I try not to repost Slate Star Codex posts too often — I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is aware of SSC, and already reads it if they’re interested (and tolerant of the very long posts there). But this one’s worth reposting: it’s a summary of the major threads of inquiry he’s followed over the past decade, with links to the posts on each thread. It’s also a short, quick read by SSC standards. Check it out!
What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s? | Slate Star Codex
In our time, polarization has not only grown sharper but has even become its own justification. In the spring of 2018, a poll by the Pew Research Center registered yet another marker in the long series of milestones on the road to ungovernability: Democrats are now just as averse to compromise as Republicans. Only a minority in both parties (46% of Democrats, 44% of Republicans) told Pew they “like elected officials who make compromises with people they disagree with.” The essence of the U.S. Constitution is to require compromise as a condition of governing. In rejecting compromise, Americans are rejecting governance. The United States and other countries have been down this road in the past, and the results are never good.
I don’t think that all PC culture is ridiculous the way conservatives do — but it’s definitely worth remembering that it’s sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes hurts innocent people. I think claims of offensiveness and insensitivity should be considered with a skeptical eye, just like all normative claims from any source.
A lot has happened in the last decade — including a lot of things being called racist, sexist, offensive, or insensitive.
Happy New Year 2020
I’ve been arguing something pretty similar to this for a decade, although not on free speech / moderation grounds. It’s nice to see someone make the case in a thorough and detailed way, and I’ll probably point people to this in future. I’m posting a brief summary excerpt here, but I recommend the whole thing.
Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams. On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process. Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don’t moderate). Still others have suggested that there should be no moderation allowed at all—at least for platforms of a certain size—such that they are deemed part of the public square.
As this article will attempt to highlight, most of these solutions are not just unworkable; many of them will make the initial problems worse or will have other effects that are equally pernicious.
This article proposes an entirely different approach—one that might seem counterintuitive but might actually provide for a workable plan that enables more free speech, while minimizing the impact of trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts. As a bonus, it also might help the users of these platforms regain control of their privacy. And to top it all off, it could even provide an entirely new revenue stream for these platforms.
That approach: build protocols, not platforms.
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
A bit of unexpected good news…
For once, the climate news might be better than you thought. It’s certainly better than I’ve thought.
You may not have noticed it, amid the flood of bad news about the “Emissions Gap” and the collapse of the COP25 climate conference in Madrid, but over the last few weeks a new narrative about the climate future has emerged, on balance encouraging, at least to an alarmist like me. It is this: As best as we can understand and project the medium- and long-term trajectories of energy use and emissions, the window of possible climate futures is probably narrowing, with both the most optimistic scenarios and the most pessimistic ones seeming, now, less likely.
That narrowing contains both good and bad news — what was recently the best to hope for now seems vanishingly unlikely, and what was the worst to fear much less likely, too. But let’s start with the good news, since there is typically so little of it.
“…the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”
In a recent study published in the journal Physical Review X, an international team of physicists from Austria, Scotland, Canada, Finland and Germany have demonstrated how quantum entanglement can be strengthened to overcome particle loss or very high levels of noise, which are inevitable in real-life applications outside the laboratory. This strengthening is accomplished by departing from commonly used two-level quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits are bi-dimensional systems, the quantum analogue to the classical bit, with values zero or one. In this study, the researchers instead employed entanglement of systems with more than two levels. By entangling particles of light through their spatial and temporal properties, scientists have now observed the survival of quantum entanglement under harsh environmental conditions for the first time.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-entanglement-long-distance-free-space-quantum.html
https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.041042
Note: I’ve been blogging less because unfortunately the WordPress Android app is broken for self-hosted blogs — lots of people complaining about it but no fixes as yet. Hoping it gets resolved before too long…
I find both pro-socialism and anti-socialism arguments pretty plausible; I haven’t figured out yet whether there’s a resolution of those two perspectives that I find convincing. In the meantime, here are a couple of decent articulations of the anti-socialist case:
It’s been a while since I’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with a genre I had never even heard of before (and it’s one of my very favorite experiences), but over the past few months I have utterly lost my heart to Ethiopian music from the 60s and 70s, sometimes called Ethio Jazz. There’s a fantastic series of albums, “Éthiopiques”, which documents the scene. It’s kind of like jazz, kind of like soul music, sometimes kind of like funk, and always steeped in the hypnotic cycles of traditional Northern African music, but it throws those all in a blender and something utterly unique comes out. The “very-best-of” compilation I would have liked to link isn’t available online, but here’s some random person’s playlist which includes some good representational material:
