The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:
The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.
He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”
With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.
Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:
Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.
The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:
Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.
The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.
hooser
1yr ago
From an op-ed at Harvard Crimson (via Marginal Revolution):
Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?
[snip]
Yet of the 7,000-strong horde, it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience.
For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”
Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
I enjoyed reading the article, and as someone not at all affiliated with Harvard I am happy to argue against some of the ideas the author expressed.
Firstly, a quibble about facts:
In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost.
Yes, the sticker-prize tuition at Harvard has grown, as it has at other private colleges. But the question ought to be: do students actually pay more? According to College Scorecard, students [1] pay on average just under $14,000 per year--for everything, including living expenses. I don't have comparable data for 1986, but that's lower than the median for 4-year US colleges (which is around $19,500).
One may argue that all US colleges have bloated administration and thus increased cost, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But at least let's acknowledge that, regarding actual cost of attendance, Harvard seems to be doing better when compared not just to its peers but the set of all accredited US 4-year institutions.
Now, for the challenge that the author kindly provides:
I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
I don't know any actual specifics, but I am willing to bet (a modest amount) that at some point in the past decade there were student protests at Harvard regarding the choice of art on display. Probably the protests involved non-white students, or people speaking on behalf of non-white students, and their main objection was something like: people of color don't feel welcome at this institution because all the prominently-displayed portraits are of white people. Likely some professors were part of the protesters.
Whatever your opinions are as to the validity of the protesters' claim that the choice of art affects non-white students, the protests themselves would be disruptive and/or stimulating to the educational experience. The president's response to create the task-force on the issue has calmed the protests (taking away the disruptive aspect ) while taking seriously the vocal minority's concerns. For those who found the protests stimulating to the educational experience (which includes acquisition and polish of social norms, and not merely subject matter studied in one's classes), the president's response models how one goes about addressing strongly-expressed concerns over some issue of institutional inertia.
It's still reasonable to ask: was the process that the president cost-effective in achieving its objectives? I would love to see someone try to analyze that! In my experience, service on such committees isn't directly compensated, though it does suck up substantial time. Like, did those six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators have better things to do? They were either on that committee because they were deeply interested in the issue (the students and faculty), or because they were the nine administrators. Did those administrators have languishing tasks which would have actually been more important to address than calming down vocal protesters current and future? Will that new administrative post be filled by an already-existing Harvard employee, or are they actually hiring a brand-new administrator?
Inquiring minds kinda want to know.
[1] At least, students who filled out FAFSA and received any federal financial aid.
hooser
1yr ago
Brasilian president Jair Bolsonaro pledges to respect the Constitution after the election loss. I am posting this here as an example of where culture war gets actually rather civilized. The race between Bosonaro and Lula was tight, and the former could have made serious trouble re. transition of power. Since that link is pay-walled and I have yet to figure out how to get archive.org to take a snapshot of what I am seeing, I will reproduce the parts that I find interesting.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday vowed to respect the constitution after he lost the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ending a tense silence of 45 hours in which he had refused to acknowledge the results even as his allies urged him to do so.
Mr. Bolsonaro didn’t comment on his loss in Sunday’s runoff vote in a press conference in Brasília, the capital. His chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, flanking Mr. Bolsonaro in the briefing, told reporters that the president had authorized him to begin the transition process that would end with Mr. da Silva’s inauguration on Jan. 1.
“I will continue complying with the orders of the constitution—it’s an honor to be the leader of millions of Brazilians who, like myself, believe in economic freedom, religious freedom, free speech, honesty and the green and yellow colors of our national flag,” said Mr. Bolsonaro, speaking to reporters from his official residence.
Mr. Bolsonaro thanked the more than 58 million people who voted for him Sunday, saying that protests by truckers across the country Tuesday in support of his government were the result of “indignation and feelings of injustice over the electoral process.”
Mr. Bolsonaro has spent much of the past few years raising allegations of fraud in Brazil’s electronic-voting system and warned that this year’s election could be stolen from him, without presenting evidence.
[something something stocks, because it's Wall Street Journal]
The 67-year-old former army captain came close to winning, but ultimately lost Sunday’s runoff election to Mr. da Silva, a leftist former president, in the closest presidential race in Brazil’s history. In the final tally, Mr. da Silva, a 77-year-old former trade-union leader who served two terms as president ending in 2010, garnered 50.9% of the vote, 2.1 million more votes than Mr. Bolsonaro, who got 49.1%, according to the country’s electoral court.
Though Mr. Bolsonaro had pledged shortly before the Oct. 2 first round of voting that he would only accept the outcome if the vote was clean, prominent allies had quickly recognized the result after electoral authorities counted the more than 120 million ballots Sunday.
[someone possibly well-known in Brasil calls for Bolsonaro to concede]
Mr. Bolsonaro’s short speech came as Mr. Garcia and other politicians called on him to acknowledge the outcome to help tame protests by truckers across the country who blocked major highways in a show of support for the president. Brazil’s traffic police said it was investigating cases in which its own officers had sided with the truckers.
As of midday Tuesday, truckers had erected more than 200 blockades across Brazil, the federal traffic police said, including at São Paulo’s international airport, where flights were canceled after the main access road was blocked. The authorities said they had cleared hundreds of others.
I am in US. There is one thing I expect my president to do: step down. So kudos to Brazil.
hooser
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other
That observation is a very useful starting place. When I find myself in a similar confusion, I try to switch my perspective to a more traditional view by imagining it involving my kin. Like: "What would I want to do to the guy who did this to my 18-year-old daughter?"
If a guy uploaded to pornhub a realistic sleazy deep-fake porn with my daughter's image and distributed the link within my community, I'd be contemplating the percussion sound of a baseball bat striking his kneecap.
Now that I have an anchor to my reaction, I can explore its possible reasons.
The modern US culture is (broadly) a culture of dignity, where "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is an aspirational ideal. If I aspire to this ideal for myself and my hypothetical 18-year-old daughter, then the sleazy deep-fake porn is "words" that I and my daughter ought not allow to hurt us. We would then treat the incident as we would one where someone created a fake Linked-In account for my daughter, or a controversial blog post written in my daughter's name, or if someone hacked my daughter's Twitter account and posted some unsavory tweets in her name.
In a culture of dignity, I would assume that my daughter's dignity cannot truly be compromised by something she didn't do (in this case: make a sleazy porn video). I would understand the need to correct the record--have pornhub take down the video, issue a clarification within our community --and I would regard that task as an annoyance.
However, underneath that culture-of-dignity veneer lurk centuries of cultures of honor. It doesn't take much for me to get into that mindset. By creating the deepfake porn and distributing it among my community, the guy compromised my daughter's honor--altered for the worse her reputation among my community--and by extension he compromised my honor. Swift baseball-to-the-kneecap plus spreading the word about the retribution is pure restorative justice.
(But what if the guy didn't distribute the deepfake? Like, what if I found it by browsing his laptop? The threat of distribution is there. So my gut response is to get immediately angry and see that he erases the video and promises never to do that again. Presumably, if I am browsing the guy's laptop, the guy is part of my community and I will have social levers to ensure compliance.)
The question is then: what culture does my community have?
If it's Blue Tribe PMC: my daughter's reputation will rise by spreading word about (a) her stoic response to someone's attempt at reducing her dignity, (b) our levelheaded pursuit of legal means of redress, and even (c) our high-brow discussions on why our culture regards sex as shameful in the first place.
If it's Red Tribe Appalachia: out comes the baseball bat.
There's a related and well known pattern in relationships, where men focus on fixing things while women talk to feel listened to, understood and valued. Similarly, it's much easier to debate a man and even vehemently call him wrong, and then pat him on the back and grab a beer afterwards. With a woman it usually gets interpreted as an attack on a deep personal level.
I have noticed a similar pattern among people I interact with, but it also overlaps strongly with the divide between those in STEM (especially engineers) and those in more Humanities-adjacent fields.
I like to categorize the patterns of discourse as "n-dimentional social chess". Imagine that you are part of a group of people who together are playing chess against an online opponent. The group discusses strategies for their upcoming move.
-
"Zero-dimensional social chess": you focus solely on the merits of the proposed strategies in defeating the online opponent. It doesn't matter who proposed which strategy; you evaluate each proposed strategy solely on its own merits.
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"One-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what. You are doing this to help you evaluate the merits of proposed strategies (like, giving more weight to strategies proposed by people with more experience playing chess).
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"Two-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what, and how they said it. You are doing this because you are aware that, within your group, people are jockeying for social status. So you keep track not only of who said what, but what that means for everyone else in terms of social status within the group.
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"Three-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it). You are doing this because you are aware that the group members are jockeying for social status, and you also assume that they know that everyone else is doing it too. Therefore you expect to see shifting alliances, communicated subtly through the phrasing of support, or withholding support where it was expected.
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"Four-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it), but also have a good working theory of the level of n-dimensional social chess that each person in the group is at.
I find that (at least in my social circles) most engineer groups (and majority-male groups) tend to play two-dimensional social chess; most humanities-adjacent groups (and majority-female groups) tend to play three-dimensional social chess. People who move fluently between engineers and humanities circles either play four-dimensional social chess and code-switch, or play one-dimensional social chess and are blissfully unaware of the status games.
The trope of a frustrated girlfriend saying "If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!" would be my example of a situation where the girlfriend by default plays three-dimensional social chess and can't imagine that others (including her boyfriend) don't. So she's definitively not playing at four-dimensional social chess, since she fails to have a good working theory of her boyfriend's level.
[Edit: Edited the lower categories, upon further reflection. Zero-dimensional social chess is just chess, with some pooling of strategies. One-dimensional social chess takes relative expertise into account, but it's still all about the chess. With n>1, the "social" part becomes a competing goal.]
hooser
1yr ago
I am fascinated by your idea of what actions make a scientist. If an experiment I am conducting needs some beakers washed, does it make me less of a scientist if I have a freshman undergrad wash them--so long as I check that it's done properly? If the experiment that I designed needs some chemicals mixed in particular proportions and sequence, does it make me less of a scientist if a senior undergrad does it--so long as I check that it's done properly? If I design three experiments to test a theory, does it make me less of a scientist three first-year graduate students carries each experiment out--so long as I check that they are done properly? If there are multiple competing theories in my field and I have good ideas about how I can test them but to design the experiments in detail I would need to have a thorough and detailed knowledge of several disparate sub-fields and possibly fields in adjacent disciplines, and also I would need to raise substantial funds to finance such experiments, does it make me less of a scientist if I recruit a team of grad students and post-docs, each specializing in some particular sub-field and tasked with designing and carrying out experiments there, while I use my broader expertise and established credentials to convince whoever I can to finance these projects?
Are you less of a programmer because you don't program in Assembly? Or because you import modules? Are you less of a software engineer if you spend your time with the client determining their needs, then oversee the development of architectural design, APIs for relevant modules with appropriate testing system, and then hand off the actual code writing to a team of programmers?
Also on Stanford's list: "abusive relationship" should be replaced by "relationship with an abusive person", because:
The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.
Firstly, they are breaking their own guide of "Person-First", which is the section just prior to that entry. According to the heading,
"The use of person-first language helps everyone to resist defining others by a single characteristic or experience if that person doesn't wish to be defined that way.
So, shouldn't that be something like "relationship with a person who occasionally makes an action that is perceived as abusive"?
And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.
hooser
4mo ago
Here's a summary by Zvi Mowshowitz of publicly-known facts regarding the firing of Sam Altman, as of Monday morning. The board has not yet made known the reasons for the firing besides the vague and broad claim that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and it seems that they are not making an effort to stand by their reasons.
The situation is ripe for some juicy conspiracy theories, and I would love to hear some. Why would a group of (I assume) intelligent and competent people on the board make such a drastic and dramatic firing that was sure to cause an excrement storm, and then not be able or willing to defend their actions to the public? Would disclosing their actual reasons cause the very thing they were trying to avoid? Did their actions prevent an untested AGI escaping into the wild? Inquiring minds want to know!
hooser
1yr ago
I work at a small private US liberal arts college. When I was part of a search for a tenure-track candidate, we asked the candidates to include in their application a DEI statement, because it was expected for all searches at the college.
Then we threw out any candidates who clearly drank the Cool-Aid.
Out went the candidate who said she moved all her black students to the front of the class, and all her white students to the back of the class. Out went the candidate who said he had a special study group only for his LatinX students.
In went the candidate that said she volunteered at a tutoring program for the local Title I school with majority of student black or latino. In went the candidate who said he stepped up his office hours for everyone, and personally reached out to invite each student who struggled in his class, many of whom were black.
If you are working in academia, having a reasonable amount of fluency in the current etiquette of the Professional-Managerial Class is a requirement of the job. Knowing when to not get carried away with the rhetoric is also part of the job. The candidates that we tossed out (like the ones above) actually discriminated against some students, so they were a legal liability for their employer.
You mentioned in another comment that your goal is personal career progress, and that you'll be with this employer for only a few years. Good, focus on that. Don't fall for anyone claiming that you should be able to "bring your whole self" to work. You are expected and required to only bring your professional self to work. So: if your employer requires X, you do X or quit. If your employer recommends X and you don't want to do X, quietly don't do X. If other employees ask you why you are not doing the recommended X, ask them politely to explain the benefits of doing X, and consider their explanations. Even if their explanation is a stream of religious/woke prosthelytizing, you can get some value from it by seeing what new terms or etiquette is going around. But someone may actually tell you something more useful (e.g., X is something your boss really cares about and pays attention to).
hooser
1yr ago
My personal observation is that almost everyone I still see wearing a mask in public transport or while shopping is a senior citizen or a middle-aged person that seems obviously sickly.
I wonder how many of those people are like my husband, who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances. He gets bad sinus headaches that last for days from artificial fragrances and he is very happy that now he has a normalized excuse for wearing a mask in public.
hooser
1yr ago
I agree with your assessment of what makes one a programmer. Programming is a specific technical skill, and what makes one a programmer is being good at--and doing--that technical skill.
A software engineer, on the other hand--or better yet, a software architect--need not necessarily do any programming. They can offload the tasks that require that specific technical skill to programmers.
I suspect that this is at the root of the contention between your perspective and mine. Do you regard doing science as a set of technical skills? Or do you regard doing science as making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world?
And once I phrase it like that, I find that the specific issue of our contention--under what conditions you/we call the people who progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world "scientists"--stops mattering so much.
The current system (in US) where one can progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world on a fundamental level is done mostly in university-based labs. These labs rely on funding to continue to make their progress. Funding depends on maintaining a solid and clearly-legible track record of previous progress (which in our system involves high-quality publications in peer-reviewed journals that are well-regarded in the field). Funding also depends on seeking out and getting those grants, and then making sure to satisfy their conditions so the lab can get more of such grants in the future.
So if I run a bio-chem lab (the Hooser Lab at Stanbridge) and my goal is to progress what we know about what causes aging and what may halt the process in mammals, then my main job is to make sure that my lab can actually make useful progress in my goal. I need to break down what my lab needs to do, what resources it needs to do that, and how I can get those resources. Then I get those resources, and oversee the process. And as much as I enjoyed writing scripts to analyze data when I was a postdoc at Whatihear Lab at Oxbridge, maybe my time would be better spent on reviewing drafts for publications (because I have the breadth of knowledge to connect that esoteric result to broader field, or to suggest in the discussion multiple probable interesting consequences), and speaking with grant-giving foundations (because I have built my reputation as a serious scientist and they will take me seriously), while a postdoc in my lab oversees the data analysis.
hooser
1yr ago
Looks like you have already substantially analyzed the pros and cons of moving. One additional possible cost of moving (depending where you're at): the deposit.
In California, my experience is that renters can kiss their deposit goodbye. The standard renting procedure is to pay upfront first month's rent, last month's rent, a deposit for the keys (a couple hundred dollars), and an additional deposit in the amount of monthly rent in case you leave the place trashed once you move. My experience with renting is that there is a high chance that the landlord will by default not return that deposit, even though I always clean up the place before moving out. The times I have asked for itemized list of what that deposit went towards fixing (which they are required to provide upon request), the list included carpet cleaning, repainting, and other stuff that is about sprucing up the place after normal wear-and-tear.
Once, that list included carpet cleaning for an apartment with no carpets. I did get that portion back, but only after making a credible threat to sue.
In other parts of the US, however, I got my deposit back without such problems. So I recommend considering the norms regarding deposits where you're at, and if the norms are for those deposits to go to upkeep for normal wear-and-tear, then adding both your deposit for your current place and your deposit for the other place as part of the moving costs.
hooser
1yr ago
using Google (or Bing for the freaks out there, you know who you are)
... or DuckDuckGo, for us nerds!
I appreciate that you are taking the time to fact-check both yours and others' assertions. I recommend not using time between responses as an indication of indecision; some of us deliberately restrict our internet usage.
I can't speak to SharpieGate, but I can recall when I was relatively certain (say, 95%) that there were people in US government / political elite who knew that 9/11 would likely happen and benefited from it. I wouldn't say that I was deeply into 9/11-Truth conspiracies (though I did come across them, and I do own a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, so maybe I need to re-evaluate that).
My certainty was based not on corroborated facts, but rather on my mental model for how elite social world works. If I were to try to summarize:
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Politically involved elites tend to be interconnected (politically involved elite people know lots of other elite people).
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These interconnections cross international boundaries (e.g., they or their kids go to the same prestigious colleges).
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People pass information (or at least tips) along their network of friends / acquaintances.
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Large well-funded conspiracies leak, and 9/11 was a large well-funded conspiracy.
It's been two decades. I am far less certain now (more like 20%) about my original assertion, because I haven't come across any well-publicized scandal that so-and-so did some insider trading based on their advanced knowledge on the matter. My suspicion did not disappear entirely though, because my mental model for how elite social world works hasn't changed.
hooser
1yr ago
Try: "I find your phasing... problematic." (Followed by a dignified silence.)
Seriously, though, if your purpose is to improve your own communication skills--and that's a laudable purpose to have--I recommend seriously adapting Socratic method. Ask questions, and genuinely listen to their responses. If they talk about broad ideas, come up with realistic concrete scenarios, preferably based on your own life or someone you know. If the terminology gets in the way of communication, suggest "tabooing" a particular word and see if it improves communication of ideas.
By the way, I recommend reading Plato's dialogues. The character of Socrates is great at walking the narrow path between a devil's advocate and a troll, and it falls to other characters to voice "common-sense" ideas.
hooser
1yr ago
At the college where I work, I have successfully used the rhetoric of microaggressions and bias incidents on the casual put-downs of republican-coded ideas. The college instituted a "bias incident" reporting system ("non-punitive" and "restorative-justice"), and the legalese-sounding description of what a "bias incident" is includes "political party affiliation".
hooser
1yr ago
Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?
Thank you for considering the possibility that you are missing something. You are: most acts of public harassment are subtle and most women will not make a scene. (I am speaking from my experience and experience of women I know.)
Here's a specific example: I and my husband are riding a crowded train. We are standing, getting jostled around as people move around. My husband and I are facing each other, we are talking. Suddenly I feel the guy behind me grinding his clearly-erect penis into my butt.
I don't make a scene; I ask my husband to switch places with me, that's all. My husband doesn't notice a thing, nobody else noticed a thing. I look at the guy, and he just pivots away.
And, before anyone asks: yes, I firmly believe that not making a scene was the best option for me. I don't want to start a fight where I or my husband may get hurt; I don't want to report a harassment that has zero chance of prosecution.
And yes, almost all of my women friends who have lived in large metropolitan areas have at least one such story, and we are nothing special.
hooser
1yr ago
For those less familiar with decision theory, this not an abstruse philosophical question - it's simply a mathematical fact with probability approaching 1 (specifically, 0.49^n for large n), SBF will destroy the world.
Correction: the probability that SBF will destroy the world under these circumstances is 0.49 + 0.51*0.49 + 0.51^2 * 0.49 + 0.51^3 * 0.49 + ... + 0.51^(n-1) * 0.49, where n is however many times he plays that game. That's cumulative probability of the geometric distribution.
(Whereas 0.49^n goes to 0 as n goes to infinity.)
hooser
1yr ago
Once you acclimate to London, I recommend visiting Vienna. You'd be like: what? why did I ever think London was clean!!
I very much appreciate posts like yours, which give a personal, unusual (to me) in-depth perspective on something that I regard as a given. I was in India some years back for over a month, and I still remember coming out of Los Angeles airport (LAX) and being stunned how clean it is. How clean the air is. And the water--I can drink it straight from the tap! And the LA traffic... so orderly! Cars stay in their lane! Cows are nowhere on the freeway!
Best of luck to you and your girlfriend.
hooser
1yr ago
I saw the movie with my husband (who apparently would do anything for love). It was funny and entertaining, and I was pleased to see how well this move upholds essentially conservative ideals of monogamy and sacrifice for the sake of your partnership within the context of very permissive do-who-you-want-so-long-as-everyone-consents sexual norms.
"BROS" has a bog-standard rom-com / sex-com story arc. A quirky, passionate, somewhat neurotic, career-driven girl man is convinced that he is satisfied with his non-experience of love (though plenty of tinder hook-ups). He meets a hottie popular guy who is his exact opposite (conventionally gorgeous, popular, chill). They get together, in the opposites-attract sort of way. They get split up, in the opposites-repel sort of way. They get together again, because opposites-still-very-much-attract, and in the process each gives up something very important to them for the sake of making their now-monogamous relationship work.
Woven into the story are funny scenes that depict the awkward tinder negotiations, awkward logistics of group sex (really, there is nothing porny about this movie), and drama-drama-drama that one could foresee any attempt at opening an LGBTQ(letters-letters-maybe-a-2?-letters)-specific museum.
You may be absolutely right about the marketing of the move. I wouldn't know, I have not seen anything other than a trailer before we went to see it.
hooser
1yr ago
I have a similar proposition for women: regardless of sexual preferences, many women interested in raising a family would be happier in a same-sex marriage with another woman.
Hear me out.
There are a lot of women in US who want both children and a career. If you are such a woman, it's not that difficult to find another woman with similar goals. If the two of you get along as BFFs, why not get married? If neither of you are into women sexually, that makes the arrangement even more stable: there will be no miscommunication on expectations of sexual intimacy between the spouses.
If both of you want your own biological children, you can plan out a pregnancy schedule. If one of you is way more into pregnancy than the other, that's cool too. The studs could be long-term boyfriends, male friends-with-benefits, or sperm-bank donors. The advantage of studding with long-term boyfriend is that he's even likely to pitch in financially for the child.
For male role models, bring into the fold male friends you actually admire, as opposed to those you find hot. Could be your brothers or male cousins, could be the baby-daddies, could be close male friends.
There are plenty of cultures where mothers (and grandmothers) are the stable center of the family and fathers are on the periphery. Same-sex marriage between two women interested in raising a family mirrors such an arrangement.
hooser
1yr ago
This example fits the following narrative pattern:
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An institution X used to have broad support, but now we* recognize it as harmful or bad, though they* still defend it.
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Breaking news: evidence E that X was far worse than we* knew! (But not worse than we* can imagine!) So X was altogether evil!!
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(Whisper among us*:)
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"Isn't that evidence kind of weak? I mean, X still evil, but ..."
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"Shh! X was evil, don't undermine the narrative! They* will latch on to it!"
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[* For some variation of we and they.]
Once the narrative transitions from "X bad" to "X evil", any questioning of evidence E that precipitated that transition is questioning that X is evil, as opposed to merely bad (from the narrative's perspective).
In the Kamloops graves case, there is a competing impetus: physical anthropologists and archeologists (who are part of we* in this case) very much want to preserve their status as scientists, so they have a strong stake in upholding the rigor of their methods. The Wikipedia entry for Kamloops Indian Residential School reflects this process. The "Possible Unmarked Graves" section is written in a cautious neutral tone, and points to specific plans for corroboration of the evidence:
In May 2022, Casimir said that a technical task force had been formed "of various professors as well as technical archeologists" and that work on an archeological dig and possible exhumations could soon begin... [...]
As of May 2022, no remains had been excavated, leaving the initial claim unverified.
The Kamloops graves case, therefore, is a very interesting case to watch, and I thank you for putting together such a great effort post on its progress.
hooser
1yr ago
I think you're right about that this is where we disagree. If we take doing science as "making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world", well that applies to the electron microscope salesmen, academic departmental secretaries, directors of corporate research orgs, plumbers who install chilled water systems in labs, the maintainers of python and r, and any number of other people who contribute in some small way to the broad economic activity of advancing science.
Excellent point! My follow-up question is therefore: what actual utility is there in distinguishing some of the jobs (professions? tasks?) that progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world as "scientist"?
I do think that this utility exists and is important. It reminds me of Feynman's description of cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
In an organization whose purpose is to progress in our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world--and which has a solid track record of effectively making this progress--who are the people that are essential to the enterprise, and who are in necessary supporting roles?
If the latter: do they require transferable set of skills that are not particular to this specific enterprise? The plumber who installs the chilled water system is such; so is the CPA in HR; so is the janitor. The lab manager (like, in a chem lab) would need to have specialized knowledge to do her job, but it's still transferable set of skills (solid Bachelor's level knowledge of chemistry plus great organizational skills). These people do useful work that enable the enterprise, but they are not essential.
It's useful to reserve the term "scientist" for the former--those who are essential to the enterprise--to keep the telos of their profession foremost in mind. It's useful, because the scientist's telos is frequently in direct contradiction with goals people have (e.g., getting that publication after you put in so much effort into that experiment, if only those couple of observation points weren't undermining your hypothesis). Let me quote Feynman once more:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. [...] It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
hooser
1yr ago
And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.
Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.
Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.
The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.
Graduate students in the University of California (UC) system have been on an official strike for the past five weeks. They are unionized by United Auto Workers (UAW). The union representatives have reached a tentative agreement with the UC representatives.
"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week. That's the official cap for UC graduate students receiving stipends. Translating into hourly pay: the graduate students will go from earning $30/hour to a bit more than $43/hour.
So, culture war angle:
On the one hand, I don't trust government representatives negotiating with representatives of government-employed union members to fully represent taxpayer interests. In particular, I fully expect that everyone negotiating on behalf of UC was fully sympathetic with the striker's cause, and not strongly motivated to maintain low costs.
On the other hand, graduate student workers tend to provide specialized services. So a reasonable question (that I don't have an answer to yet) would be: how much would a professional grader of introductory writing courses charge? What about one for differential calculus? What about one for organic chemistry? From that perspective, $43/hour sounds like not such a bad deal.
For extra culture war angle, the LA Times quotes some tweets from graduate students unhappy with the deal. I will include one that does raise an interesting point:
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