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roystgnr


				

				

				
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User ID: 787

roystgnr


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 02:00:55 UTC

					

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User ID: 787

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That is, to say the least, unusual among modern ethnoreligious memes.

Looking at Wiki's examples of ethnic fusion ethnoreligions, other than Jews, I'm seeing 10 Christian sects (i.e. other people who believe Moses was a prophet of God), 4 Islamic (likewise), 1 Jewish-but-distinct (ditto). That still leaves a few Sikhs, Mandaeans, and Zoroastrian sects, but they seem to be outnumbered about 3 to 1 (by sect count) or 1.5 to 1 (by population). Ethnoreligions which don't treat the Book of Numbers as scripture are the unusual ones.

Although... why should we limit our numbers here to ethnoreligions? If I meet an Asian guy who thinks Jeffrey Dahmer had some great menu ideas, I'm not going to think "well, at least they're not the same ethnicity!", I'm going to smile non-confrontationally and back away slowly. Most religions with murderous scriptural lessons tend to downplay or backpedal from them a bit, but that goes for most Jewish believers as well. The "Genocide is good when He orders it" message is in the Bible and the Quran, with billions of followers. The killer is calling from inside the house!

Some of your other links aren't really about CRT?

That's the point, though, not a mistake. As the saying goes, "once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action". If "No, that's not Critical Race Theory; don't you realize how cringe you're being!" had been a new sort of claim to me, I'd have been inclined to take it seriously. But it's just one more instance of an increasingly predictable pattern of the modern left trying to disavow their own endonyms as soon as they're subjected to cross-examination, and I'm getting increasingly tired of it.

Even if their actual ideas are total nonsense, they're going to win if you fight them there.

Nah. Their home turf isn't wordplay, it's institutional support. Hence the current panic over the right's discovery that they still have control over a few institutions (some state legislatures and governors) that at least nominally have authority over the local left-controlled institutions. Indiana can pass a law about "no saying one race is inherently superior" and the media can blatantly lie to turn that into "they're trying to prevent students from learning about Black history!", but if the law passes anyway then it's not going to be a journalist's (95%-left) opinion that matters, it's going to be a judge's (maybe 50%-left, and also often more serious about their honesty than their ideology).

But no one in academia officially uses the term Critical Race Theory.

Google Scholar reports 4,000 citations from the 20th century, which hopefully is an old enough cutoff date to clearly precede the current backlash, and another 200,000 citations since, which probably aren't all part of the backlash to the backlash.

It sounds a bit cringe when Republicans say they want to ban CRT, because officially it doesn't exist.

Wow, that takes me back down memory lane. I never understood how this sort of historical revisionism was expected to work, when we don't actually have a Memory Hole to drop actual history into, we have an Internet. But if the first history you see on the internet is still the revisionist one, it's hard to fault the revisionists for their choice of tactics. Perhaps someday even still-problematically-factual summaries will also learn to love Big Brother.

It's tempting to wonder whether the enraging pattern of gaslighting isn't to persuade, so much as deliberately to enrage. But that's unfair; to the people who actually complain that we aren't all jogging along the euphemism treadmills as fast as they demand, the complaint appears to be a mix of standard attempts to rebrand themselves to avoid "scorn and sarcasm", just combined with very non-standard attempts to condemn anyone who doesn't immediately keep up with the rebranding.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea

I'm mostly in the "Doomer" camp (not because I think it's more likely than not, but because I think russian roulette is an even worse idea if the odds get above 1-in-6 and the downside gets way above a single death), but even from here: I've yet to hear a convincing argument explaining which non-zero regulation suite is likely to do more good than harm. At this point I've seen too many bipartisan "War On Bad Things" initiatives that didn't actually reduce the bad consequences of the bad things and too many "GoodPerson Act" laws that didn't actually seem to be the product of good people, and I'm going to need to hear actual specifics of any proposed regulations before I can judge them.

And good (bad) news! We've got some specifics from the EU now:

The AI Act lists a bunch of special-purpose can't-possibly-go-"foom" tasks as their "high risk" targets, and then as a sop to people worrying about actual existential risks (sorry, they can't even bring themselves to say that; let's go with their phrase "systemic risks") we get "transparency obligations" for models exceeding a roughly-GPT-4-level training budget. "Providers of models with systemic risks are therefore mandated to assess and mitigate risks, report serious incidents, conduct state-of-the-art tests and model evaluations, ensure cybersecurity and provide information on the energy consumption of their models."

So ... basically do what you were going to do anyway, hope that's enough to prevent human extinction "systemic risk", and also in the same breath we're equally super worried about GPUs causing a tiny bit more global warming.

These are the people you want to give a monopoly on AGI? At least the current group of people who might kill us with it seem vaguely aware that that's a possibility to watch out for.