Wednesday, June 26, 2024

My Marshall-McLuhan-in-Annie-Hall Moment

Even in its current sad state, you still find yourself in interesting conversations on Twitter.

 

 

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher[2][3][4][5] and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence.[6][7] He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.[8] His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

 

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

 I'm afraid even the Brothers Grimm would have found Bitcoin a little too fantastic

I'm edging closer to the notion that the tools which we would normally use to critique journalism are no longer up to the task of discussing the 21st century technology narrative. Instead, the appropriate methods are probably those of the folklorist. We are rapidly approaching the realm of the myth and the tall tale. Why not start thinking in those terms?

It is standard practice when discussing something like a Jack tale to list the Aarne–Thompson classification. For example, Jack in the beanstalk fall under the classification AT 328 ("The Treasures of the Giant"). We could do something similar with the vast majority of tech reported. TakeTheranos. This and other accounts of college dropouts supposedly coming up with some amazing innovation can be classified under "wayward youth finds magic object."

 I've been getting quite a bit of thought recently to how magical heuristics have come to dominate the conversation about technology and innovation, but the idea of actually treating the narrative as folklore didn't hit me until I read this:
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings when programmed to pursue even seemingly-harmless goals, and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power its optimized goal would be to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.[4]

    Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
    — Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence", 2003

Bostrom has emphasised that he does not believe the paperclip maximiser scenario per se will actually occur; rather, his intention is to illustrate the dangers of creating superintelligent machines without knowing how to safely program them to eliminate existential risk to human beings. The paperclip maximizer example illustrates the broad problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values

Suddenly it struck me that this was just the magic salt mill ever so slightly veiled in cyber garb. In case you're not up on your folklore...

It is Aarne-Thompson type 565, the Magic Mill. Other tales of this type include The Water Mother and Sweet porridge.

Synopsis

A poor man begged from his brother on Christmas Eve. The brother promised him, depending on the variant, ham or bacon or a lamb if he would do something. The poor brother promised; the rich one handed over the food and told him to go to Hell (in Lang's version, the Dead Men's Hall; in the Greek, the Devil's dam). Since he promised, he set out. In the Norse variants, he meets an old man along the way. In some variants, the man begs from him, and he gives something; in all, the old man tells him that in Hell (or the hall), they will want to buy the food from him, but he must only sell it for the hand-mill behind the door, and come to him for directions to use it. It took a great deal of haggling, but the poor man succeeded, and the old man showed him how to use it. In the Greek, he merely brought the lamb and told the devils that he would take whatever they would give him, and they gave him the mill. He took it to his wife, and had it grind out everything they needed for Christmas, from lights to tablecloth to meat and ale. They ate well and on the third day, they had a great feast. His brother was astounded and when the poor man had drunk too much, or when the poor man's children innocently betrayed the secret, he showed his rich brother the hand-mill. His brother finally persuaded him to sell it. In the Norse version, the poor brother didn't teach him how to handle it. He set to grind out herrings and broth, but it soon flooded his house. His brother wouldn't take it back until he paid him as much as he paid to have it. In the Greek, the brother set out to Constantinople by ship. In the Norse, one day a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from him, and eventually persuaded him. In all versions, the new owner took it to sea and set it to grind out salt. It ground out salt until it sank the boat, and then went on grinding in the sea, turning the sea salty.


I realize Bostrom isn't proposing this as a likely scenario. That's not the point. What matters here is that he and other researchers and commentators tend to think about technology using the specific heuristics and motifs people have always used for thinking about magic, and it worries me when I start recognizing the Aarne–Thompson classifications for stories in the science section.
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Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Tuesday tweets – – when you have to dig up one-year-old professional wrestling clips to find signs of social progress

Seeing a lot of comments along these lines from Trump watchers along with a lot of what does look like groundwork from the Trump camp. Not sure if I'd go 60%, but I won't be shocked if it happens either.


 

Why would they be worried?


The key to understanding Trump's speaking style has always been to think of him in terms of a second tier Vegas insult comic, at least on the level of a Jack Carter. This is not damning with faint praise. It takes an unusual level of real talent work a crowd for an hour or more the way the former president does. Some of his crazier quotes actually do make sense as part of a Vegas lounge riff when you hear them in context. By the same token, many of the things that he and his followers have tried to explain away as jokes such as the Nancy Pelosi/Nikki Haley confusion are even more obviously brain glitches when you actually listen to the clips, and those brain glitches have been getting more common.


"A washing machine to wash your dishes"



This has also been getting some news.


One of the lessons of 2016 was that non-endorsements of Donald Trump aren't all that significant, but for a Republican this is still remarkable.


On an unrelated note.



At least Trump still as the nepo-baby support.


I seem to recall us telling idealists in the education reform movement around a dozen years ago not to put too much trust in some of their allies





Anyone else getting a no more Mr. nice guy vibe from recent Democratic campaign ads?


Yes, the Republicans still have a vetting problem.

Then there's this.

The bank he leads, Utah-based Sunwest, last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.

And possibly a reverse coattails problem.




Don the Dove





When the headline writer for the Onion calls something beyond parody...


For a NYT writer, when the narrative can't be reconciled with the facts, go with the narrative,

AI






This is a perfect rundown of how the techno-optimist crowd thinks about fusion.



Rep. Jack Kimble is about to be your new favorite politician on Twitter.




Always read the bio before replying.









Mock if you will, but I find this genuinely encouraging.

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Monday, June 24, 2024

Campaign Cash -- the spending side

We have to be careful about how we talk about money in an election, particularly in this election. With financial questions, we're used to thinking  in terms of businesses or (two perhaps a lesser degree) household finance where more money coming in is almost always better, as is less money going out. In those situations, the money can usually be seen as end to itself. Whoever ends up with the most wins.

In politics, money is a means to an end. Turning a profit is not an objective. The only good reason for not spending the money is so that you can spend it next time. Normally, this is so obvious we don't have to put a lot of thought into the matter. It is sufficient to ask me how much each candidate is bringing in and how wisely it is being spent. In 2024, however, we can't assume anything is normal.

One of the odd things about the role of campaign funds this time is how little Donald Trump is spending. This was somewhat obscured by the fact that, until his recent surge in fundraising, the GOP simply had far less cash on hand which certainly constrained its expenditures, but even taking that into account, the lack of money going out has been little short of amazing.

I checked in with my friend from Georgia over the weekend. He continues to encounter regular Biden/Harris ads on both television and the radio (and not just Georgia). In the bluer parts of town, there are plenty of Biden yard signs. By comparison, he has seen no ads for Trump and has actually come across more upside down American flags that he has Trump yard signs. It's not as if Trump had a great deal of local earned media in Southeastern swing states. Unless I'm missing an obvious counterexample, he has recently done more campaign events in New Jersey, New York, and Texas than he has in either Georgia or North Carolina.

Yes, the Republicans were cash poor, but they weren't exactly bankrupt. Based on statistics I've seen and anecdotes like this, the level of ad spending, local organizing, and get out the vote operations has been bizarrely low. Even now, after what has supposedly been a very good month of fundraising, if there have been announcements of major ad buys or plans to open dozens of field offices, I've not heard about them. 

There is an exception, albeit an exception so odd that no one seems to know what to do with it.


There are also some questions about exactly how much money we're talking about, but that's a topic for later.

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Friday, June 21, 2024

Meta-panic and the Importance of Timing

June 19th...

One day later...

And this from Josh Marshall:

But the heart of the [Axios] piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.”

“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary.”

I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January. (Literally not kidding about this.) We’ve been reading about these fearful strategists for months.

Purely at a definitional level I don’t get how a tie race can be “dire.” How is that possible, even by the dictionary? Scary, yes. Not ideal, absolutely. But a tie can’t be “dire.” That’s just not what dire means.

...

I have no doubt that if we’re back here in mid-November and Biden lost some of you will be saying, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself now, Josh.” And I think my answer will be “I mean, he lost. It was close but he lost. And that sucks. I never promised he would win.”

But I keep coming back to “dire.” There’s something legitimately clinical going on here. Some of it is DC journalists being attached to a narrative, one they’re invested in for various reasons. But Democrats and “Democratic strategists” play a role here too, whether or not they have the initials D and A. I’ve made my argument at some length that runaway pessimism has real world campaign impacts, in addition to simply being an Eeyore-ly and undignified way to live life. But there is some disconnect here that is worth understanding, worth taking a hard look at quite apart from its potential negative impacts on the election outcome. I wish I could give a good explanation for it beyond the inherent GOP tilt of most national political press coverage and intrinsic Democratic worry-wart-ism, both of which are certainly playing a role. But I can’t. For now I can only point to it as a standout example of the way that certain press and political narratives can remain curiously immune to actual evidence.

He's right, the word "dire" is really telling. It goes to the point we've been making that arguments we've seen from Silver, Klein and others that Biden is so far behind that he needs to do something incredibly risky is bizarrely disconnected from the actual polling.

I find this a little less inexplicable than Marshall does, at least in part because I've been spending a lot of time recently going through memoirs, interviews, and statements from New York Times writers and particularly editors (not to mention the publisher) and the central theme is how terrified almost all of them are at the thought of being accused of liberal bias. Given the influence of the paper, I'm certain they speak for lots of other national journalists.

They went to absurd lengths in 2016 to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and yet the message that much, perhaps most, of the country took away from their coverage was that they underestimated the chances of a Republican victory due to a bias against Trump. From this they learned the wrong lesson and they learned it too well. Not only have they taken the most pessimistic and critical view of the Biden campaign possible, they have also apparently internalized it so that when critics point out the flaws and inconsistencies, they angrily respond that people are asking them to abandon their journalistic standards.

This was exacerbated by the extended period of denial about Trump's chances of winning the 2024 nomination. Go back and read the New York Times' 2022 "analysis" showing that DeSantis was actually the real front runner or Slate's article insisting that Trump wouldn't even run. Along similar lines, check out their wildly overoptimistic coverage of Haley and Ramaswamy. By convincing themselves that Trump would go away on his own, they could frame every Biden story in the most negative way possible and engage in constant mean-girling of Harris without worrying about the consequences. When reality set in, they were fully invested in their narratives.

We'll leave the last word to Doug J.



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Thursday, June 20, 2024

Unpasteurized Feral Disinformation

The fundamental rule of feral disinformation is that once a useful lie develops a life of its own, you can no longer depend on it remaining useful. Case in point:

For a long time, sowing distrust of health and safety regulations and of the agencies and research institutions behind them was good politics for the conservative movement. It aligned with the movement's antigovernment, pro-business agenda and it played to the pre-existing paranoia of much of the far right. In the case of the dairy industry, attacks on the EPA help producers get away with practices such as dumping wastewater while pressure on the FDA made it more difficult to introduce more regulations and labeling requirements.

On the whole though most businesses are not uniformly anti-regulation, particularly when those regulations shield them from lawsuits and costly reputational hits to their industries, making this story a decidedly mixed bag.

Chelsea Brasted writing for Axios:

Louisiana lawmakers approved a bill to remove the state's total ban on raw milk sales, joining the majority of the country where the product is already available, if and when Gov. Jeff Landry signs the legislation.

...

The big picture: Commentators for conservative media like The Blaze, QAnon, Infowars and Gab have been sharing what they describe as the benefits of raw milk, according to an analysis from left-leaning Media Matters.

  • The Blaze, for example, published what it called an investigation on "the truth about raw milk the government doesn't want you to know," calling raw milk "close to a perfect food" in its headline.
  • The Media Matters analysis found more than 13,000 TikTok posts with the hashtag #rawmilk, and the top 581 videos had amassed over 231 million views by May 3.

Reality check: Nearly all store-bought milk is pasteurized, a process that kills the bacteria that can lead to harmful diseases and illnesses like listeria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

And for you animal lovers out there...

Coates' intentions for the product appeared clear that day as she stated that "many people [are] looking for healthy choices and even be able to use it for their pets."

Brasted then quotes this article from the LA Times:

Federal officials say they have found high levels of active H5N1 — a highly pathogenic avian influenza — in raw milk. Observations and studies have show that barn cats who drank the contaminated raw milk have suffered horrific symptoms — including blindness, brain swelling and neurological issues — as well as death.

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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Six years ago in the blog -- two vintage tech posts

 

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

"Oh, the things that you'll see."

To get a handle on turn-of-the-century mentality, you have to focus not just on the newness of individual technologies, but of the very idea of being able to do these now ordinary things. At the beginning of the 19th century, the only way to capture an image was to have a highly skilled artist draw or paint it. The process was inexact, expensive and so slow that anything that could not remain still for an extended period of time had to be represented from memory.

For people around 1900, viable photography was still a relatively recent development, very much in living memory. It would not have been difficult to find someone who remember the first time he or she saw a photograph. Furthermore, this fantastic advance kicked off a dizzying flood of ever more impressive innovations. Cameras and film became cheaper, simpler, and more compact. Pictures started to move. Photographs could be transmitted over telegraph. You could see images of the skeleton of a living human being and capture an instant in time.

One of the points we keep coming back to in this thread is that our concept of the future was the product of a generation of explosive and (even more importantly) ubiquitous technological growth which was the culmination of a century of exponentially advancing innovation. Our framework for thinking about the world that's coming was largely formed in a period of technological change unmatched before or since.

From Scientific American 1909/12/18







Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Steam-powered airplanes

I'm going to connect this up with some ongoing thread somewhere down the line, but for now I just thought I'd share this really cool list from Wikipedia of 19th-century experiments in steam-powered aircraft.


The Aerial Steam Carriage



The Henson Aerial Steam Carriage of 1843 (imaginary representation for an advertisement).





Patent drawing for the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage of 1843.











  • 1842: The Aerial Steam Carriage of William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow was patented, but was never successful, although a steam-powered model was flown in 1848.
  • 1852: Henri Giffard flew a 3-horsepower (2 kW) steam-powered dirigible over Paris; it was the first powered aircraft.
  • 1861 Gustave Ponton d'Amécourt made a small steam-powered craft, coining the name helicopter.
  • 1874: Félix du Temple flew a steam-powered aluminium monoplane off a downhill run. While it did not achieve level flight, it was the first manned heavier-than-air powered flight.
  • 1877: Enrico Forlanini built and flew a model steam-powered helicopter in Milan.
  • 1882: Alexander Mozhaisky built a steam-powered plane but it did not achieve sustained flight. The engine from the plane is in the Central Air Force Museum in Monino, Moscow.
  • 1890: Clément Ader built a steam-powered, bat-winged monoplane, named the Eole. Ader flew it on October 9, 1890, over a distance of 50 metres (160 ft), but the engine was inadequate for sustained and controlled flight. His flight did prove that a heavier-than-air flight was possible. Ader made at least three further attempts, the last two on 12 and 14 October 1897 for the French Ministry of War. There is controversy about whether or not he attained controlled flight. Ader did not obtain funding for his project, and that points to its probable failure.[1]
  • 1894: Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (inventor of the Maxim Gun) built and tested a large rail-mounted, steam-powered aircraft testbed, with a mass of 3.5 long tons (3.6 t) and a wingspan of 110 feet (34 m) in order to measure the lift produced by different wing configurations. The machine unexpectedly generated sufficient lift and thrust to break free of the test track and fly, but was never intended to be operated as a piloted aircraft and so crashed almost immediately owing to its lack of flight controls.
  • 1896: Samuel Pierpont Langley successfully flew unpiloted steam-powered models.[2]
  • 1897: Carl Richard Nyberg's Flugan developed steam-powered aircraft over a period from 1897 to 1922, but they never achieved more than a few short hops.



Ader Avion III


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