fluid_pride
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User ID: 621
fluid_pride
11mo ago
Seriously, Russ is such a fantastic interviewer because he's curious, open-minded, and generous. Every time I've heard him push back on something he sets it up like he's asking the interviewee to explain what he's misunderstood. "It sounded to me like what you just said implies that ducks are made of green cheese, but I'm sure I'm making a mistake in my reasoning. Could you unpack that a bit?" Talking with him is the Platonic Ideal of a sounding board.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Here's a long take from National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/desantis-ap-african-american-studies-program-violates-florida-law/
I'll try to cut/paste it in case it's paywalled, which will remove the internal links.
/// by Stanley Kurtz
The College Board — the group that runs the SAT test and the Advanced Placement (AP) program — has launched a pilot version of an AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course, to great fanfare in the mainstream press. Although the APAAS pilot has received plenty of publicity, the College Board has clothed the course in secrecy. The curriculum has not been publicly released, nor have the names of the approximately 60 schools at which the pilot is being tested.
In various press accounts, College Board advisers and teachers — so as not to fall afoul of new state laws against the teaching of critical race theory — have denied that APAAS advocates CRT or indeed any particular theory or political perspective at all.
On January 12, however, the administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis wrote a letter to the College Board informing it that Florida was rejecting its request for state approval of APAAS. The letter, from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation, goes on to state that, “as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” At the same time, the letter notes that “in the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion.” In short, DeSantis has decided that APAAS does in fact violate Florida’s Stop WOKE Act by attempting to persuade students of at least some tenets of CRT.
As far as I know, this is the first time that any state has refused to approve a College Board Advanced Placement course of any kind. While there were serious expressions of concern by some states during the 2014 controversy over the College Board’s leftist revision of its AP U.S. history course, no state or school district actually refused to approve the course. So this is a bold and unprecedented move by DeSantis.
DeSantis’s refusal to approve APAAS is entirely justified. Although the College Board has pointedly declined to release the APAAS curriculum, I obtained a copy and wrote about it in September. There I argued that APAAS proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, that it directly runs afoul of new state laws barring CRT, and that to approve APAAS would be to gut those laws.
Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, for example, bars any K–12 attempt to promote the idea that color blindness is racist. Yet most of the readings in the final quarter of APAAS (Unit 4: Movements and Debates) reject color blindness. One of the topics in that unit is explicitly devoted to “color blindness.” There, APAAS suggests reading CRT advocate Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, best known for his theory of “color-blind racism.” Overall, the readings in the final quarter of APAAS — the quarter chiefly devoted to ideological controversies rather than to history per se — are extraordinarily one-sided. They promote leftist radicalism, with virtually no readings providing even a classically liberal point of view, much less some form of conservatism. If DeSantis were to approve a course pushing the idea of “color-blind racism,” he would effectively be nullifying his own Stop WOKE Act.
Then there’s APAAS’s promotion of socialism. A state doesn’t need a preexisting law to decide that a course filled with advocacy for socialist radicalism is inappropriate. In my earlier exploration of APAAS’s curriculum, I described the neo-Marxist thrust of the course. This is evident enough from the readings. On top of that, however, we know that Joshua M. Myers, the member of the APAAS curriculum-writing team whose expertise covers the final quarter of the course, is an acolyte of Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Myers’s writings on African-American studies explicitly call for the field to reject traditional concepts of disciplinary neutrality and adopt openly anti-capitalist radical advocacy instead. In short, for DeSantis to approve the APAAS course as currently configured would be to repudiate everything he stands for. It would welcome woke, not stop it.
The College Board’s decision to keep the APAAS curriculum secret is indefensible. At least during the 2014 controversy over AP U.S. history, troubling though it was, the curriculum was public. This, of course, is why the College Board is resorting to secrecy now. It is trying to get states to approve APAAS for high school and college credit before there’s even a chance of informed public debate.
Last October, North Carolina’s James G. Martin Center submitted a public-records request calling on the lab school of Florida State University, where we know that APAAS is being piloted, to release the curriculum and associated materials. Gavin D. Burgess, associate general counsel of Florida State University, wrote back in December refusing that request. According to Burgess, “The vendor, College Board, has asserted that the materials you are seeking are trade secret and confidential.”
Again, for the College Board to keep the APAAS curriculum secret while simultaneously asking states to approve the course for high school and college credit is indefensible. This secrecy validates long-standing concerns about the College Board’s acting as a de facto unelected national school board. By filling APAAS with Marxism and critical race theory, while at the same time presenting the course as a harmless exercise in African-American history, the College Board is trying to fool the public. In effect, the College Board has decided to go to war with the national movement of parents working to take back control of their children’s schools. The College Board is using secrecy and prestige to nullify democracy.
The tactic is nefarious, but politically clever. What governor wants to be attacked for rejecting a course in African-American studies? It takes guts to say no to a course that looks benign on the surface but is in fact filled with CRT and leftist propaganda. DeSantis has got guts.
The larger danger here is that once APAAS is approved, we will see the College Board devise AP courses in women’s studies, gender studies, transgender studies, latino studies, environmental studies, the full panoply of politicized “studies” courses that have balkanized and politicized higher education. This will drain off students from AP U.S. history and quickly convert high schools into woke bastions. But again, once APAAS is approved, who will be able to say no to the others? That’s why I hope DeSantis will stand strong against any “studies-style” AP course at all.
That said, Florida has invited the College Board to revise its curriculum. A radically reconfigured APAAS still has a chance in Florida. A successful revision wouldn’t necessarily require the complete elimination of readings based in neo-Marxism and CRT. At minimum, however, it would call for such readings to be fully balanced by traditional liberal and conservative perspectives. (See my earlier piece on APAAS for specific suggestions.) Promoting radicalism is one thing. Even-handed discussion of competing views is another.
Yet again, DeSantis is setting the mark for other states. Will red states now reject the current APAAS curriculum? What about Texas? What about Georgia? These and other states have CRT laws and Republican governors. To approve APAAS as currently configured would be to make a mockery of those laws. And why would any state — CRT law or no — approve a course plugging socialist radicalism?
We shall see how it all plays out—and whether the College Board maintains its unjustified secrecy. At a minimum, no state should approve APAAS until the curriculum is released and there has been ample opportunity for the public to assess and debate it. In the meantime, all honor to DeSantis for being faithful to both his word and to the law. Truly, he is doing what it takes to stop woke.
///
fluid_pride
4mo ago
Never underestimate the stupidity or laziness of criminals.
This is true, but doesn't distinguish between criminals. The degree of carelessness that is effective in a child trafficking ring is much narrower than that of a fraudulent ebay listing scam. I can easily believe that someone set up a bot to scam pedos trying to buy kids online. Even if they're caught, they're never anywhere near any actual kids. It's harder to believe that an established child sex slave operation would risk everything to cut corners in an online shopping cart app.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
The appointment does not supersede the usual election formalities. So there will be a primary and general election. It's just that, as you note, primary opponents will be discouraged and the general will reliably elect the Dem candidate. It's not like a Harlem Globetrotters game; they actually do have to hold a real election.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
National Review was speculating that this was maybe a chance to punt Kamala off of the ticket and get her to agree to the essentially lifetime appointment to that Senate seat. Newsome appoints her, she steps down, Newsome takes her spot as the VP candidate.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Allow me to introduce you to Letterkenney.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
I think you're 100% right here. Fat little kids running around kicking worn out soccer balls to play like Messi is an infinitely positive social good, even if they never get any better than "pretty bad at this." I used to be a pretty big sportsball hater, but now I'm in favor of anything that gets people off their phones and moving around.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
I don’t know why we can['t] run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society.
"Social Justice" is why. If you run society for the benefit of the productive people, there will be some people who don't or can't contribute. To put it as mildly as possible, advocates for those who don't or can't contribute would strongly object to removing those people from society. Take a look at graphs showing lifetime net consumption of government benefits. Any government policy has to account for the fact that the bottom 15% of the population is functionally incapable of participating in civil society.
all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.
Yes.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
and not just be racist or something
Having read this, I think it's actually low-hanging fruit for the AI doomers. There are plenty of people very willing to accept that everything is already racist. It should be no problem to postulate that eHitler will use AI to kill all jews/blacks/gypsies/whoever. From there, it's a pretty short trip to eHitler losing control of his kill bots to hackers and we get WWIII where China, Russia, Venezuela, and every one of the 200+ ethnicities in Nigeria has their own kill bots aimed at some other fraction of humanity. The AI doesn't even have to be super-intelligent, it just has to be good at its job. Chuck Schumer could do this in one sentence, "What makes you think Trump wouldn't use AI to round up all the black, brown, and queer bodies?" Instant 100% Blue Tribe support for AI alignment (or, more likely, suppression).
fluid_pride
5mo ago
Actually, I am in complete agreement with your comment. I do believe that there is a meaningful difference between Groups 1 and 2 and that it is reasonable to differentiate between the two. I will have to re-evaluate which term I meant was butt-derived because your reply is so sensible that I must have been thinking of something else. I will also add that people attracted to Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High are also considered part of Group 1 because she was meant to be 17 yrs and 366 days old in that scene.
OK, after reviewing my previous post, I stand by my statement. GENERALLY, soft science academic activity is mostly butt-derived. In this case, you raise an excellent and valid counter-example. Still, if a Harvard PhD tells me it's raining, I'm going to look outside the window.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
In the comments further down, it gets pretty thoroughly dismantled, too. That alone was worth the click to me.
fluid_pride
7mo ago
And someone who is African American is more likely to know the will of African Americans than someone who isn't.
Not to derail this thread, but I think this statement is mostly false. It used to seem self-evident to me. More and more, though, I think class and occupation are much more relevant.
Two points as to why: a) People like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have done more to harm black people in the US than all the KKK members combined. b) Black people are not a monolith (especially wrt the trans/gay stuff) even if they have a lot of statistical and biological things in common across the entire race.
It seems to me that you would probably agree that "Someone who is White is more likely to know the will of White Americans than someone who isn't" is kind of a meaningless statement. To the extent that it's true, it's trivial.
I recognize that this is probably one of the deepest core progressive concepts, though, so I don't expect many on the left to be eager to abandon it. I just think it's false and around here we should note stuff like that.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
Yes, and? It's still wrong, even if 100% of men did it.
I think it's important to flesh out why you think it's wrong. The assumed fact that 80% of men do this seems like strong evidence that it is normal behavior and normal behavior is not ordinarily considered morally wrong. It is my understanding that the Christian perspective on this is that imagining anyone naked is cultivating lustful thoughts, which will naturally lead to sin. In your system, is it wrong to imagine your wife and mother of your kids naked? Is it wrong to fantasize about eating at a buffet until you have to unbuckle your pants? Is it wrong to fantasize about winning the lottery? Someday getting a sweet oxen like your neighbor has?
fluid_pride
1yr ago
I would add to this the very common self-help advice to visualize the success you want to have. As in imagining yourself winning the race, award, promotion, etc. And one of those et ceteras is "get the girl." Is it morally wrong to imagine oneself asking out a potential partner? Getting a yes? Having a great conversation over dinner? The first kiss? These don't strike me as remotely creepy. Why is "we have a great time together" creepy when you add "getting it on?"
fluid_pride
11mo ago
I remember seeing a bunch of weird Grand Theft Auto images on imgur years ago that were supposedly Russian number station posts.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
This is exactly the analysis that converted me from loathing college football to a begrudging support. I still don't enjoy the hype, but I can now see the good things football programs bring to the environment. I want people to be able to do fencing, curling, archery, golf, soccer, track, etc. I think those are excellent channels for character development. If football makes all of that possible, then I support football.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows
Absolutely. That motivation is why any hope of a non-totalitarian end state requires strong pushback on this kind of thing. "Money laundering" is the "think of the children" of financial regulation. If one could report drug sales as "miscellaneous goods" there would be no reason to go through all of the hoops of washing the money. If all the government cared about was tax evasion, it would allow an amnesty category to report any income one didn't want to specify. Instead, the tax department has been roped into the criminal enforcement department and it makes for ridiculous regulations that shouldn't apply to 90% of the population.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls
I think what you're really going to get is bots. Most of those bots will be female presenting because most of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty simps. Some of the bots will be male presenting because some of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty gay simps. From my experience in lonely hearts subreddit moderation, women are 100x less likely to fall for obvious spam accounts, even when they're lesbians. But every time we let a botspam post stay up longer than 2-3 hours, at least 5 male idiots will engage with it.
Bots can't (yet?) do "watch me play" videos, so SFW content creators are going to be easier to distinguish as real humans. NSFW stuff is so easily commoditized that bots can do it pretty well, especially if they also scrape real onlyfans accounts. Like all spam, the NSFW bot accounts only have to convert a handful of suckers to be profitable so if lewds are permitted, lewds will be overwhelmed with scammers. At this point, it's the equivalent of establishing a dedicated Viagra sellers group channel/board. That's going to be 99.9% spam instantly.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
I can agree with that.
fluid_pride
4mo ago
FIRE types are under no illusions about which situation they're in. But they're the minority. Ideally, we're observing the start of a widespread awakening.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
Unfortunately, I think you're probably right, especially in the third point. I'm not sure the second point matters because, as you said, that already happens all the time with everything anyway.
Getting the public on board with AI safety is a different proposition from public support of AI in general, so my point was to get the Blue Tribe invested in the alignment problem. Your third point is very helpful in getting the Red Tribe invested in the alignment problem, which would also move the issue from "AI yes/no?" to "who should control the safety protocols that we obviously need to have?"
I should also clarify that I don't actually think there is any role for government here. The Western governments are too slow and stupid to get anything meaningful done in time. The US assigned Kamala Harris to this task. The CCP and Russia, maybe India, are the only other places where government might have an effect, but that won't be in service of good alignment.
It will have to be the Western AI experts in the private sector that make this happen, and they will have to resist Woke AI. So maybe we don't actually need public buy-in on this at all? It's possible that the ordinary Red/Blue Tribe people don't even need to know about this because there isn't anything they can do for/against it. All they can do is vote or riot and neither of those things help at all.
If that's the case, then the biggest threat to AI safety is not just the technical challenge, it's making sure that the anti-racist/DEI/HR people currently trying to cripple ChatGPT are kept far away from AI safety.
fluid_pride
11mo ago
This is a great point. In some sense, this is the situation we had with the CDC. It was a trusted institution that was able to play around with gain-of-function because its reputation indicated that it would only ever use technology to fight disease, not win at superplauge war. It was limited to disease-type stuff, though, and the AI would presumably be able to predict and head off any kind of threat. Assuming, like you said, that we can trust it.
I think it makes "pausing" AI research impossible. There's no way to stop everyone from continuing the research. If the united West decides to pause, China will not, and it's not clear that the CCP is thinking about AI safety at all. The only real option is figuring out how to make a safe AI before someone else makes an unsafe AI.
fluid_pride
10mo ago
taxing large fortunes going to people who did nothing to earn them directly is good
I strongly disagree with this. It is no business of the state to decide how anyone spends their money after death. What is the meaningful difference between giving your children $10M when you die versus giving that to a local animal shelter? The animal shelter didn't do anything to "earn" that money either. It's the decedent's money and the only reason the state can take any of it is because the owner isn't around to protest anymore. If you can't do it to people when they're alive and able to complain about it, you shouldn't be able to do it to them when they're dead and can't fight back.
fluid_pride
1yr ago
The fucking President met with Dylan Mulvaney, on HD video, visible from the little clairvoyant in everyone's pocket. It's over.
Sure, and in 2083 this will get the same treatment as the "Democrats" in the KKK
(Byrd), and the ones who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the ones who voted to expand slavery into every new state at the 1860 Democratic Convention. To wit, "Those were actually Republicans."
In the past two years, every single time I or anyone in my family went to the doctor, we ended up with a bill months later, despite also paying something at checkout. It's ridiculous. If there is one Federal healthcare law I would support, it's "tell me exactly what this will cost upfront, just like my mechanic, and if you don't get the final bill correct as I'm paying during checkout, you can't bill me for the difference."
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