Inevitable enshittification

Ed Zitron goes on a well written rant

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products. 

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we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe it’s so much bigger than just social media and algorithms — though they’re a big part of it, of course. 

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing. 

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.

Trump might really be a fascist

Listen to what he says

I am not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t) and certainly not if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (‘thing I don’t like’) and in that context ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements and if so, what does that mean. And I want to do it in a long-form context where we can get beyond slogans or tweet-length arguments and into some detail.

AI bullshit

Large Language Models are bullshitters

in the technical sense of the word 

bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. 

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false statements by ChatGPT and other large language models are described as “hallucinations”, which give policymakers and the public the idea that these systems are misrepresenting the world, and describing what they “see”. We argue that this is an inapt metaphor which will misinform the public, policymakers, and other interested parties.

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their primary goal, insofar as they have one, is to produce human-like text. They do so by estimating the likelihood that a particular word will appear next, given the text that has come before.

The machine does this by constructing a massive statistical model, one which is based on large amounts of text, mostly taken from the internet. This is done with relatively little input from human researchers or the designers of the system; rather, the model is designed by constructing a large number of nodes, which act as probability functions for a word to appear in a text given its context and the text that has come before it. Rather than putting in these probability functions by hand, researchers feed the system large amounts of text and train it by having it make next-word predictions about this training data. They then give it positive or negative feedback depending on whether it predicts correctly. Given enough text, the machine can construct a statistical model giving the likelihood of the next word in a block of text all by itself.

This model associates with each word a vector which locates it in a high-dimensional abstract space, near other words that occur in similar contexts and far from those which don’t. When producing text, it looks at the previous string of words and constructs a different vector, locating the word’s surroundings – its context – near those that occur in the context of similar words. We can think of these heuristically as representing the meaning of the word and the content of its context. But because these spaces are constructed using machine learning by repeated statistical analysis of large amounts of text, we can’t know what sorts of similarity are represented by the dimensions of this high-dimensional vector space. Hence we do not know how similar they are to what we think of as meaning or context. The model then takes these two vectors and produces a set of likelihoods for the next word; it selects and places one of the more likely ones—though not always the most likely. Allowing the model to choose randomly amongst the more likely words produces more creative and human-like text; the parameter which controls this is called the ‘temperature’ of the model and increasing the model’s temperature makes it both seem more creative and more likely to produce falsehoods. The system then repeats the process until it has a recognizable, complete-looking response to whatever prompt it has been given.

Learning economics

Old orthodox economics has proven to fail to describe the real world.

Core-econ is teaching theory that fits empirical data 

The Economy 2.0 is a complete introduction to economics and the economy. It's student-centred and motivated by real-world problems and real-world data. 

Climate news is bleak

So, 

how doomed are we?

The global increase in temperature is the simplest and most predictable dimension of climate change. It is also the one that scares me the most, partly because the direction of change is so certain and partly because heat is such a persistent and widespread hazard. For the large proportion of the world where it’s already hot during some or all of the year, just a couple of degrees of warming will cause great societal harm. In places with cooler climates, such as much of Europe, severe heatwaves can sometimes be even more deadly, because people there are less accustomed to heat1.

Geoengineering to mitigate climate change

Models suggest that it’s feasible to inject SO2 at 20km high

And reduce warming sufficiently to let us decarbonize at the current rate 

Why is there no trust?

Kyla Scanlon  has a great essay.

We live with the expectation that words mean very little, because we have seen it all before, heard it all before.

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“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction… But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity” as Ted Goia described it.

Fixing things

Find out more at repair.org

iFixit guide to repair manuals

Elder care, a resource guide

Advice on end-of-life logistics

Take care of yourself so that you can take care of others 

A few years ago, Tumblr user ms-demeanorpublished a free "workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies", available in two different versions as PDFs on Google Drive. One is DeathSucks.pdf, a "version with lots of swearing at the useless, shitty situation you're in"; the other is SayingGoodbye.pdf, a "version with a fair amount of black humor but no cursewords"(except she missed one f-bomb). Topics include "Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone," "Depressing Mad Libs" (obituary templates), "So You Suddenly Have To Become Some Kind of Hacker" about getting into online accounts, and "How to plan a non-religious death party". It is USA-specific in some parts.

The science of reading

A reading list

From the journalist behind “Sold A Story”

“Sold A Story”

Cueing theory is bad, phonics good, among other things 

Climate collapse and health can both be addressed by changing the food system

The major contributor to greenhouse gases is industrial scale agriculture and meat

The impact of agriculture on climate change is significant. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agriculture sector is responsible for 10 percent of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, after transportation (29 percent), electricity production (25 percent), industry (23 percent), and commercial and residential usage (13 percent). However, according to Peter Lehner, managing attorney for EarthJustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm, the EPA estimate is “almost certainly significantly quite low.”

Lehner argues that most analyses exclude five unique sources of emissions from the farming sector: soil carbon (carbon released during the disturbance of soil), lost sequestration (carbon that would still be sequestered in the ground had that land not been converted into farmland), input footprints (carbon footprint for products used in agriculture, like the manufacturing of fertilizer), difficult measurements (it is harder to measure the carbon emissions of biological systems like agriculture than it is to measure the emissions of other industries that are not biological, like transportation), and potent gases (like methane and nitrous oxide).

Regarding that last source: Focusing on carbon dioxide as the main greenhouse gas often ignores powerful planet-warming gases that are emitted by agriculture and that are even more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane, which is emitted by the burps and farts of ruminants like cows and sheep, has up to 86 times more global warming potential over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide (and also impacts public health, particularly in frontline communities). Nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertilizer runoff, has 300 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide (and also harms plants and animals).

“Most other studies, including by the [United Nations (UN)] and others, say that agriculture contributes much closer to 15 or 20 percent or more of world greenhouse gas emissions,” Lehner points out.

plant based eating   is good nutrition and reduces environmental pressures 

There has never been a better time to ditch meat. Climate change, health, and animal cruelty are among the many reasons why some leave animals (partially or entirely) off their plates.

Luckily, folks seem to be catching on. Vegetable-forward dishes are taking over food magazines, TikTok, and the restaurant scene. Along with some greater cultural acceptance of plant-based diets, there has been a growing recognition that animal-free cuisine can taste great; it doesn’t have to mean compromising on flavor. 

“There is so much possibility of just feeding people a good dish,” food writer Alicia Kennedy told me in a recent conversation. “That can be an overlooked strategy of changing people’s minds. A lot of people never even notice if something is vegan or vegetarian until you tell them it is. They never even think about the fact that there’s no meat in it. They just ate it and it was good.”

Public opinion, education and manufacturing consent

The past century since Lippmann’s essay

Schooling alone will not be enough to lead us out of the many crises and disasters we now face. Those who are adult today must take responsibility for confronting them. But it should at least lend us a torch.

100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion. In it, he observed the universal human tendency to oversimplify, or ‘stereotype.’ His various observations were later given names in psychology: the Dunning Kruger effect; confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, to name but a few. 1 Lippmann argued that the pervasiveness of this tendency to oversimplify, coupled with the increasing complexity of modern life, meant that the democratic model could not work: no person, however intelligent, could ever know enough about every matter of governance that concerned them. It was therefore not practical for any person to make important decisions regarding government and policy: democracy as it was, he felt, could not work

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Meditation and non duality

Introductory guide to some issues and practices 

You may have heard about this “non-duality” thing, or “non-dual meditation.” Perhaps you have heard rave reviews of a meditative state sometimes referred to as “non-dual awareness,” or “big mind” or “the natural state.” Maybe in connection with exciting-sounding phrases like “spiritual awakening” or “enlightenment.”

Sometimes, people hype it up in a way that can seem far-fetched. For example, nearly a full half of people who learned how to achieve non-dual awareness through a Sam Harris meditation course said it was the most important skill they’d ever learned in their lives. Presumably, these people have learned some important skills before, like job skills that allow them to feed themselves. So that’s quite an assessment. Also, non-dual teacher Loch Kelly says, “It gave me a way of relieving my underlying suffering and connecting to an inner joy that I didn’t even know existed.”

Okay, what is this thing? How is it done? What is “non-duality”?

Free energy principle

Friston   and his free energy ideas might help unify theories of human behavior.

what, exactly, is free energy? Why might all living things minimise it?

Start with a simpler idea: every organism is trying to minimise how surprising its experiences are. By “surprising”, we mean experiences that have not been encountered previously by the organism or its ancestors.

Your ancestors were successful enough to produce a lineage that eventually produced you, so what they experienced must have promoted survival. And your own experiences so far have resulted in you still being alive.

A comprehensive survey paper

Stupidity

Cipolla’s 5 laws of stupidity

Attempting to explain why everything is going so poorly…

I disagree with the core thesis.  I don’t think it’s so much stupidity, though I’ll grant that there is a lot of it, rather, I believed it is self interested actors who exploit the work of others.  Game theory shows how this can lead to strong forces towards making the overall “good” worse, in favor of the gains for the few powerful exploiters.

I need to write an essay on this…

Michael Hudson explains history

Neoliberalism   is unsustainable 

Therefore it will eventually end

How?  And what might follow?

There is an economic alternative, of course. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of ancient rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from reducing the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom. If the non-U.S. Eurasian world now follows this basic aim, it would be restoring the course of history to its pre-Western course. That would not be the end of history, but it would return to the non-Western world’s basic ideals of economic balance, justice and equity.

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U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall.

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The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy.

Dollar as the reserve currency

Galbraith  discusses history and some possibilities for the future in this time of flux.

the dollar has by now been de facto the primary world reserve asset for over a hundred years

On August 15, 1971, the curtain came down on the gold-exchange standard, and it rose – though we did not know it yet and thought otherwise at the time – on the neoliberal era. Devaluation, export controls, the wage-price freeze, and fiscal stimulus à outrance – these were Keynesian and even wartime measures that seemed to signal a mass conversion of Richard Nixon’s coterie to full employment, price stability, and managed trade.

it fell apart in 1973 when the stimulus ended, controls were weakened or lapsed, oil prices spiked, and the resulting general inflation was met by high interest rates, spurring a new slump in 1974. At that point pre-Keynesian dogmas re-emerged in an updated toga.

up to now the dollar-based order has been supported mainly by instability elsewhere and the lack of a credible alternative or compelling reason to create one, or where such reasons are felt, the ability to do so. With a large and liquid market for debt, the US Treasury bond remains the refuge of first resort even when a financial upheaval originates within the United States, as was the case with the sub-prime debacles of the 2000s and even today.

Enter China 

The China that one sees with trained but unfiltered eyes does not so easily fit into … simple boxes. It has the following key characteristics:

• it is a very large, administratively decentralized, internally-integrated economy, regaining in these respects attributes that were already familiar to Adam Smith;
• it has a plethora of organizational forms – public, private, joint venture, state, provincial, municipal, township and village.
• These are financed by a state-owned banking system that provides elastic support to activity in the interest of maintaining social stability, a paramount goal, and that has a large portfolio of non-performing loans to show for it.
• The state at various levels enjoys substantial control of the land, hence has the capacity to earn land rent, and is capable of spurring and directing major investment projects, in urban construction, water management, electrical power and mass transportation, including roads, air travel and most recently high-speed rail.
• The larger economy is capable of absorbing technologies from the West as well as of creating its own, and of meeting the standards of Western markets, thus having solved the consumer goods quality-control problem of historical socialism, and, finally,
• China remains somewhat insulated from the predations of international finance by a large foreign currency reserve and the continued application of capital controls.

The Chinese model has succeeded, by trial and error, over a bit less than 50 years, in eliminating mass poverty, in creating an urban world that is largely secure, with an educated, healthy population. In 2020 it succeeded in mobilizing that population to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic – so far, anyway – as no Western society, except New Zealand, was able to do.

Conclusion: A Dual System Has Arrived

A tentative conclusion is that the dollar-based financial system, with the euro acting as a junior partner, is likely to survive for now. But there will be a significant non-dollar, non-eurozone carved out for those countries considered adversaries by the United States and the European Union, of which Russia is by far the present leading example – and for their trading partners. China will act as a bridge between the two systems – the fixed-point of multi-polarity.

Is everything falling apart?

Sure seems like the (maybe just “a”) apocalypse is looming 

Nonzero discusses Haidt

Jonathan Haidt has bad news for us. In a much discussed Atlantic piece called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” he lays out a view of our situation that’s grimmer than that grim title suggests—even if you throw in the grim subtitle: “It’s not just a phase.” 

From ~2000

“While I’m basically optimistic, an extremely bleak outcome is obviously possible.” And even if we avoid a truly apocalyptic fate, I added, “several moderately bleak outcomes are possible.”

I don’t see quite as much bleakness as Haidt seems to see. And one reason, I think, is that I don’t see the causes of our current troubles as being quite as novel as he does. We’ve been here before, and humankind survived.

By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.

Some of these thresholds look more like the current era than you might think. Though my book is often depicted (accurately but incompletely) as Haidt depicts it—as emphasizing the tendency of information technology to unite people—it also emphasizes the tendency of information technology to divide people, to deepen the bounds between tribes of various kinds, and to facilitate the creation of new, narrower tribes.

Robert Wright

The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.

Social media

And the fragmentation of modern society

Some strong criticism

The internet is not what you think

internet history and philosophy and the source of crapification

everything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers’ parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user’s part.

Internet search has become crapified

But it’s still possible to use 

Old Google

Alternatively 

Yandex or  DuckDuckGo

Consciousness

A conversation  between Damasio and Anil Seth

while we may all be intimately familiar with what consciousness feels like, explaining why it exists or how it arises from physical and biological processes is another matter. These questions are as old as Aristotle, and yet millennia on, we still don’t have any definitive answers. For much of history, the nature of consciousness was the purview almost exclusively of philosophers and poets. It was not taken seriously as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry because it was difficult, if not impossible, to do experiments. But over the past three decades, that has changed, as neuroscientists began to make some real headway in understanding the neural bases of consciousness-related phenomena.

Roundup of vaccines at two years on

Part 1

Of a series

close to 30 vaccines have been rolled out, and there are more than 140 in clinical trials. Many more are in the pipeline, too… 

overview of clinical trials and other studies on boosting and mixing vaccines.

a combination of waning immunity and variants has focused a lot of recent attention on boosters. Mixed vaccine schedules, on the other hand, have been critical ever since we’ve had a range of vaccines with uneven supply. Mixing vaccines isn’t only considered for logistical reasons, though. It can be done in hopes of improving immunity. The theory is that this could widen immune responses more than same-same vaccination, as vaccines are targeted at stimulating the immune system in different ways.

There are 3 major issues this post doesn’t address: vaccine outcomes specifically in people who have also been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, outcomes in the under-18s, and adverse events after boosters and mixed schedules.

Major safety concerns in rollouts of boosters haven’t been reported

The system that drives the world

The nutmegs curse

The Nutmeg’s Curse asserts that the modern world order, what I call the System, is built on four principles that guided the Dutch takeover of the Banda Islands in Indonesia in 1621: white supremacy, genocide, war and trade.

COVID hospital capacity tracker

Citizen science

Is ther progress in philosophy?

Philosophy

Always questions, no answers

Nutrition for the benefit of the planet

What to eat to save the planet and ourselves

What we eat needs to be nutritious and sustainable. Researchers are trying to figure out what that looks like around the world.
More than 2 billion people are overweight or obese, mostly in the Western world. At the same time, 811 million people are not getting enough calories or nutrition, mostly in low- and middle-income nations. Unhealthy diets contributed to more deaths globally in 2017 than any other factor, including smoking2.
But if everyone, on average, ate a more plant-based diet, and emissions from all other sectors were halted, the world would have a 50% chance of meeting the 1.5 °C climate-change target5. And if diets improved alongside broader changes in the food system, such as cutting down waste, the chance of hitting the target would rise to 67%.

Politically impossible since too much money is in big food, especially meat.

Some steps to protecting your digital life

Although probably a losing battle, 

Ars Technica  has some suggestions.

Even those who consider themselves well educated about cyber crime and security threats—and who do everything they’ve been taught to do—can (and do!) still end up as victims. The truth is that, with enough time, resources, and skill, everything can be hacked.

The key to protecting your digital life is to make it as expensive and impractical as possible for someone bent on mischief to steal the things most important to your safety, financial security, and privacy. If attackers find it too difficult or expensive to get your stuff, there's a good chance they'll simply move on to an easier target.

Part 2  lots of specifics 

You can do a number of things to reduce the risks posed by data breaches and identity fraud. The first is to avoid accidentally exposing the credentials you use with accounts. A data breach of one service provider is especially dangerous if you haven’t followed best practices in how you set up credentials. These are some best practices to consider:

• Use a password manager that generates strong passwords you don’t have to remember. This can be the manager built into your browser of choice, or it can be a standalone app. Using a password manager ensures that you have a different password for every account, so a breach of one account won’t spill over into others. (Sorry to again call out the person reusing letmein123! for everything, but it's time to face the music.)
• When possible, use two-factor or multi-factor authentication ("2FA" or "MFA"). 

Part 3  focusing on smartphones 

Criminals are using smartphone apps and text messages to lure vulnerable people into traps—some with purely financial consequences, and some that put the victims in actual physical jeopardy...

text message phishing scams that target personal data—especially website credentials and credit card data. Sometimes called "smishing," SMS phishing messages usually carry some call to action that motivates the recipient to click on a link—a link that often leads to a web page that is intended to steal usernames and passwords

… applications are presented as free but feature in-app payments—including subscription fees that automatically kick in after a very short "trial period" that may not be fully transparent to the user. Often referred to as "fleeceware," apps like this can charge whatever the developer wants on a repeating basis. And they may even continue to generate charges after a user has uninstalled the application.

To be sure that you're not being charged for apps you've removed, you have to go check your list of subscriptions (this works differently on iOS and Google Play)—and remove any that you aren't using.

Layers of reality

Lee Camp lays out the allowable discourse.

Why do we have private property?

It’s just the way it is…. 

Break free with MMT

How the global south can break free

Argues that defaulting on dollar debt paves the way for MMT inspired policies to serve the population, such as a job guarantee, universal health care, infrastructure…

Resources and labor exist but currently mostly in service to delivery of the wealth to developed nations.