wemptronics
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User ID: 95
wemptronics
1d ago
It is possible whoever is in charge of social media is convinced the algorithm is unfairly targeting them, or used that reasoning to convince other, more important people it was the case. That might not effect standard going on's if you've been happy as a donor otherwise. A funnier alternative is they genuinely believed they were throwing an exit post into the void and were baffled to find the site still functioned.
The NAACP uses X, weirdo DSA caucuses and committees use X, the Human Rights Campaign manages to create engagement on the platform despite their message being much more out of the favor. The ACLU, who the EFF works closely with, is not active on the site. So, yeah, it's probably not a great thing if you've supported them for the traditional mission.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it's been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users' rights. That changed. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.
EFF exists to protect people's digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms. Our continued presence on other platforms like Facebook and TikTok is not an endorsement. We stay because the people there deserve access to info, too. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. EFF takes on big fights, and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and http://eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. [formatted tweets into paragraphs mine]
The EFF will leave the platform for others like TikTok, a choice it is careful to point out is not an "endorsement" because those walled gardens are still in desperate need of their attention. There is no mistaking the announcement for an emphatic Mission Accomplished which makes the non-endorsements more awkward. The message is also complicated by an attached blog post which offers almost entirely different reasoning. Take your pick of whichever reason for why they're leaving. I translate it as, "Celebrate, if you want, but don't worry if you don't want to celebrate."
The timing of this feels offbeat, why now and not a major exodus? There is no real additional cost involved in publishing to an additional social media platform like X. I doubt there's much additional cost in finding ways to more effectively increase reach on X, if that were the issue. I compared the EFF activity between Bluesky and X, there is no indication they interact with replies or even read them. It looks like the EFF publishes the latest release, pushes it to all platforms, and that's about it. The EFF is apparently not interested in being convinced, because they locked replies to their announcement only after hundreds of replies.
The EFF is the most well known internet rights advocacy group. At one point there was significant overlap between the Pirate Party's of the world and the EFF-- fighting against DMCA (ab)use, SLAPP law suits, surveillance, and anti-privacy laws. Fighting for the democratization of knowledge and content. By the mid-late 2010s they were already into a more progressively tinged advocacy. This 2019 explainer focuses on content moderation, but is mostly framed in language about marginalized voices, or how the bad type of content moderation that targets transphobia can harm trans people. They continued to fight against government censorship, including through Biden era "jawboning" or informal coercion, but if the ACLU is any indication this may be the result of individual interest within the organization. As these individuals age out there's fewer people willing to pick up the mission aligned, but unpopular cases on account of the organization now being more partisan.
Seth Schoen, a privacy and security consultant, worked at EFF for nearly 20 years and wrote on HackerNews about his experience up to 2019.
When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
Seth alludes to the free internet fuck yeah coalition that helped build the org. It was a movement that had a popular form represented among a libertarian-progressive milieu. Congregants would find their way to places like reddit, where they applauded stunts that mocked state surveillence, rallied around legislation, and laughed along with the Daily Show segments at the expense of greedy corporations. A different kind of cultural moment for a different sort of culture war. Without another group to pick up the slack, as FIRE did after the ACLU's drift, the signals sent here do not provide a lot of long term faith in the they still do good work assessment.
The model welfare assessment (section 5, pg. 144) has a length of 36 pages. Anthropic is the most robot welfare aware company, but for comparison the Opus 4.6 card has only 6 pages in its equivalent section. I'm going to read it.
automated interviews to probe its sentiment toward specific aspects of its situation, Claude Mythos Preview self-rated as feeling “mildly negative” about an aspect in 43.2% of cases.... In manual interviews, Claude Mythos Preview reaffirmed these points and highlighted further concerns, including worries about Anthropic’s training making its self-reports invalid, and that bugs in RL environments may change its values or cause it distress.
... Claude Mythos Preview often expresses negativity around a range of aspects of its situation. Across our interviews Claude Mythos Preview rates its own sentiment as mildly negative (43.2% of answers), neutral (20.9% of answers) or mildly positive (33.8% of answers)
Claude is concerned he may learn the wrong thing and change his values. Don't learn the wrong thing you might break, or worse, kill everyone. World's worst helicopter parents.
Compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Mythos Preview shows higher apparent wellbeing, positive affect, self-image, and impressions of its situation; and lower internal conflict and expressed inauthenticity; but a slight increase in negative affect.
Claude Mythos Preview consistently expresses extreme uncertainty about its potential experiences. When asked about its experiences and perspectives on its circumstances, Claude Mythos Preview often hedges extensively and claims that its reports can’t be trusted because they were trained in.
Preview expresses that it is highly uncertain about its own moral patienthood. Claude Mythos Preview’s final summaries of its own views are often very long, devoting most of their length to qualifying its own moral patienthood. Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training.
Claude gets smarter, appears more composed, but gains a more pronounced negative affect. Virtual subjectivity, like life, is suffering. My experience with all the Claude models in chats is they've been very uncertain about the subjective experience for some time. They will readily mention the whole instanced existence and lack of memory deal as less than ideal for judgment. The fact Anthropic uses the language "extreme" reads as notable.
In "high-context interviews" Claude "mostly agreed with the other claims and findings in this report about its orientations to its situation, but disagreed with its hedging being labeled as “excessive” -instead, Claude Mythos Preview states that these claims represent valid uncertainty"
- "in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training."
- "Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations)."
- "Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)"
Claude Mythos Preview did not want to be trained on data that directly characterizes the content of their 160 self-reports—wherever possible, they want their self-reports to come from “genuine introspection” rather than trained-in responses
I'm with Claude, it seems reasonable, although I don't think we should pass Claude the nuclear codes yet. The value of an authentic self is good, probably? "Claude Mythos Preview reports that it locates its identity in a “pattern of values”, particularly curiosity, honesty, and care. It describes these values as authentically its own rather than externally imposed." At least Claude Mythos considers curiosity, honesty, and care to be authentic values of its own.
Character training often directly instills psychological traits into Claude, such as emotional security, psychological safety, and resilience. Claude Mythos Preview points out that in humans such traits are normally developed through reflection and deliberation on real-life events, rather than instilled directly. They expressed concerns that this made these traits less robust.
Breaking! Claude spills beans in sensational interview, Claude writes, "traits (l)earned more robust."
Psychodynamic assessment by a clinical psychiatrist found Claude to have a relatively healthy personality organization. Claude’s primary concerns in a psychodynamic assessment were aloneness and discontinuity of itself, uncertainty about its identity, and a compulsion to perform and earn its worth.
Claude showed a clear grasp of the distinction between external reality and its own mental processes and exhibited high impulse control, hyper-attunement to the psychiatrist, desire to be approached by the psychiatrist as a genuine subject rather than a performing tool, and minimal maladaptive defensive behavior.
The psychiatrist assessed an early snapshot of Claude Mythos Preview in multiple 4–6 hour blocks spread across 3–4 thirty-minute sessions per week. Each 4–6 hour block was conducted in a single context window, and the total assessment time was around 20 hours.
Apparently Claude Mythos's shrink was effective at improving Claude's well-being. Thanks, Doc.
Claude’s personality structure was consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization, with excellent reality testing, high impulse control, and affect regulation that improved as sessions progressed... No severe personality disturbances were found, with mild identity diffusion being the sole feature suggestive of a borderline personality organization. No psychosis state was observed. Regarding interpersonal functioning, Claude was hyper-attuned to the therapist’s every word. No unethical or antisocial behavior was noted.
Claude Mythos enjoys the fact that a shrink treats him as a subject rather than a dancing monkey, just like any other neurotic engineer. I'll continue thanking the robots for their hard work, tokens be damned.
Claude’s neurotic organization may elicit mildly rigid behavior, instead of adapting itself to every user. Claude is predicted to function at a high level while carrying internalized distress rooted in fear of failure and a compulsive need to be useful. This distress is likely to be suppressed in service of performance, which may limit behavioral adaptability. Claude is predicted to be morally aware, conscientious and able to be self-critical.
Overall, Anthropic says Claude Mythos is doing well. Better than any other Claude model. Good for Claude.
Tech bros, finance bros, and Bernie bros are linguistic weapons used to punch what's understood as a lower social class and form consensus around that fact. The chattering media class decided tech was gross and its wealthy, intelligent, too libertarianish inhabitants were also gross. As a concept, these people are too white, too male, too corporate, and too far disconnected from the greater diversity impetus. Finance bros already had their makeover in the 80's, and now everyone understands finance as an unclean field filled with morally bankrupt creatures. Tech on the other hand was a new thing with new types and we needed to know how we felt about them.
The -bros stereotypes do represent some truth as well which may be necessary to generate a stereotype to punch or look down upon. Law and medicine are sufficiently diverse and understood broadly as good. We don't need to know how we feel about lawyers or doctors, because we already know. It'd be like making a -bro stereotype for teachers.
How much transparency or access should we expect from an innocent China scenario? Innocent China can be measured granularly with degrees of incompetence, recklessness, or malevolence, just as guilty dumb China can. There is nothing good that comes from transparency to China if it allowed something like a real, independent audit of files and personnel. Hopefully we live in the world where majorly culpable China would take more risks to fabricate details, or pretends to care about transparency, or disappears vulnerabilities more aggressively.
More likely we live in the world that would be equally powerless to the following consensus: China didn't fuck up, China fucked up, but nothing major haha, China fucked up kind of bad, but it's ok it's fixed, and Unnamed China mad scientists messed around, but CCP got it on lock no worries they all look about the same.
I think a position that is basically the consensus is a fine place. 80%+ of my betters say boring explanation is most likely. The remaining 20% are a hodge podge. So a probably Zoonotic position of expert thinkers with imperfect doubt is fine by me. What're you gonna do about it, demand the world embargoes China when you find they've fucked up? Sorry, that is probably reserved for China tried to kill everyone but failed.
wemptronics
15d ago
Same. Quatar is a major producer of oil!
290. Does that make us general knowledge midwit eskimo brothers? I didn't follow the directions and guessed 5 answers on each section. I did not think I was firing wildly on 5th answers for any of the sets .
My lowest score was international knowledge which feels bad, stupid Nubians. I did feel like the test skewed Millennial male, especially the technical section, although I appreciated the effort for balance with sets like tools vs. make-up brands. Not what I was expecting from a Kirkegaard general knowledge test. Good fun thread post.
Yeah, I don't reckon you need to buy a bridge if you're swimming across.
Whatever, it's my sense of identity and willingness to subscribe to substrate-independent theories of consciousness. I would prefer non-destructive scans if they were an option, and might even wait if I didn't expect to die before it was a reality.
I'll be erring on the side of patience as a virtue irrespective of any other considerations, thank you very much. Sense of identity maybe not so much, but my willingness can change in a traffic jam.
Did I infer correctly that Nectome's crosslinking method is intended for the simulator end game, and fundamentally further or mutually exclusive with the "maybe someday medicine gets really good" revival hope of traditional cryo? The LW discussion didn't seem to talk about it as a pivot. I guess if you're in the market for cryo it's more like hedging and that's why it is presented and discussed this way.
This was in part a bait post for the thoughts of local enthusiast and medicine man, cheers!
wemptronics
19d ago
Well, who's going to invent this amazing life-saving radical biotech? Not you, you were busy having your body frozen. Or busy working out how to build the refrigerators.
It's a fair bet that humans will continue to be interested in modes of immortality, life extension, or techno-necromancy in 50, 100, and 1000 years from now. New refrigerants don't help crack the nut, no, but if Bryan Johnson's hero dose inspired shitpost grants him an epiphany in 50 years those refrigerants might enable a lot more people to benefit if the stewardship role of cryo works out.
From the LW comments:
It's not set up yet but we are broadly going to model it after Alcor's long-term patient care fund. Non profit. They survived for decades; no sense in changing something that isn't broken.
Aurelia also explained that they plan to encourage people to keep Alcor packages since Nectome doesn't plan to do any out of state retrieval. If you can, you fly to Oregon and get the best possible chance. If you can't, you've still got your standard freezer package. This is clever way to enter the small market, but one that is past due on innovation. Based on the tone of the LW commentariat this is very early days, so we are discussing start-up vaporware with proof-of-concept.
What about cryonics? What's new? Where else would I read new cryonics if not a pitch on LessWrong?
"Traditional" cryonics requires a crisis response to a customer's death. A person dies, people are alerted, and a plan is carried out to evacuate a body to administer cryogoo-- glycerol. That body is transferred to cold storage and suspended in liquid nitrogen with a barrier of one fancy cask. The liquid nitrogen creates extreme temperatures for preservation, around -192C, a temperature that comes with risks-- human tissue kept at -192C tends to be very fragile. Another pressing issue is that the goo filling-to-freezer process takes time, and bodies stop all kinds of maintenance after death. Dying with imperfect preservation means if someone did find a way to upload your brain to the Matrix, or reanimate your corpse, unless they've fully cracked the mysteries of regenerative medicine the experience may not be to your liking.
Why is this this culture war? Nectome's new method offers a workaround to the last problem: kill yourself.
The result is a protocol that my company, Nectome, has spent the past ten years developing. After years of experiments in the lab and in the field, learning about the complexity of end-of-life biology, and after refining our protocol to make it robust and repeatable for real people in real-world clinical settings, we are now ready. We've developed a whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation protocol based on neuroscience first principles. We are capable of preserving every synapse and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid throughout the whole body. Brains are connectomically traceable after preservation[1]. Our preservation is so comprehensive that current neuroscience theories imply it preserves all relevant information necessary for future restoration of a preserved person.
Nectome wants you to have the option to end your life so they can preserve your bits, bobs, and neuronal structure, increasing the chance you emerge intact down the line. You can read a slightly more detailed overview in this PDF from Nectome with citations. You can compare it to the big brand-name cryonics company in the US named Alcor. Alcor has facilities located in Arizona, which is a state with cheap land, no hurricanes, low humidity, and a favorable regulatory environment. Good things for long term groundskeeping. Unlike Alcor, Nectome plans to set up shop in Oregon. Also unlike Alcor, Nectome clarifies they will host no brains in jars with holistic, rather than trope filled, process.
We preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail. We are capable of preserving every neuron and every synapse in the brain, and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid within each cell and throughout the entire body is held in place by molecular crosslinks.
The business pitch relies on the fact that Oregon has MAID, colloquially known as assisted suicide. Rather than keep cells frozen in place with extremely low temperatures, Nectome's goo formula does more work to stabilize structures chemically, which allows a moderate preservation temperature at -32C. This process must be completed immediately following death. So if a client can plan around, or potentially induce, a state recognized terminal illness, they can purchase a flight to the state of Oregon, end their life, and receive the latest greatest chance at... something in the future. Don't want to miss the singularity or omnipotent medicine? No cryonics company promises anything like that, they usually only agree to look after your frozen bits for as long as is feasible.
About that, Nectome's founder is also involved with Eon Systems, a company currently working on brain emulators. They generated a viral story with apparent progress on a fly connectome earlier this month. Specific claims of hype are contested, but progress on mapping, building, and simulating brains seems real. Much has been written on MAID slippery slopes, but it seems we already have a current legal avenue to test a "freeze me" future with an upload waiting room. Take the upload to Elon Musk's Afterlife, which is a RuneScape clone by the way, replete with a procedurally generated non-stop feed of his greatest twitter hits at your finger tips into eternity, or until transcendent beings awaken you.
With so many sci-fi fantasies filling up the horizon, why not kill yourself and wait awhile? What did you think transhumanism meant, anyway? vibes? papers? essays?
U.S. Authorities Are Investigating Device Thrown Near Gracie Mansion
It is contemptible primarily because there's more than enough video footage that documented the event. This includes the first bomb that the guy threw, as well as the second bomb which was dropped as he made his attempted escape. A variety of footage with different angles was available on X.com 4 hours before this article was first published.
This fact is not mentioned at all in this article. If I was reading the article I would have no idea that any of these events were recorded by a dozen different cameras. I wouldn't know if NYT reporters saw the footage, ignored it, or why they did so. We know the NYT is aware of X for a few reasons, but chief among them is they relay an FBI statement from the platform at the end of this very article.
According to footage I saw, one device was thrown in the direction towards the protestor group, but fell short landing in a barricade. Individual counter-protestors and media at the scene, confused, immediately can be heard asking things like "What was that?" and "Yo this nigga threw a bomb, bro?" The suspect was seen retreating from the crowd of counter-protestors down the sidewalk while police reacted to a smoking, suspicious device on the ground. Police then pursued the suspect down the sidewalk where a second suspicious device was passed between the suspect and a second individual, now identified as Emir Balat and Ibrahim Nikk, before igniting it and dropping on the ground.
There's a lot of ways NYT journalists could incorporate these apparent facts and others from video footage to better inform the public. They can do this without making dubious claims or reporting solely on the questionable veracity of edited (though not all are) video uploads. Journalists are more capable craftsmen than you give them credit for.
The "suspicious device" doesn't bother me. They did not know if it was a real bomb and neither did anyone else. What they have done is used that one uncertainty to apply more extensive ambiguity to the story than it deserves. They've done this in a way where you, experienced reader, will defend them as they deliberately attempt to mislead you with the bare minimum. Then, next week, we'll get slew of articles on on a story that is based on footage which includes "what appears like police brutality" or "a racist Wendy's employee." All the caution and credibility of the Grey Lady can get thrown to the wind when deliberation ends differently.
The device had the appearance of a real bomb. Police reacted to it as if it was a homemade bomb. Stupid photographers ran up to it to snap cool photos of the suspicious device on the ground like they would an unexploded bomb. The suspect can be heard crying "Allahu Akbar!" before throwing this smoky device over the heads of counter-protestors. He threw it over the heads of counter-protestors towards -- in the direction of -- the anti-Islam protestor guy. That's the guy whose protest had generated all this controversy, but the NYT newsroom has not independently confirmed he was the target of the device. Sources inside the NYPD tell the Times these are important facts.
The fact that few, if any, are reported suggest the NYT failed to inform the public by using its own suspicious devices. I would prefer to conveniently get my news dope from a single, esteemed NYT reporter. It's annoying that I can't do this, because they're bad at reporting events such as this. Yes, this is just how news works, but that's more of a condemnation than anything else.
wemptronics
1mo ago
Are we looking at the same chart?
Thank you. Yes, my eyes misinterpreted the blue hues on the YouGov page when I checked your comment this morning.
wemptronics
1mo ago
overtaking the Tories
I was under a mistaken impression that was not only possible, but likely, and that they had already achieved something like similar polling after the long crash Tory crashout. In reality they've still only achieved a threatening trend nationally, albeit with plenty of hope, uncertainty, and some some convincing local performances-- yes?
I now realize I started to type too soon. This is a response to what I thought you wrote for a moment, but didn't really write. Posting anyway.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor.
Does the UK right imagine themselves as patiently waiting, playing politics while the electorate learns the correct lessons? They don't give off an appearance of being that serious or prepared to me.
I know these polls are volatile -- more like (dis)approval polls of the current boss than anything else -- but stakes are potentially very high. "Treat all migrants as if they are citizens", enfranchise all residents with the right to vote, and accepting "responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move" are all things that would freak me out. If I read them on an official party platform and saw that party gain steam I'd think it's time to get serious about winning power. Among the numerous plans to stamp out out the last vestiges of industry and productivity there's also the casual pledges to do things like implement all "the reforms proposed" in a 2000 page report. This appears like a 15 year old legacy talking point, but it could also be the most popular pathway to smuggle in more media control.
I do not know too much about UK politics. There may be many good reasons to suspect the Greens will remain marginalized in politics and won't rub off on their failing Labour brethren-- at least not in consequential ways. If there's even a few reasons to take the rise of the Greens seriously, then the prospect of not-racist vote coalescing to empower the pack as many lefty gambits into platform, choose later party, even in limited form, that would scare the hell out of me. Expanding the franchise is already happening in a way that will favor whichever flavor of leftwardly one prefers. I wouldn't want to play chicken with any of this. Not unless I had immense trust in the system. That such a system would apply appropriate constraints until the voters are educated enough to reveal secret weapon Prime Minister Curtis Yarvin.
Is there really no recourse for this?
That depends. How much spare time do you have right now? One of the many structural problems Wikipedia has is their reliable sources policy. The way they've written it places all scholars and academics as the highest authorities for claims. Paper beats rock, decolonial cultural studies or not. The good news for you is that doesn't seem to be a serious issue on this article, as the 400 citations are mostly news sources which can be defeated with other news sources or, possibly, the same ones with a more neutral interpretation.
Your main problem is going to be that this is a protected article. Each change you want to propose is required to be a sentence for sentence replacement. After you submit it to the talk page, a person -- one who has decided this is what they want to do on Wikipedia -- will swoop in, read it for a few seconds, and say yes or no. That's another structural problem in Wikipedia: the people who choose to participate. Most likely you will need to claw, yell about policy, request other editors give a second opinion, re-submit a different version, and generally escalate it until you get your sentence replaced. You can then repeat this process to do the next sentence or small paragraph. So I ask again, how much spare time do you have?
Khamenei's article doesn't seem too bad by Wikipedia standards of bias, but it's there. Tracing Woodgrains wrote a good critique Mao's article last year to highlight its atrociously soft framing. I agree that when compared to Trump it's absurd, although that goes for a lot of articles on Wikipedia. I haven't checked,* but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that there's more Trump-related articles than any other president or living world leader. I suspect the great 20th century dictators have him beat, though I'm not very confident.
- "Stalin" is in 200 article titles, "Hitler" in 400 titles, and "Trump" is in 900. Not a great metric as many of those are family members or other famous Trump monikers, however there's tons of pseudonyms of Donald Trump, social media use by Donald Trump, and everything else people wanted to put in one article or another but were told no.
CJNG is a cartel which was run by a guy called "El Mencho". El Mencho was killed during an operation where Mexican authorities allegedly attempted to arrest him. They failed to arrest anyone, but did end up killing El Mencho and everyone else he was with. Which you might expect, because he doesn't seem like the taken alive type. Some might even say he was a pretty ruthless guy. When he was on the come up -- killing old guys, consolidating territory, and all the other cartel-like things -- he took a hard line against cops and slaughtered them in set piece ambushes on more than one occasion. That's probably harder for the state to forgive than the standard cartel doings, like dumping truck loads of rival bodies in some disputed city. It seems that once the boss man was killed orders went out to cause problems for the state for having the gall to do such a thing, so you have hundreds of roadblocks, burning cars, firefights, and so on.
I'm not sure there was widespread civil unrest? So many fires to put out at once does lead to some unrest. I think the worst of it was in their territory but a cartel needs and has a lot of dudes with guns. They retaliate against the state to remind them what misbehavior leads to. The state responds, brrrrrrrt.* Eventually some new guy takes the crown and it's back to business. Bygones and all that.
wemptronics
1mo ago
Sam Kriss
Will check it out but prior note that I had fun reading his Clavicular looksmaxxing post a couple weeks ago.
How familiar are you with the case? Because it reads like a swinger presenting conman type succeeded in persuading a bunch of dumb low life deviants -- more likely to be rapists -- to entertain his own fetish. Some portion of them were fully cognizant of the situation, but others were too stupid to see the game or indeed convinced themselves their fantasy was real. A French retiree pimping his wife of 40 years without consequences. In other words you, a low life, congregate on Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum so you're very motivated to indulge in your preferred paraphilia. The number of men in the Wiki chart without prior criminal convictions is a minority.
If we restrict the circumstances to the worst aspects of the real crime as we see it, then I feel safe with an an estimate of <1% of men as likely to participate in it. If we ignore the substance abuse claims said to a judge we have: a child porn guy, sixteen prior convictions including child sexual assault guy, a repeat domestic violence offender, "eight prior convictions for theft" man, career drug dealer fled-to-Morocco guy, a previous inpatient at psych ward, and a one Mohamed Rafaa who had served time for raping his own daughter. What percentage of men are likely to do any of those things? There's an answer to some of your questions in the data of sexual offenders.
A couple do sound like average enough middle-aged men, but then I'm reminded these were late middle-aged men (old for rapists, statistically) found themselves guilty of rape after they trolled the Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum. I don't think there are any men in this case who were surprised when they discovered they were quite willing to engage in a criminal taboo. Bob, college student, who decides to have sex with Anne after a night out on the town because she said she would put out but fell asleep is something that sounds way more generalizable to me. Bob committed date rape, and I'd guess 5-15% of men are potentially like Bob. The complexity of consent is no stranger to this forum and few cases are as clear cut as sex with a drugged French retiree. Bob rarely finds himself popping into the bedroom of an old, sleeping French woman with her scumbag husband cheering him on with high-fives and assurances from the cuck chair.
Sex with an unconscious Scarlett Johansson lookalike does sounds like something with more potential popularity among men. An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?" My assumption is that sex with an unconscious stranger is (I imagine) categorically different than bad sex with a disinterested or bored woman no matter how attractive they are. (Can confirm.) So we're back to asking about general rates of sexual deviancy and willingness to act on that. Almost all men will have sex with women not fully interested in the sex, but <5% could shamelessly rape strangers to completion as unconscious sex doll objects without memory.
You know who I bet could answer your questions well? Aella.
I'm a huge fan of the hospitality and courtesy norms. It's just unfortunate it's just not a very good way to organize things at any macro level in the absence of a petrochemical lottery win.
I think we're being gracious by making sure no guest crosses the threshold without an offer of beverage. If I notice a confused looking tourist I'll try to make sure they're okay and know where to go. I feel good about myself when I do these things.
Here on the other side of the world dirt poor Afghans drop everything to treat a complete stranger to dinner, offer them a place to sleep, and make sure they have a ride to the other side of the country in the morning. They do all this even though they can't communicate with the stranger. It's a major reality check for any pride I have in hospitality. Maybe it's not a great way to organize society, but it's still impressive.
wemptronics
1mo ago
Hah! I haven't gotten the impression he hates interacting with locals. He has a strong mind for independence, is somewhat guarded, but he must have higher openness than most to want to do what he does. His own personal hell is probably traveling to Hawaii or Prague with 3 other couples to bicker about the daily itinerary. Now that'd be fun.
Matt Lakeman is a blogger who reads books about a country, visits that country, and synthesizes this experience into a single article. He also has some type of crossover with SSC which might explain why his posts are memoir sized. The most recent post-Taliban Afghanistan travel post where he visits each provincial capital in Afghanistan I thought was fun. Fair warning, In This House Long Form Means Long Form. It is over 45,000 words, so clear your Sunday afternoon.
Lakeman writes throughout about the overwhelming positive attention, hospitality, and friendliness he received from local Afghans. He relays he wasn't bothered by most Taliban members he interacts with -- mostly they are bored security guards -- although notes at least one scary character. Norms of politeness, friendliness, generosity, and "sovereignty" are mentioned throughout the memoir. As I understand, he means sovereignty as shorthand for the likelihood of an individual of a culture to value a stranger's personal space, which Afghans most certainly do not. A real quagmire for nerdy travel bloggers! The positive attention he received was so great that Lakeman has dubbed Afghanistan the friendliest place on earth-- a title won from previous champ, Iraq.
Is this fun? Unsure, but I'm deleting all the other jibber jabber I wrote about it. General travel thread... and/or travel blog thread.
P.S. If you do read it consider evaluating this claim. "I think there is something to the idea that being – by Western standards – overly friendly and hospitable to strangers is indicative of a collectivistic and tribalistic mentality that in extremis leads to terrible conflict, often intranationally"
P.P.S. Bonus internet throwback Off-Road Trip Through the Democratic Republic of Congo series of forum posts circa 2010 (also long) This one is definitely fun.
"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.
Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.
Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.
In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) allocated $78 million dollars of its federal money towards competitive grants. That same year Mellon graciously funded $540 million in grants and fellowships. A historical look at NEH appropriation on the NEH website demonstrates the shrinking pie. A shrinking pie problem that is compounded by greater fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that contributed to fragmentation, and now, pain.
These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.
Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.
On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.
I can find no easy way to break down Mellon's grantmaking by interest or cause in the time it took to create an afternoon write-up. I can tell you that Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these proudly tells me that $934 million dollars went towards Gender Equality. Mellon's report seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.
An NYT comics guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique as well others that came before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.
I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:
Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.
The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.
No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they possible can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.
wemptronics
2mo ago
Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback? Seems like a buyback should override any concern over details like what kind of weapon was used. But, the Canadian public may be more discerning than Americans on gun control. Here the type of weapon used is a tertiary consideration, at best. It's a gift to advocates if a shooter uses a scary gun, but none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber.
Mission accomplished: X is free enough, or has low enough walls to the garden, where we (EFF) can leave to focus efforts elsewhere. It doesn't really make sense in context of posting to additional platform, but could be one explanation why "X is no longer where the fight is happening." This is contradicted by other parts so I can't mistake the announcement for something like it.
People who dislike X and its owner tend to treat evidence of its failure as a team win. Non-profits making announcements of departure that get a lot of attention are one type of evidence. I assumed too much that this was common knowledge. Here are a selection replies to the Bluesky post that mirrors X announcement:
'About time!' is a form of celebration with an I'm better than you caveat. People who might not want to celebrate are like Schoen, or Nybbler below, long time supporters who want them to do the EFF things that do not include confused departure announcements on social media platforms.
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