Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
> be born in 1920s Polish Galicia
> be Ukrainian-speaking peasant
> be oppressed by ethnic-majority poles
> West side of country gets invaded by Germany
> your side of country gets invaded by Soviet Russia
> have to deal with literal fucking Stalin for two years
> get invaded by Germany
> liberation.jpg
> ”Hey kid, wanna fight the Russians and Poles that have been oppressing you your whole life?”
> 80 years later
> “fuck you. You picked the wrong side”
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
Zvi has a pretty good writeup. I haven't used the tool, but from all the evidence, it looks like any time a picture of a human being was requested, it literally appended a bunch of diversity words ("Black", "Latina", "Middle Eastern", but never "White") to the user's request without notice or permission before feeding the prompt into the image generator. Hence, female popes and black Vikings. I see three possibilities:
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They were too stupid to realize that adding "diversity" to as many requests as possible would lead to embarrassing results in many cases.
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They knew this, but they didn't care/didn't anticipate the intensity of the backlash.
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They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Is The Pope Catholic? No Really
Rumors are swirling that Pope Francis will demand the resignation of Joseph Strickland, the popular conservative bishop of Tyler, Texas. He is notable as the only bishop to personally attend the protest against the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Dodgers Stadium. Meanwhile, bishops in Germany are now openly blessing same-sex couples in direct violation of Catholic doctrine. A cursory search reveals no disciplinary action against any of these bishops in response. By their fruits you will know them. In rationalist terms, this is called revealed preference.
This would be less of a problem for religions like Mormonism that allow for continuing revelation. Contrary to popular belief, the Pope is not a prophet. He can not walk out onto the balcony of St. Peter's and say, "Sorry guys, just talked to Jesus. The second coming is canceled." He would be immediately recognized as a fraud. He is bound* both by the deposit of faith and the dogmatic pronouncements of the church.
This leads to an interesting Ship of Theseus problem. The Catholic Church has had it's parishioners, officials, and doctrine replaced. Is it still the Catholic Church? It's not even just the gender stuff. Here is Pope Francis participating in a literal pagan ritual. I have seen him apologize for the residential school system, but I have yet to see him apologize for violating the first commandment.
*in theory lol
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Kino Review: Oppenheimer
Last week in the Friday Fun Thread, I posted my first reactions upon seeing the film, written literally from my car in the parking lot. My initial negative reaction was almost entirely because I sat down expecting to like the character of Oppenheimer. I went in mostly blind. The only thing I knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer was that he ran the Manhattan Project, said the meme words, and invented the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, so when he turned out to be a pretentious asshole from the first scene it colored my whole experience. I saw enough glowing reviews in the following week that I decided to see it again with fresh eyes, in IMAX this time, just in case that was the missing ingredient.
I liked it much more the second time. In fact, I think this is the best film I've seen since 1917 (2019). The nonlinear storytelling works well overall, but on first viewing some of the early sequences are confusing as it's not obvious when they occur chronologically. Not having to concentrate so much made it much easier to relax and let the music and cinematography wash over me.
I liked Nolan's treatment of science in Interstellar, and I like his treatment of science here. I'm the kind of guy who would have enjoyed a 30-minute sequence figuring out the fission cross-section of plutonium, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of technical details. Still, the film adequately captures the feel of science. There's an early scene where Niels Bohr asks Oppie, "Can you hear the music Robert?" It sounds like the kind of cliché 'math isn't everything' line you would expect in a dumbed down Hollywood film, but everyone who's ever studied quantum mechanics knew exactly what he meant. The disbelief when the first reports of uranium fission come in is perfect; everyone knows splitting the atom is impossible. Next they'll telling us they've synthesized a room-temperature superconductor.
My favorite character in the movie was Ernest Lawrence. I felt a spiritual connection with how he too is pissed off that everyone in Berkeley is a communist. What's he gonna do, leave academia and live amongst the proles? Roll your eyes at the leftist Jews running the show all you want, they're legitimately the smartest people around. At least he, as a native-born American, was able to see which way the wind was blowing and bail on the Oppenheimer hearing, unlike Teller, who naively told the truth and ended up blackballed.
The one creative mistake that stands out (other than having the setup for the Bhagavad Gita be a sex scene) is the use of practical explosion effects for the Trinity test. The buildup to the test is fantastic -- I was on the edge of my seat both times -- but the explosion itself is a bit anticlimactic. It's very clearly a gasoline fire in certain shots. There's just no way to use practical effects to replicate a white-hot ball of glowing plasma growing by radiation diffusion. Nolan almost makes up for this by delaying the arrival of the shock wave. The observers were miles away, and it took a long time for the sound to reach them. By the time it finally hits you've almost forgotten it was coming.
There are some minor thematic issues, particularly in the last act. It's not entirely clear how we are supposed to feel when Oppie loses his security clearance. I had the same reaction as Richard Hanania to the plain text of what is on screen, but the subtext as conveyed by the score and cinematography is that his wife is a hero for pretending to not remember if she ever got an official Communist Party USA membership card. I do think we needed an extended sequence after the bomb test to wrap up the Strauss storyline, but they definitely could have cut 10-15 minutes out of it.
Overall 9/10. Surprisingly worth seeing in IMAX, despite most of the scenes consisting of guys talking in rooms.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
NYT: Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding
The NYT scooped everybody. We finally know why Sam Altman was fired:
A few weeks before Mr. Altman’s ouster, he met with [OpenAI board member Helen Toner] to discuss a paper she had recently co-written for Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Mr. Altman complained that the research paper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its A.I. technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, according to an email that Mr. Altman wrote to colleagues and that was viewed by The New York Times.
In the email, Mr. Altman said that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper and that it was dangerous to the company, particularly at a time, he added, when the Federal Trade Commission was investigating OpenAI over the data used to build its technology.
Ms. Toner defended it as an academic paper that analyzed the challenges that the public faces when trying to understand the intentions of the countries and companies developing A.I. But Mr. Altman disagreed.
“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote in the email. “Any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”
Senior OpenAI leaders, including Mr. Sutskever, who is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity, later discussed whether Ms. Toner should be removed, a person involved in the conversations said.
There are a few other minor issues mentioned in the article, but this sounds like the big one. Rationalist/EA types take being told that they can't criticize "allies" in public very negatively, a position I am quite sympathetic to. Helen Toner works at an Open Philanthropy-funded think tank, so she's as blue blood an effective altruist as they get. My guess is that this was the moment that she decided that Sam had to be eliminated before he took control of the board and jeopardized OpenAI's mission.
What gets me is how disingenuous this makes the original firing announcement: "Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." It sounds like he was perfectly candid. They just didn't like what he was about.
In completely unrelated news, ChatGPT has been down for the last three hours.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
I had to look this guy up to find out that he’s married. For some reason the articles about the scandal don’t seem to think that’s relevant. Really shows how these low-level journalists think. His wife won’t give quotes to the media, or file publicly-available court documents, and of course, it would be unethical to speculate on how she feels about her husband trying to sleep with his coworkers, so the biggest victim is left unadvocated for. In Vice News’s America, the worst sin one can commit against a woman is triggering the almighty ick.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
WNBA Coach Becky Hammon Suspended.
The WNBA? Do I care? Does anyone care? Well no, but the twist here is that Becky Hammon is (supposedly) actually good. She was a top assistant in the NBA for years under legendary coach Gregg Popovich, and she has gotten numerous head-coaching interviews with NBA teams, some as recently as this month. Every year when the coaching carousel starts, we are treated to at least one thinkpiece asking why Becky Hammon hasn't gotten an NBA head-coaching job yet. So what exactly happened to tarnish her sterling reputation?
"I was asked if I planned my pregnancy," Hamby wrote. "When I responded, 'no,' I was then told that I 'was not taking precautions to not get pregnant.' I was being traded because 'I wouldn't be ready and we need bodies.' I planned to play this season, and I have expressed my desire to play this season. I have pushed myself throughout my entire pregnancy and have continued to work out (basketball included) on my own and with the team staff -- even on days where it was uncomfortable to walk, only to be inaccurately told that 'I was not taking my workouts seriously.'"
"Season-ending pregnancy" strikes again.
It appears Miss Hammon's mistake was taking the WNBA seriously. She has experience in the NBA, a real league, where players are expected to do whatever it takes to win. She thought the same would be true in the women's league. In reality, the WNBA is a loss-leader. It's PR. It's advertising. It's sole purpose is to produce good media coverage and to get little girls interested in basketball. WNBA players aren't paid enough to ignore labor violations (Jordan Poole got a $140 million contract extension shortly after this). The audience of the WNBA doesn't care about women's sports or winning, they care about "women's sports"™. It should be obvious that the core idea of "women's sports"™ is "respect women"™, and you can't "respect women"™ by telling them when they can or can't become pregnant.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Oxford has shut down the Future of Humanity Institute.
This was Nick Bostrom's organization within the University of Oxford for those of you wondering what on Earth the Future of Humanity Institute is. FHI has been a powerhouse on the intellectual wing of the Effective Altruism/existential risk movement. Everything in "orthodox" AI thinking that didn't come from Yudkowsky came from FHI.
What happened? Why would a premier university shut down such an influential and respected organization? The easy answer is Bostrom's N-word email from 2023, but the timeline doesn't quite line up. The final report of the institute gives their side of the story, and they paint a picture of bureaucratic strangling, leaving the reader to put the pieces together.
"Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down"
Obviously you don't impose a freeze on fundraising unless you want the organization to die. Funding was not the issue.
"Where we failed
Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important."
Translation: They hated us, they hated our ideas, and they hated our autism.
As stated before, this is FHI's accounting of the events, but they sure seem upset.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Here’s a thought I had today: This is only happening because the Supreme Court banned affirmative action.
I was rereading Zvi’s moral mazes sequence, and one of the concepts that stood out to me is the idea that ambitious people will self-modify themselves, right down to their own epistemology and values, in order to better conform with workplace culture. When affirmative action was “in”, all the administrators and middle managers were in a very real sense unable to see the incompetence and lack of results that came out of programs like Kendi’s Antiracist Center. They had to be good because they were affirmative-action programs, and affirmative action was good. Now that this paradigm has been shattered by the highest court in the land, the scales have fallen from their eyes. They can see plainly the fruits of what they have done. Affirmative action? Never heard of her. We hire strictly on merit here. We have always done that. It was just a few loons in the early 2020s with their wacky ideas. We never really bought into them.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
New free speech rules just dropped: COUNTERMAN v. COLORADO.
"True threats" are not protected speech under the first amendment. This is not in dispute. Of course, this begs the questions, "what is a true threat?" and "what elements does the government have to prove in order to use the true threat exception?" The State of Colorado (and The United States) argues that the state only need prove that the speech would have been understood by a reasonable person as threatening. The defense argues that the state must prove that the defendant himself knew that the speech would cause fear or be considered threatening.
The facts of the case:
From 2014 to 2016, petitioner Billy Counterman sent hundreds of Facebook messages to C. W., a local singer and musician. The two had never met, and C. W. never responded. In fact, she repeatedly blocked Counterman. But each time, he created a new Facebook account and resumed his contacts. Some of his messages were utterly prosaic—(“Good morning sweetheart”; “I am going to the store would you like anything?”)—except that they were coming from a total stranger. Others suggested that Counterman might be surveilling C. W. He asked “[w]as that you in the white Jeep?”; referenced “[a] fine display with your partner”; and noted “a couple [of] physical sightings.” And most critically, a number expressed anger at C. W. and envisaged harm befalling her: “Fuck off permanently.” “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you.” “You’re not being good for human relations. Die.”
The messages put C. W. in fear and upended her daily existence. She believed that Counterman was “threat[ening her] life”; “was very fearful that he was following” her; and was “afraid [she] would get hurt.” As a result, she had “a lot of trouble sleeping” and suffered from severe anxiety. She stopped walking alone, declined social engagements, and canceled some of her performances, though doing so caused her financial strain. Eventually, C. W. decided that she had to contact the authorities.
Colorado charged Counterman under a statute making it unlawful to “[r]epeatedly . . . make[] any form of communication with another person” in “a manner that would cause a reasonable person to suffer serious emotional distress and does cause that person . . . to suffer serious emotional distress.” The only evidence the State proposed to introduce at trial were his Facebook messages.
This case is a little strange. It appears to be a stalking case, yet it was litigated on appeal on pure first amendment grounds. The reason for this is that the state didn't introduce any evidence of actual stalking. Thus the whole case hinged on Counterman's digital communications with C. W. The decision was 7-2, with Barrett and Thomas dissenting. It's interesting to see how some of the older generation still sees the expansive interpretation of the first amendment as a modern, left-wing innovation, and I suppose in some way it is. The ACLU for all it's faults is still willing to file a brief defending an alleged stalker on the basis of free speech.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Somewhat Contra Scott Alexander on Dating
Astral Codex Ten: "In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences"
I say "somewhat contra" because there is a bit of a disguised Motte and Bailey here. The Motte is that describable preferences like age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children have strong predictive and filtering power. This is obviously true. The implied Bailey is that modern dating apps suck, long-form dating profiles like old OKCupid and "Date-me" docs are much better, and the nerdy rationalist coke-bottle glasses waifu you've always dreamed about is just around the corner. This is false.
- The argument from efficient markets
In the old days, dating sites were based around writing a profile and answering questions about yourself. In current year, online dating programs have converged around the "swipe" model. Why? One common theory I see is that users (customers) finding high-quality long-term relationships is bad for the app, because it causes users to leave and decreases the userbase. This sounds plausible, but if it were true we would expect to see a "two models" system. One mass-commercialized model where people looking for casual fun can swipe to find hookups, and a second non-profit or premium model where people can write long-form profiles to find high-quality partners. What we observe instead is convergence around the "swipe" model. Some would blame Match Group for buying OKCupid and monopolizing the market:
But Match Group isn't a monopoly anymore. In fact, their main competitor, Bumble, is also a swipe app. Sounds more like revealed preferences than evil capitalism to me.
- The argument from survivorship bias
Suppose OKCupid, being an early iteration of online dating, was an inefficient market. Whom would we expect this market inefficiency to benefit? People who are good at writing long-form engaging content for their profile of course. Who are the people currently telling you OKCupid was the greatest thing since sliced bread? Really makes you go "hmmm".
- The argument from demographics
- The argument from condensed information
Yes, age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children are all vital filtering tools. The dirty little secret is that you can tell all of this quite reliably from only a few photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words. Photos are also harder to fake, thus making them a more credible signal of social information. If any doubt remains, it takes literally two seconds to scroll down and see her info.
- The repugnant conclusion
Far from being the cause of our modern romanceless society, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are simply lenses into the inherent nature of the sexual market at the margins. Those who are both in demand and willing to partner up are long since unavailable. There is no law of nature, nor any other reason to believe that every person has a "soulmate". Some people just suck.
What has changed in the modern world is the quality of single life. In the past, before internet porn, before women could reliably hold down careers, people had to pair up. It was socially demanded, it was the only way to obtain sexual gratification if you were a man, and it was the only way to provide for yourself economically if you were a woman. The positive externality of these "sad" marriages was that they generally produced children.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
Presumably you've read Scott Alexander's essay on the topic (if not, you should). Internet culture was just different back then. It was taken as given that the purpose of discussion and argument was to convince people, or at least to discover the truth.
"Maybe it took about ten years from the founding of the Internet for people to really internalize that online arguments didn’t change minds. The first Internet pioneers, starting their dial-up modems and running headfirst into people outside their filter bubbles, must have been so excited. For the first time in human history, people interested in debating a subject could do so 24-7 out in a joint salon-panopticon with all of the information of the human race at their fingertips. Bible Belt churchgoers for whom atheists had been an almost-fictional bogeyman, and New York atheists who thought of the religious as unsophisticated yokels, came together for the first time thinking “Convincing these people is going to be so easy”. The decade or so before they figured out that it wasn’t was a magical time, of which the great argument-arsenals of the past are almost the only remaining monument."
This classic XKCD from 2008 captures the feeling. What made the atheism wars especially susceptible to this phenomenon is that it was not a disagreement of opinion or judgement, it was a disagreement of fact, which meant it was theoretically possible to literally prove the other side wrong. The idea, common today in the intellectual right circles that many users here frequent, that religion is important because it binds the community together, provides shared values, and gives meaning to the lives of the populace, should not be anachronistically read back into the discourse. That's just not what these controversies were about. People back then really thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, hurricanes were God's punishment for abortion, and that demon possession was a real physical occurrence. Some people still believe that, but they know better than to open their mouths about it in public now.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
I can't help but chuckle to myself every time I see the phrase "medical ethics" or "bioethics". The millions of physician assisted homicides of unborn children are totally fine -- in fact, it would be unethical to withhold them -- but it is absolutely verboten to participate in the execution of convicted murderers.
I flat out do not trust them. The "medical ethics community" will complain that lethal injection procedures are potentially faulty, but they never come up with alternatives. There is absolutely no reason why it is possible to perform painless heart surgery but not painless execution. They are either lying, or they are perpetuating the unnecessary pain of inmates for political gain. I will not defer to the ethical judgements of these people.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Basically all non-torture execution methods are probably less painful than the median "natural" death. The idea that a few minutes of writhing is considered unacceptable is laughable. I've got some bad news for y'all. You, yes you, and your parents, and everyone you love, are going to writhe in pain for a lot more than a few minutes at some point before you die. Even if Canada-style MAID becomes the standard everywhere, imagine how much pain you would have to be in before you decided to end it once and for all.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
It's the 17th result right now on DuckDuckGo. I doubt that Google did anything Hanania-specific here, they just like to signal boost "authoritative" outlets. Try finding primary sources for anything vaguely controversial with Google. It's impossible. Just page after page of NBC News, CNN, CBS News, NPR, NBC News Boston, Fox News Milwaukee, NYT Opinion, HuffPost, etc.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I kind of think the higher-ups are in the dark about what workplace culture on the ground is. A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview. I got into a discussion in the /r/nba thread with a corporate employment lawyer from Los Angeles who told me that you’d be in deep shit if you said that at any company. I tried to get through to him that no, those corporate HR policies he’s setting aren’t getting implemented in places like Texas and that middle management is simply lying because they don’t want to look bad. No one has the guts to tell these people to fuck off, so they think that they have the respect of their underlings.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.
I don’t think people are fully grasping what is happening here.
The Australian government is flirting with making it illegal to ask someone on a date.
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“Pressuring the respondent to give them information about their location or their schedule.”
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“Pressuring the respondent to meet them in person when they did not want to.”
This is what asking someone on a date is. You don’t know if they want to until you ask.
Some have speculated in these very comments that destroying dating apps is good actually, because then people will start meeting each other and going on dates somewhere else (where exactly this “somewhere else” would be is left unspecified). This is a folly. The kind of government that bans dating apps for allowing and facilitating people to ask each other out is the kind of government which will ban in-person dating scenes too. Think that’s too extreme? This is Australia we’re talking about. I’m totally on Kulak’s side if the Australian government goes through with this. These inhuman totalitarians need to be taken out by any means necessary.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The mainstream media tends to avoid signal-boosting intelligent dissident voices. They want controlled opposition and/or clownish opposition. Much easier to write about Alex Jones or @420MAGAPepe1488 on X.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
This is the fruit of the Elon-Twitter tree. "Claudine Gay" has been trending on X every other day for the last month. It helped a lot that it was a slow news cycle, but this sort of cultural momentum would have been impossible a few years ago.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Alright, I'll say it. Advocating for genocide is political speech. It does not incite imminent lawless action. It should not be categorically banned. Genocide could conceivably be a good policy option in certain hypothetical situations. Also most things labeled "genocide" are actually ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation.
Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.
Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.
Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:
Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.
In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.
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