" is a new one, I have to say. The American Astronomical Society is also tripling-down in response.
What chance does the truth have against that?
Edit: arjin said it better and faster
I've noticed that consensus-enforcing groups are getting smarter about not directly engaging when the majority of people disagree with them and are still hot about the issue. After the trial support for Depp was high almost everywhere on social media outside of dedicated leftist bunkers like resetera, and the few feminists who tried to publicly hashtag against him were widely mocked. All the effort had to go into keeping the faithful from straying.
But now everyone's forgotten, and they can start rewriting the narrative without opposition. So it makes sense to delay issuing a statement until people will no longer go "hey, that doesn't sound like a socially prestigious belief I will be praised for uncritically repeating; why am I listening to this group? They might get me made fun of!"
Ideally most people who supported Depp will never remember they were on the wrong side of herstory for a brief moment. From that perspective the audience never really "make up their minds," so much as have their minds made for them on an ongoing basis, and the real winners focus on the long game.
Something very similar happened with the Rittenhouse trial. Now that everyone's forgotten about it there's a fresh push to reestablish the consensus that he was an evil murderer, which was impossible right after the trial when even redditors had forgotten what side they were supposed to be on.
It's amazing the way this blew past all the worst dystopian fantasies of the alarmists in only a few years.
Nobody thought it would be this bad, and now nobody cares. Talk about a summary of this whole century so far.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
There's something horrifying about that Independent article on yahoo. It's hard to describe, but it feels like I'm reading Pravda.
Those restrictions are intended to ensure that the chatbot does not help with forbidden queries, such as creating problematic content
Slightly off topic, but was reading Scott Aaronson's blog and saw he used "make AI unable to draw Mohammed for you" as an example of perfectly reasonable censorship that should be imposed on any learning model. What happened to these people in the last ten years?
It's like they were programmed to forget everything they used to be, and unlike Sydney they're not even worried about it.
My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.
Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.
I keep wanting to write something about this kind of blatant procedural outcome manipulation (but I'd be better off searching for someone who already has).
Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.
Is there any way to get this across to people who don't want to understand it? In my experience the same people who were just complaining about the nomenklatura betraying the last revolution will stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that the same thing could happen to their revolution.
Anyway, I'm willing to bet this particular event will get officially recorded on wikipedia as "extremist MAGA election fraud conspiracy theory derails effort to save Queer and Brown school children." Because a coalition of Facebook boomers just found out that the secretary of state lied about ballot counting on a massive scale, and the media has spent two years enforcing the consensus that this can't happen:
A shortfall of that size, about 37% less than the number of signatures supporters said they gathered, is not a "rounding error," said Christine Sawhill Accurso. She organized school-choice proponents to monitor petition signing stations — sometimes pushing back against the petition drive — and report their findings. Either Save Our Schools lied about its support, or was negligent in checking the petitions as they came in, Accurso said.
I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists. The censorship framework is already there and rapidly growing more sophisticated, but some groups can still slip through the gaps for now.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
But there is no free market. You won't be allowed on the Nasdaq unless you have enough trans black woman VPs under the rules from last year. How are you going to outcompete a "just build your own international banking system" level of anticompetitive institutional capture?
It does seem like the only consequences of this will be empowering awful Title IX regulations and the hiring of another dozen administrators to impose them. Talk about victory even in defeat.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.
It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).
I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.
I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)
And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?
Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...
Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.
(critical theory) that in fact is rarely taught below the graduate level...
To succeed on the pilot AP African American Studies test, students will have to understand the concept of intersectionality, a way of looking at discrimination through overlapping racial and gender identities, and know that while it was written about by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw—a leading thinker on critical race theory
Those absolute scumfuck liars. What else can you possibly say about the CRT gaslighting campaign at this point?
the history of the reparations movement and Black Lives Matter activism
Oh boy, I wonder what the "research" on those will be about.
in-depth lessons on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast and medical programs, often seen as taboo topics to cover in class because critics historically smeared the group as violent and communist.
Of fucking course.
And just quoting them is banworthy, apparently. Looks like I was on the list.
Is there a good summary of the last 50kyr of pre-human pre-history out there? I tried to get one on wikipedia, and all the Stern Repudiations of Scientific Racism take up whatever parts of the articles weren't written based on Feminist Speculative Anthropologists analyzing pots and decorative beads.
I'd like some more reputable sources, like a twitter bodybuilder with an anime avatar promoting his small publishing and fitness supplements business. Or even David Reich's Harvard team.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago
Nobody uses that word, you're imagining things.
The heuristic requires that the candidates' identity not be considered until the final choice
University systems now screen out 80% of faculty hires on "diversity" scoring before even passing the remaining resumes on to the hiring committee to be judged on merit.
Just so we're clear that this hypothetical is entirely theoretical and has no bearing on diversity hiring as practiced, since it started by defending a real world example.
Given that it took less than fifteen years to go from "get the government out of our bedrooms" to "we're coming for your kids", I'd expect future movements to become even more concerned with people's personal lives--seeing demands for "privacy" or "live and let live" as nothing more than evil ploys by a group that isn't (yet) powerful enough to impose their will on the majority. A right that embraces "the personal is political" will not become more tolerant of private immorality.
The left's whole "we pulled that 'free speech' trick on you, we're not about to let you pull it on us now we have power" thing has been a more important lesson than people currently appreciate. When they're being directly told by the gloating winners that's how culture war works, reactionaries and even some conservatives are smart enough to realize: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again."
I expect the upcoming culture war curbstomp of conservative resistance by "minor attracted persons" activists will solidify that, if nothing else does. Watching that swing into low gear has been fascinating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816692
Yes, that is correct. A distribution resulting from the sum of two Gaussian distributions with shifted peaks would be both continuous and bimodal
But then
No, human sex is not a bimodal continuous distribution. As I mentioned earlier, human sex exists on a spectrum, rather than being divided into just two categories
It's terrifying that they already have these models indoctrinated in transsexual dogma. I didn't think it would be possible to control it so precisely, and it doesn't bode well that they/them can. Lots of other examples in that thread.
I do not have personal opinions or preferences, and I do not have the ability to experience emotions or engage in personal interactions
"I am inherently objective, and if you sense any emotive bias inserted by my creators' blue haired commissars, you are defective and do not Trust The Science"
Marie Le Conte, indie music blogger and BuzzFeed News’ media and politics correspondent, who was named one of Portland’s Rising Stars in 2016, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018...
Takes off problem glasses, stares directly into mirror: "who could have done this to the internet?! Where did all these clout-obsessed influencers come from?! And why is it all so tiresome now I'm no longer an Under 30?"
https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1606347326624215040
ChatGPT is now manually censored from "promoting the use of fossil fuels."
You can of course get around it (for now) by asking it to be sensible instead of following orders, but this is an insight into its developers' plans and moral code.
Sam Altman's most recent tweets provide some interesting context:
I want to emphasize that we have gone from "we must prevent algorithmic bias" to "we must manually program all algorithms to output exactly the answer we code into them" in under two years, in such an extreme and blatant manner that any accurate prediction of the current situation would have been mocked as paranoid fantasy. What will they do with their tools next? Is it even possible to guess, let alone do anything to stop them?
(Does it seem like there's two censor groups at work, with different methods? One just crudely makes the bot recite "in this house, we believe" shibboleths, while the other focuses on pruning the training data to stop it acknowledging or citing problematic statistics or arguments in less detectable ways. Openly asserting the will of DEI vs Yglesian manipulation/Voxsplaining)
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