toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
4mo ago
Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.
toadworrier
5mo ago
I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.
The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.
toadworrier
3mo ago
This is 9-0 think is actually more impressive than it sounds. The SCOTUS only wants to take a case if it needs to clean up some mess from the lower courts. So imagine you are some very high ranking appellate judge, and you make your decision only to find that every judge on the SCOTUS rules against you. You can't pretend that you made some politically controversial decision.
toadworrier
9mo ago
(imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread)
You mean like one gigantic thread where a bunch of mostly right-wing, onlinefolk post their culture war angst? Hard to imagine.
toadworrier
11mo ago
(he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines)
It's working!
The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her. (Eli Lake @Tablet).
The gist is in the title, a longer gist is:
If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.
I urge you to read the article itself, as it's about details and evidence for the claim above. It did also finally clue me in about why the secret services might be supporting the left. Before Trump was elected they were:
—hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president.
[EDIT: _I wrongly thought my original referred to the FBI. That confused reading did in fact solve the puzzle that I had been wondering about, but is nonethless confused. I should have quoted: _]
... headquarters demurred. “They were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President,” an FBI official told Durham.
This is very plausible. I hail from a longstanding 3rd wold democracy, and this is pretty typical behaviour. None of the elections are fair because the authorities tip them in favour of whichever side looks more likely to win. Usually this is the government of the day, but not always. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch behaved this way too with his media coverage.
Once Trump was elected, you would expect the FBI to quietly switch sides. But they might have accidentally burned their bridges. Or you might blame Trump for being too volatile and sour-minded to be worth sucking up to.
The other angle is topical: is prosecuting Trump and not Clinton a double standard? There's an argument (ping @ymeskhout) that the difference is that Trump has so brazzenly admitted guilt. Well if there's videotape Clinton also bragging about how her sever was illegal but she's above the law, then we are less likely to know about it because she really is above the law.
If the Tablet article is accurate, this casts light on this and every other putative distinction between the Trump and Hillary cases. Whatever distinction there is, it has (at least if the article is accurate) been brought out under circumstances where investigating authorities have bent over backwards to find ways to protect Hillary.
toadworrier
5mo ago
One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.
toadworrier
3mo ago
Makes sense for a genuine civil liberties organization, because every political faction wants to violate someone's civil rights some of the time and so the civil rights will do well to practice its independence by calling everyone out on their misbehaviour. So I would expect FIRE to do it in the modern age more than the ACLU.
toadworrier
3mo ago
Both the IRA and PLO were left-wing militias.
toadworrier
5mo ago
recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.
As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.
Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
toadworrier
1yr ago
Having said that the Beeb is an interesting construct. Its funding mostly comes from the public by way of a government law for the License fee.
Just because you call it ship money a licence fee, doesn't mean it isn't a tax. The government impose it.
However its existence is part of a Royal Charter which mandates its independence from the government itself.
More importantly the BBC is perfectly willing to attack the government. But by "government" here, I mean the democratically elected institutions of the state. The BBC does however loyally represent (and is part of) the permanent state institutional structure.
So is it accurate to say it is government funded? Kind of yes, kind of no
Yes, and every kind of yes.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly
They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.
But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value.
If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.
toadworrier
9mo ago
People who do listen to their lawyers don't thus get have senior policemen covering up their crimes for them.
Now that article might be wrong about accusing the FBI of covering for Hillary, but then your comment doesn't address that at all.
toadworrier
4mo ago
I wonder what the deeper implications for human cognition are. I don't think there are people who can keep 25k words in their working memory, that seems to be much smaller, but we certainly don't usually forget the start of a novella by the time we reach the end. Is there a lot of caching and summarization going on?
Yes, there is in effect a lot of "caching and summarization" going on -- although that's probably our 2023 ooga-booga, not-quite-wrong way of talking about something else. LLMs really only have their context window and it's feedback as a short-term memory. Which is fine for text translation, but is asinine if you want anything like a thinking engine. Goldfish with a notebook.
We and LLMs can both compress long stories into gists, but the LLMs just forget about it and repeat the work on every iteration. We remember the gists and use them as context on every iteration.
toadworrier
4mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits.
I agree with this, but also remember the original mission. OpenAI got it's initial dose of mind-share, talent and OPM because it was supposed to save the world from centralising AI in the hands of a winner-take-all company.
IMHO that was a dumb strategy for achieving a valid goal from the beginning, but a straight-out for-profit company would have been completely opposite to the mission.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"
This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.
The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.
toadworrier
1yr ago
At a guess, it's associated with working class communists. All two of them.
To their credit, the 19th century left ran a lot of educational programs for working men, and so their genuinely was a large cohort of working class people who understood and believed in socialist theory. But their main representative was the Labour party. The Communists must always have been the extremist fringe of the movement.
toadworrier
4mo ago
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst
Does Ireland's history mean that there's a population of such scumbags who are unusually competent and causing trouble?
toadworrier
8mo ago
I agree with all this, but I want to add a caution from the perspective of immigrant Australia.
It's normal common in my immigrant community to:
- Assume any slight by a white person is racism and thus be angry at "this country"
- To have dual citizenship and/or believe a passport is just a piece of paper 2a. The word "patriotic" means "patriotic to the old country"
- To prefer the signs and symbols of the old country (sporting teams, flags, regalia etc).
This combination is far more common than my own eccentric notion of actually being a patriotic Australian.
All of this sounds like it's the polar opposite of what @AshLeal is claiming, but no. The people I'm talking about are perfectly well acculturated and behave well among other Australian folk, work on common projects with each other.
toadworrier
5mo ago
Adversary reveals himself through his accusations
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
toadworrier
11mo ago
I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.
Drive-by tangent.
Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job. It's probably the least-worst tactic given the situation, and it prevents you getting actually skewered.
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