Fascinating article about Chinese citizens’ linguistic innovations for getting around the government’s internet censorship (2013).

Chinese netizens are still speaking in a heavily monitored environment, and so their demands for greater freedom of information and expression often find voice through coded language and metaphors that allow them to avoid outright censorship.

One of the most famous Internet puns has to do with a character called the cao ni ma or Grass Mud Horse. The term literally contains those three words—there are Grass Mud Horse comics, videos, and stuffed animals that bring the character to life. The joke is that with only a shift of tone the words can easily be made to sound very much like a certain highly provocative and insulting profanity. Playful images of the Grass Mud Horse are novelties that circulate within the relatively small circles of people who enjoy such things. But the term cao ni ma as a spoken word has a much broader range and reaches many more people both on and off the Internet. In a famous photograph, the artist Ai Weiwei leaps into the air, naked except for a stuffed-animal Grass Mud Horse held over the middle of his body at crotch level in order to block his genitals from view. The photo is a jab at the CCP regime, for the expression “the Grass Mud Horse covers the middle” can mean, with a shift of tone, “f___ your mother, Communist Party Central Committee.” The elegance of Ai’s art is that he can induce viewers to think that second phrase without uttering a single syllable. To the regime’s Internet police he can say, “You said it, not me!”

Another widespread term is hexie, which means “river crab” but is a near-homonym of the word for “harmony.” The regime of recently retired PRC president Hu Jintao, in its public rhetoric, put great stress on the idea of a hexie shehui or “harmonious society.” By recasting this official phrase to turn “harmonious society” into “river-crab society,” netizens are evoking Chinese folklore, in which the crab appears as a bully known for scuttling sideways. Netizens also use hexie as a verb as well as a noun. When a website is shut down or a computer screen goes blank, the victims might say “We have been river-crabbed!” or, in other words, “harmonized” into silence.

https://www.chinafile.com/china-tipping-point

I’m honestly not quite sure what she’s on about in the descriptions, but these are absolutely gorgeous <3

Wisdom Engines — TANYA P. JOHNSON

A nuanced look at a tough issue where, in my opinion, our culture has rather lost its way.

The first and most important takeaway from Kashmir Hill’s excellent article in the New York Times about Mark, the man flagged by Google as a purveyor of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) for taking pictures of his son’s penis and sending them to their family doctor, and who subsequently lost nearly every aspect of his digital life when Google deleted his account, are the tremendous trade-offs entailed in the indiscriminate scanning of users’ cloud data.

It links to an essay on a related topic, and one of the comments there struck me as an excellent encapsulation of where the topic of free speech stands in large segments of our culture:

https://stratechery.com/2022/rights-laws-and-google/

A troubled and somewhat troubling project that’s nevertheless fascinating:

In January 2021, MBS appeared on Saudi television to introduce Neom’s most far-fetched element yet, a “civilizational revolution” called the Line. A “linear city” 100 miles long, it would generate zero carbon emissions. Its 1 million residents would occupy a car-free surface layer, with no one more than five minutes’ walk from essential amenities; utility corridors and high-speed trains would be hidden underground, along with infrastructure for moving freight.

The concept carried echoes of an idea originated in the 1960s by Superstudio, an Italian architectural collective, for a structure so enormous it would wrap around the entire planet. This “Continuous Monument” was never a real building proposal; it was intended as a critique of excessive urbanization and of the modernist megaprojects then in vogue. One of Superstudio’s last surviving members, when asked about the Line by the New York Times, dryly noted that “seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabia/

EDIT: can’t forget to link Scott Alexander being snarky about it! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122

This, a thousand times this.

So many political strategies are centered around “beating” the other side(s), and claiming victory over their defeat.  For evolutionary reasons, it is easy to see why these attitudes might have won out.  Yet in general those approaches are a sign of a narrow vision.  Beating the other side is a possible strategy, but it should hardly be the only strategy you attempt, even if we forget about the “you might be the one who is wrong!” worry.

Quite simply, a lot of the time you never beat the other side, though over time the terms of the debate do shift ground.

An alternative strategy is to try to make the other side better, even if you do not agree with the other side.  You might try to make the other side saner and more open, and I do not mean by telling them how wrong they are.  You do this, believe it or not, by supporting them in some ways, or at least supporting the best parts of the other side.

It is remarkable how few people pursue this strategy.  I do know two prominent people, both on the Left, who do this and I think they do it fairly effectively.  It is sad that I am reluctant to name them, for fear of getting them into trouble with their compatriots.

If the ongoing equilibrium is “the terms of the debate will be shifted,” why should “improving the other side” be any less important than “improving your own side”?  On average it should be symmetric, no?

Yet the unpopularity of this strategy once again suggests that politics isn’t about policy, in this matter it is more often about internal norms of group solidarity and intra-group status.

Learning to see that, and to internalize that knowledge emotionally, is often a better strategy — if only for your sanity — than trying to defeat the other side all the time.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/making-the-other-side-better.html

For a good example of someone doing this right:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans

As Garrison Keillor fans are well aware, all of the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. But newly published research suggests the presumption of exceptionality is hardly confined to rural Minnesota.

In fact, it is so widespread, it even applies to a most unexpected population: prison inmates.

A survey of convicts serving time in an English prison found they rated themselves higher than the average person on a range of positive characteristics, including morality and kindness. A research team led by University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikides reports the one exception was law-abidingness—“for which they viewed themselves as average.”

Study: Belief We’re Better Than Average Holds True Even for Convicts

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It’s the Chinese Room of brains. It’s the Strandbeest of animals. It’s “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” as executed by evolution.

From this excellent article in Quanta.

Fascinating. Haven’t gotten to read the whole paper yet. I’d love to see whether this study replicates.

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) predicts that moral behaviour reflects at least five foundational traits, each hypothesised to be heritable. Here, we report two independent twin studies (total n = 2020), using multivariate multi-group common pathway models to test the following three predictions from the MFT: (1) The moral foundations will show significant heritability; (2) The moral foundations will each be genetically distinct and (3) The clustering of moral concerns around individualising and binding domains will show significant heritability. Supporting predictions 1 and 3, Study 1 showed evidence for significant heritability of two broad moral factors corresponding to individualising and binding domains. In Study 2, we added the second dataset, testing replication of the Study 1 model in a joint approach. This further corroborated evidence for heritable influence, showed strong influences on the individualising and binding domains (h² = 49% and 66%, respectively) and, partially supporting prediction 2, showed foundation-specific, heritable influences on Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity and Purity/Sanctity foundations. A general morality factor was required, also showing substantial genetic effects (40%). These findings indicate that moral foundations have significant genetic bases. These influenced the individual foundations themselves as well as a general concern for the individual, for the group, and overall moral concern.

Testing heritability of moral foundations: Common pathway models support strong heritability for the five moral foundations – Michael Zakharin, Timothy C Bates, 2022

It was hard to choose an excerpt from this; the whole thing is very much worth reading.

Protections you think you have may not be as broad as you think. The confidentiality that federal health privacy law provides to conversations with a doctor doesn’t always apply to prescriptions. In 2020, Consumer Reports exposed that GoodRX, a popular drug discount and coupons service, was selling information on what medications people were searching or buying to Facebook, Google and other data marketing firms. GoodRX said it would stop, but there is no law against them, or any pharmacy, doing this.

That data becomes even more powerful whenmerged. A woman who regularly eats sushi and suddenly stops, or stops taking Pepto-Bismol, or starts taking vitamin B6 may be easily identified as someone following guidelines for pregnancy. If that woman doesn’t give birth she might find herself being questioned by the police, who may think she had an abortion. (Already, in some places, women who seek medical help after miscarriages have reported questioning to this effect.)

I haven’t even gotten to all the data collected on billions of people by giant technology platforms like Facebook and Google. “Well, don’t use them,” you might say. Again, good luck.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/privacy-technology-data.html

Lisa Nilsson (previously) has spent years perfecting a technique known as quilling in which thin strips of paper are rolled into coils and then pinched and nudged into shape in a process she likens to completing a puzzle. With a history thought to extend back to Ancient Egypt, the practice rose to more recent popularity in 18th century Europe. Narrow edges of gilt book pages were a popular material, creating metallic surfaces when rolled into place. In her most recent work, “Grand Jardin,” Nilsson has expanded upon this traditional method by building up more dense applications of the medium and assembling on a much bigger scale. Combining shimmering gold pieces with vivid hues of Japanese mulberry paper across the surface, the ubiquitous material transforms into a remarkable topography.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2022/05/lisa-nilsson-grand-jardin/