But it turns out that plutocrats are not particularly bright: if anyone doubted that there is a very public ongoing demonstration of it going on right now.
And, unsurprisingly, being rather dim, they haven't understood what is going to happen. Because climate change is not in fact going to be the thing that kills us, directly. Two really obvious consequences of uncontrolled climate change are going to be serious resource shortages and significant chunks of the planet becoming effectively uninhabitable as wet-bulb temperatures start to regularly exceed what is survivable.
So what happens? First of all resource shortages cause a rapidly worsening series of resource wars (I think we're already seeing the start of this). And secondly, well, given the choice between moving and dying, you move: there will be forced migration on a vast scale. And that's going to drive a lot of nasty racism in people and a lot of increasingly authoritarian, explicitly racist regimes (look at the UK, for instance).
And if the plutocrats really are trying to install authoritarian regimes, which is plausible, then that's just another sign they're none-too-bright. Because authoritarian regimes are not famously good at getting on with other authoritarian regimes, especially when they're competing for resources and trying to stop each other from dispatching lots of unwanted brown people over their borders.
This leads to one place: nuclear war, sometime between 2050-2070 I guess. And even plutocrats, in their luxury bunkers, are not going to be surviving that for long. (And no, they're also not going to be surviving on Mars: that's just an idiot fantasy.)
There is one way for people to survive this, which is to cooperate and deal with climate change. We've chosen not to do that, and the plutocrats, with their limited understanding, are probably making it worse.
]]>No, no you won't. What will happen is quite different. At some point in the past a system of grimoires was arrived at which was both far safer than preceding (and many succeeding) grimoires and sufficiently powerful to express a vast range of existing grimoires (this ability, for reasons too large for this comment, was usually known as the 'consideration' facility). This system, or rather this family of systems of grimoires, often known as the āwlyspian grimoires, was immediately derided by the authors of other grimoires (collectively known as the pelagian grimoires) as being too complex, too ugly, and too slow for serious magical work, especially since all serious practitioners understand the safety issues and write grimoires without the flaws which the āwlyspian grimoires sought to avoid.
As time went on and several countries were lost to catastrophic demonic infestation as a result of errors in pelagian-family grimoires, many safety features of the āwlyspian grimoires were implemented in their descendents, usually without any understanding by the practitioners that this was what they were doing. Pelagian grimoires became slower – far slower than any āwlyspian grimoire had ever been – as a result, while still remaining intractably difficult to use and never gaining the consideration facility in anything other than a rudimentary form.
In the mean time, certain sects of the practitioners of the āwlyspian grimoire family (some survived) observed that the consideration facility, as usually described, contained certain issues of safety, whereby, for instance, and imprecation to a demon might be misconstrued as a different imprecation in considerations written by inexperienced practitioners. For many years these practitioners – the 'arrangement' school as they were known – refused to use considerations at all in any official capacity. Eventually, a new consideration scheme was arrived at, expressed in terms, of certain abstract metamagical submonoidal morphisms, or equivalently in terms of undiagramatic graphs of groipoidal cycles. A theorem, running to more than four thousand vellum pages, was proven to show that these two schemes for considerations were equivalent. Several people understood it.
A new family of āwlyspian grimoires using these considerations became somewhat fashionable. It is widely believed that nobody understood it.
In the pelagian world two related processes happened. Grimoires became vastly complex and stylized in order to prevent inadvertent demons: nobody understood these because it would take far longer than a human lifetime to read any one of them. Other pelagian grimoire schools, being dimly aware of the arrangement school, started to describe their grimoires in terms of semi-infinite femtomagmas: nobody understood these either.
While this evolution was still taking place, the seas rose – completely expectedly – and everyone drowned.
]]>My guess is the former: most people actually think that treating other people decently, even other people who are different in various ways, is a good thing.
So what's the whole anti-woke thing about then? Well, I think it's just the same as everything else they're doing: Sunak and Truss are competing for the votes of a bunch of decrepit white men who are extremely unrepresentative of what most people actually want.
I don't know how this plays out in terms of winning the next election. If they intend to have a meaningful next election of course.
]]>Jobs could probably have funded a project on the scale of the Human Genome Project ($3 billion), and it's hard to see such a thing not having some side benefits.
]]>Problem: cancer is a diagnosis
Yes, I really did mean whatever specific thing he had: whatever the specific underlying thing was, not the symptom. It would be astonishing if there turns out to be 'a cure for cancer', but there might be a cure for whatever killed Jobs. Of course it may not have been known what the underlying thing was for the cancer which was killing him, but still 'here is x billion dollars for you to find out what it is and spend on curing it' had some non-zero chance of succeeding I think and if it had (or even if it had failed in its immediate target of keeping him alive) it might well have helped many other people either directly or via other results of the research.
More generally my argument is just that this kind of moonshot thing is something very, very rich people could choose to do. (ut, well, the US government did actually do a moonshot thing, and they knew that they could afford for it to fail, which is one of the reasons I think my argument is wrong.
]]>As an example, Jobs could have chosen to throw all of his wealth at some approach to curing or ameliorating whatever specific cancer he had. In the unlikely event that this paid of he might have been left merely wealthy but, on the other hand, alive, and as a side effect many other people might have been saved. If it didn't pay off, well, he doesn't need to care because he's then dead in any case.
You could argue that that's what Musk is doing with Mars, but I don't think it is: he might think it is but I think that's because he's not understood that science fiction is in fact fiction. For such a thing to qualify it has to have some chance of doing something actually useful, and I don't think either landing some people briefly on Mars and declaring victory, or watching a colony slowly die there is useful.
And a stronger argument against this is that governments can in fact do the same thing: they can't do it with all their money the way a person can, but they can spend as much money as a very rich individual can spend on each of many individual high-risk high-benefit projects, of which enough will succeed to make it worth it. That's kind of what DARPA did (does?) I think.
And the sort of people who become very rich are almost always the sort of people who have some defect in their mind which makes it impossible to stop once they have all the money they could possibly ever need: that same defect also probably makes it impossible for them to make good decisions about this sort of project, which governments perhaps can do.
So I think I'm wrong: there's a theoretical case, but it is probably not a real one.
]]>As another example: the johnsonites are proposing legislation that will mean you need photo ID to vote. Crucially, not to live in the UK, just to vote in the UK. The stated motivation is that there is voting fraud ... except, there isn't, in fact, fraud: obviously there could be fraud, but in practice there is almost none. So, what are they actually doing? Well, you won't need photo ID to live here, just to vote, and what sort of people will therefore be less likely to have such ID? Why, young, poor, non-white people, of course: people who are less likely to vote for the johnsonites. How ... very convenient.
So the voter ID thing is, of course, voter suppression. And the sexual-predators-can-pretend-to-be-trans thing is equally something else.
]]>This has good and bad sides I think.
It's good for two reasons. (1) Because he's just a maximizer he has no real agenda: he's not (in this view) some evil dictator who really wants, say, to kill some group he doesn't like, he just wants more johnson. (2) Because he is pretty rudimentary, and all he can do, really, is gradient ascent I think so he's pretty likely to get stuck in local maxima. Indeed, he probably already has got stuck in one: brexit increased the johnson, but he's now stuck on top of his little brexit hill with nowhere to go.
It's bad also for two reasons. (1) Nothing says the local johnson maxima are not in themselves very bad places to get stuck. (2) He can't get down from them, and that's bad. For instance, he can never apologise and never be wrong because this involves temporary decrease in johnson and his algorithm won't accept this. So when he gets stuck and things turn out not to be great, it must always be someone else's fault: the Europeans, the elites, remainers, the 'woke', whoever. And as things fall apart his need to find others to blame to avoid johnson reduction becomes more serious and there's no real limit to this until all the groups he blames no longer exist, and this is largely the same outcome as the evil dictator case.
So, actually, it really doesn't have any good sides, except possibly that he could be somehow fooled as he's not terribly smart and all that has to be done to fool him is to garden-path his algorithm as there's not really a person in there with beliefs etc.
[*] The climate thing is a good example which is well explained by the johnson-maximizer theory. Does he actually care about climate? No, because it's not johnson. Because he's also a rather primitive maximizer, he also isn't competent to understand that taking it seriously might also enable longer-term johnson maximization: that's exactly the kind of thinking he can't do (and he might even be, coincidentally, right in terms of johnson maximization: by the time it really bites he'll be dead). So why does he seem to care? Well, obviously sex. Carrie does care about the climate, and Carrie provides his current supply of sex, and sex is critical to maximizing johnson. So Johnson 'cares' about the climate. When Carrie is replaced in due course, he will no longer care.
]]>Right, of course. Programming just doesn't generally appeal to women, does it? (Except, you know, lesbians, who really are almost men after all.) After all they have weak female minds and they're really not up to dealing with the difficult technical problems that men, with their stronger, male minds can solve. And it certainly conflicts with some element of their group identity: have you ever tried to type with nail extensions? It's very hard, and you're forever chipping the varnish.
And of course it couldn't be anything at all to do with getting harassed and sometimes assaulted by men in the profession, could it? No, of course not. The woman I know who was 'accosted' by RMS (her term: her native language is not English, I have not asked her more detail, as I can only do so by email and I'm not having that kind of conversation by email) is just imagining it, right? The woman I know who was told that she really should wear a wedding ring to indicate that she was not available to be approached in the (academic computing) workplace was just imagining that, right? And I'm not even going to report the comments I have heard from people drunk in the pub, because obviously they didn't happen: men don't say that sort of thing about women. White people certainly don't say that sort of thing about non-white people. And anyway alcohol makes you racist and sexist: everyone knows that.
Fuck off with this essentialist nonsense.
OK, that's all I'm writing here. It's sad, but I suppose predictable that there are lots of people, even here (perhaps especially here?), who find it convenient to believe that that no discrimination exists against various groups.
]]>If you think that there is no current serious bigotry aimed at black people you should talk to more black people, because I can tell you that there is.
If you think that there is no current serious bigotry aimed at roma and travellers you should talk to more roma and travellers (which I do, as I take photographs of horse fairs), because I can tell you there is, because I see it.
If you think that there is no current serious bigotry aimed at women who work in computing you should talk to women who workd in computing, because I can tell you that there is. Indeed I am married to a woman who works in computing so my information is quite good here.
But, you'll say, 'you're married to her, you will be biased, and also it's only one data point: it's just her'. Well, I'm also a scientist, so I can do numbers. And let's look at some numbers: in 1971, about 14% of US computer science and information science graduates were women. By 1984, about 38% were. But by 2011 the proportion had fallen to under 18%. That's a factor of two change in about one generation. This is not a 'lack of positive discrimination' this is women actively being driven out of CS by something.
The 'bigotry is solved, now we need to fix some other structural problem' idea is a dangerous lie.
I'm not going to respond further here, because this is not the forum for this argument and I will just lose my temper and shout (indeed I am about to do that in one more comment).
]]>And just in case, Charlie also was right in his response: my 'there is no structural racism, of course, we've decided that' was meant to imply the opposite.
Finally as to whether the police are themselves racist or not: there's a big difference between being openly racist and being racist. Almost no-one is now openly racist – what do you think Boris 'watermelon' Johnson would answer if you asked if he was racist? And he is openly racist: there are lots of other people (perhaps including me) who would never admit to themselves that they are racist, but gosh, isn't it convenient that everyone they work with looks the same as they do? And then, one day, they get drunk and oops, they're a bit racist after all. And let's not have the stupid 'the drink made me racist' bullshit: the drink disinhibited you (not you the person I'm replying to, generic you) until you said what you already thought.
]]>I agree, probably very few police officers are openly racist. But still there is an enormous disparity between the police force and population they serve: you are less than half as likely to be black if you are a police officer than if you are not. So, if you reject the explicitly racist 'black people are somehow less able to be police officers than white people' argument (which I'm not accusing you of, obviously!), then there is racism somewhere.
So the police in the UK organisation in which the members are not openly racist, but which somehow is very clearly discriminating in its employment practices: that's pretty much the definition of institutional of structural racism I think.
]]>If there is some group in the population which is under-represented in some activity (where enough people do that activity to be statistically meaningful) then there really are only two options that I can see:
So: women make up less than 10% of people involved in open source: are women innately less good as programmers, are they somehow different in a way which makes them not want to be programmers, or are a bunch of brogrammers driving them out by behaving inappropriately?
Well, I'm not willing to go for the essentialist nonsense, and I've dealt with enough open-source people to be pretty sure what's going on there.
And now this report. So there is no structural racism in the UK, right? Yet only 1.3% of police officers are black, while 3.3% of the population is (or was at 2011 census) (these figures may be for England only, not sure).
So, well, there is no structural racism, of course, we've decided that. That leaves one option: black people are just innately less suited to be police officers than white people. It is, no doubt, because they have weaker brains and are just innately more criminal than white people (especially, of course, white men, and doubly so white men who know the names of their ancestors going back hundreds of years). Also the whole 'not being allowed to join neo-nazi organisations' thing doesn't help. I mean, that's the only option remaining right?
Yeah, right.
I used to think that people who talked about western countries sliding into fascism were being hyperbolic. Not any more: our lovely clown emperor with his nationalist (but you know, a little bit socialist too) takeover of the tories is doing just what his supporters want. And what they want is camps.
]]>I disagree, mostly. Famously he has made less money than he would have if he had simply stuck the money he got from his father in some kind of index-tracker (and in fact he's probably doing much worse than this: although it's impossible to really tell the evidence seems to be that he's very heavily in debt). So financially he's an unmitigated disaster: if he's a con man he's certainly not one who is doing very well to con people out of money.
You could argue that he's a political con man: he's bargaining not-very-much into enormous power. And he did OK for a bit, I guess: he got to be president. Except, well, he's just failed there too. Well, things always catch up with con men eventually, I suppose.
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