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Messages - dubsartur

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1
Cathy O'Neil interviewed someone who dropped out of the Effective Altruism movement while still practicing some of the belief system.  Interviewee reports that a philosophy professor thinks EA is getting major influence in philosophy departments in the UK through donations. Contrast the LessWrongers whose preferred way to interact with academe is to read pop science books and computer science and psychology papers and who tend to be dismissive of philosophy, history, philology, etc. https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/16/an-interview-with-someone-who-left-effective-altruism/ (And Sam Bankman "if you wrote a book you made a mistake" Fried the son of two professors)

Interviewee, like the people above, noticed that many of the movement leaders are thinky talky people not doers ... except that some EA people now control big money!

Edit: American on how he spent a year working for a crypto company trying to decide whether it was as scammy and fly-by-night as it seemed then left when he decided the answer was "yes" https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/100-bafflegab

2
When the party-of-capital BC Liberals rebranded as BC United to avoid associations with centrist party-of-power federal Liberals in April 2023, something predictable happened: their support in the polls collapsed in favour of the BC Conservatives.  This put the leader of BC United in the situation of having to say on the record that voters are confusing the provincial and federal conservatives, which is plausible but not very respectful to low-information voters. Canadian parties have very small advertising and PR budgets so a rebranded party does not have many chances to communicate the new name between elections.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/12/27/Kevin-Falcon-BC-United-Not-Doomed/

Unfortunately BC United has gone full 'how can we reduce our emissions when China exists?' One factor which the Tyee interview leaves out is that most of the CO2 added to the atmosphere from the year 1 to 2000 was added by Europe and the North Atlantic plus Japan.  So we got the benefits, and telling India and China that they have to stay poor because we used up the global carbon budget is not likely to be convincing.

3
NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)
Is this something that's actually traceable as a single block change, or is it more that it's gone through several phases since? We're quite a few careers down the line from Apollo 11 now!
Simultaneous in different parts of the organization!  They lost the Columbia while teams were carefully trying to calculate obscure long-term health risks to highly-paid idealistic volunteers.

Maybe because of its origins, NASA is always centred around a prestige project (Apollo, Space Shuttle, ISS, Artemis) and when that project gets into trouble management makes choices which are bad for science and space capabilities but good for covering their butts.  Currently they are cancelling a $20m science project (Chandra X-ray telescope) to have MAWR BUDGET for the Moon/Mars plan.

More budget would probably help, but giant prestige projects are prone to delays, budget shortfalls, and deadly engineering failures.

Edit: fediverse thread on moon dust and its effects on breathing and equipment https://mastodon.green/@AnarchoCatgirlism@transfem.social/112057068231111010

4
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI
« on: March 13, 2024, 06:15:23 AM »
The Walrus wants you to be scared of TikTok misinformation https://thewalrus.ca/social-media-is-warping-history/ which seems to draw on a trade book from a Big Five publisher: Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Basically though, corporate social media are not places for establishing evidence-based consensus.  They never were, any more than bar-room chats, cable TV, or magazines for thinky talky people were.  If you wanted them to be, you would build them differently, and they would be much smaller.  Knowing verifiable true things is an uncommon taste.  There was no time in the 20th century when most people in the North Atlantic world were good scientific materialists, most people have at least one belief or practice which is hard to square with natural science.  But when you are one-on-one or one-on-few with people, you can listen with attention, ask some gentle questions, and offer some extra information and often they can take that and step away from the woo.

If you want a mass-media-sized audience, you have to create mass-media-shaped things like big speculative claims or moralistic gossip about famous people.

5
One of the hard problems in human spacetravel is shielding crew from radiation outside the Earth's magnetic field whenever there is a solar storm (although a lot depends on the level of safety you expect).  One proposal is electromagnetic shielding but implementation is the problem.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/shields-up-new-ideas-might-make-active-shielding-viable/

NASA's safety culture after Apollo 11 is a weird mix of safety-conscious (carefully calculating incremental increases in cancer risk to International Space Station crew) and reckless (all those deaths in the Shuttle program)

6
Computer wargames are excellent examples!  There is probably something by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Medieval: Total War had the problem that they did not have historical Byzantine units from the later middle ages to draw on.  I played a long Byzantine campaign but some people found their armies got underwhelming after about 1200.  Of course Mongol armies were underwhelming too because the AI did not know how to use horse archers and the game had no way to represent their overwhelming strategic mobility and C3I advantages.

7
If you train yourself into a good scientist, either through academe or through doing things which are continuously tested against evidence, it becomes hard to believe in 'big ideas' books and essays.  Unfortunately, the Internet and social media reward the 'big ideas' much better than specific nuanced expertise.  Something that seems truthy and provocative to someone with no specific knowledge of the topic gets more shares, angry responses, 30 second clips on TV, etc.  Its one of the simple pleasures you have to give up with education or experience, like getting a medical or paramedical education makes it hard to enjoy medical dramas.

For every romantic reactionary in classic American science fiction such as Poul Anderson there is an anarchist expat Esperantoist like Harry Harrison or a feminist such as Ursula le Guin.

Mystery and comedy are all about restoring the proper order of society, and romance tends to promote the romantic pair bond as the ideal way to live a life.  So you could argue that popular fiction tends to be conservative.

Edit: Also, debates like "are organized sci fi fans self-important?" go on because they continue to be issues! But If you have heard the argument go back and forth 10 times, then an 11th version is probably not for you.

Edit: essay from 2015 which defines the fiction it is talking about https://scholars-stage.org/fiction-and-the-strategist/

8
Moving on, other than "A Memory Called Empire," Edward Gibbon, and the Harry Turtledove Videssos novels and Agent of Byzantium stories, can we think of any examples of East Roman culture in pop culture?

They don't have a counterpart in the Warhammer Old World, you can argue about Gondor in LotR.  Someone generated LotR art in the style of a late Byzantine icon with one of those generative AI programs.

Classic sci fi was obsessed with the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, the east not so much.

9
Questions and Suggestions - The High Court / Styling Blockquotes
« on: March 05, 2024, 04:33:22 AM »
Right now, blockquotes appear in smaller lighter text than the body.  So if the main text is readable, often the quoted text is not.  Could we change styling so that the blockquotes are in at least the same size and weight as the body text?

10
I will see what I can do.

The essay by Jake Casella Brookins is trying to use drama on the internet or social media to show something about society in general, and his jeremiad against digital-industrial civilization could be picked at in the details (eg. a smaller proportion of humans are very poor today than any time in the past 150 years, and Mr. Biden actually ended one of the forever wars - and Highland New Guinea had forever wars with neolithic technology).  Classic California sci-fi fandom was full of people who would go to a party and say something provocative and watch the sparks!

11
I don't yet have time to read that and form an opinion, but other essays along those lines are a recent one by Charlie Stross and a strange older essay by David Brin where he set up Star Wars as reactionary and mystical (OK) but Star Trek as a model of rational scientific humanism (um ...)  A lot of powerful people are implementing technologies like buttonless touch-screen interfaces and voice control and orbital space habitats which seemed cool on TV or in Analog magazine when they were 12.

Ursula le Guin has essays on science fiction and fantasy which are also worth reading too.

Stross says something I said in a talk a few years ago:

Quote
SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

Could we change the default styling on this forum so that text in BlockQuotes is at least as tall and weighty as in the body of a post?

12
A software person in the USA just told his followers that big parts of this (gestures to the thread) are just a typical California apocalyptic cult as has been common since the 1930s.  That person has a cryptocurrency address and wants you to know that spicy autocorrect will change everything for the good as creatives become AI-feeders.  A typical California Ideology is that if we turn everything into data and feed it into the computer our problems will be solved, and if actually existing computers don't seem so helpful we just need to give them more power.

So there are a lot of messages about the impending doom or rebirth of the world circulating in parts of these spaces, and someone can reject one of them ("my company which is currently raising funds with several well-known VC firms is not building Skynet" or "anomalous sensor readings on classified hardware are neither aliens nor angels") but fall for others.

The NXIVM cult / self-help movement / pyramid scheme was also based in New York City and had many tropes which will be familiar to anyone who has looked into all of this (lots of bad Latin, 'rationality', 'doing well by doing good', a male Leader surrounded by adoring women)

13
Anyways, I guess my point is that xenophobes who cry "Christian Constantinople is threatened by the oriental Islamic hordes!" never actually want to see more Ethiopian Christians or Syrian Christians in their country, so they don't really feel fellowship with all Christians.  And their inclusion of live Greeks or Neapolitans or Bulgarians in their imagined community is often provisional and tactical.

14
General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: February pub - 29th?
« on: February 29, 2024, 06:59:39 PM »
Got the message about the meeting but there are no mods yet

15
But Syrians and Egyptians before 1071 and arguably 1204 were mostly Orthodox Christians!  For a long time, Moslems were just a thin ruling class and Jews, Christians, Manicheans, Mandaeans, and so on provided most of the white-tunic professions.

This series of posts https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2024/01/24/from-%cf%84%e1%bd%b0-%cf%86%cf%85%cf%83%ce%b9%ce%ba%ce%ac-ta-physika-to-physics-xiv/ and Wiki on Ibn Butlan talk about one aspect

And of course when you get into it Protestant nuts don't think Catholics are really Christian, Catholic nuts don't think any of the Orthodox churches are really Christian, etc. - if you argue that Christianity Caused the Rise of the West, but the Eastern Roman Empire fell, its very tempting to argue that the Orthodox churches had something wrong with them.

And the appetite among PEGIDA types for "lets let in all the oppressed minorities of the Islamic world!  Palestinian Christians, Syrian Yazidis, Iranian Baha'i, as long as they are not Moslem we want them in our shops and our schools." seems basically zero.  Talky members might raise the idea as a gambit, but I can not imagine any Xenophobe Party franchise voting for it.

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