A long overdue Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff. (There’s also one for personal stuff.)
As always, no trolls or MRAs. Let me know if any show up.
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Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff, 5/16 Triumphant Hedgehog Edition
No matter how you feel about Gawker’s sex tape thing, this is actually pretty damn big and bad news: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-huge-huge-deal
I’m sure the other 11 hedgehogs can succeed if they keep trying.
… I just now realized it’s a reference to the date. Wow.
Cool, Cosby looks like he’s going to have to stand trial and now this.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/25/swedish-court-upholds-julian-assange-arrest-warrant-wikileaks
Good to see that the courts not being swayed just because rapists have influence.
I think it’s a 5/16th scale hedgehog. The date would be off a bit as it already Towel Day.
Ah, month and year because brain that’s why.
I am so glad that I wasn’t the only one, pitshade! Anyway sorry all, for the digression.
skiriki:
I do agree that anonymous funding of lawsuits is pretty bad. And yet this is probably not the case I want to use as the basis to make that case–Gawker’s actions were absolutely horrible, and it’s almost impossible to generate much sympathy for them, even though I tend to agree with a lot of the politics on their various affiliate sites.
Just read this while rehydrating and making sure that my little ewok gets some food:
http://www.tor.com/2016/05/25/12-scenes-from-hbos-game-of-thrones-we-wish-were-in-the-books/
Spoilers, obviously.
I’m sad that I can no longer like Stannis 🙁
@Alan re: Cosby & Assange: No time to read now, but it’ll be interesting to see how sticky new charges prove.
Dammit.
This is what I wanted to show with the above broken link (too late to fix):
^ Not sure if that qualifies as “personal” because it’s something that I like or as “non-personal” because it’s not about me, but it’s here now.
This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen on Facebook today and I see a lot of weird things. Apparently alt-righters think Taylor Swift is some kind of closet Nazi goddess whose songs secretly spread alt-right racist messages.
Some choice quotes from the article:
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/cant-shake-it-off-how-taylor-swift-became-a-nazi-idol
I’m not a Swift fan, but I feel for her. Being made into some kind of Nazi darling is not something anyone outside of an alt-righter would want and I’ve never seen any indication she’s in league with them. I simply can’t wrap my mind around the extremely unrealistic beliefs the alt-righters cook up to cope with a reality they have issues with.
@Alan, in a previous thread you had asked my take on this link:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/24/robots-future-work-humans-jobs-leisure
It’s about the end of “useful humans”, and talks about how the robots are gon’ take all our jobs. To avoid resurrecting the thread, I’ll just reply here! The article is… right? Sort of? It’s a very bleak, negative take on what’s happening. I’m much more hopeful about things. There are a few points of contention I’d like to make about it.
Intelligence Augmentation is not subtractive
Frankly, while the author gets a lot of stuff right, he’s missing an important and very powerful trend in research and development. Most research in the data side of things isn’t about replacing human effort, it’s about improving human effort.
My own lab’s work involves developing educational software that will give teachers a more accurate picture of how their students are learning. Useful in the western world, certainly, but we’re actually building it for India. They have a huge deficit of qualified teachers, and those teachers need a lot of help. We’re trying to build tools to give those teachers hooks into what the kids are learning about and how they’re learning, so they can better direct their time and effort. We’re also trying to make the educational process more organic and natural and enjoyable to help keep learner interest and attention. None of this replaces human effort, it just makes human effort more effective.
(Of course, it can be used to reduce the number of teachers required to do the same job, which is a whole other ball of wax, and is problematic. We’re working on that too. Making code that helps a teacher connect with the students directly will encourage the employment of more teachers, if that becomes the dominant teaching style. That’s the hope.)
Most work is unhealthy
If we just look at the work that people do, and ignore the problems of unemployment, we find that most people have sort of useless jobs already. Shuffling boxes or carrying trays isn’t meaningful work. Some of our “menial” jobs can be meaningful – retail work can easily be akin to hosting guests, which can be very meaningful and rewarding, for example – but almost all of the jobs that are being replaced right now are meaningless and unhealthy, in a physical sense at the least. Sitting in a truck for twelve hours a day, delivering freight six days a week, is not healthy. Driving a cab – interacting with people from all walks of life is great, but it’s a sedentary life if you’re stuck in a car all day for your money.
These unhealthy jobs with relatively meaningless work aren’t things we should cling to.
Societal restructuring is needed on many fronts
In the western world, and throughout the world in general, capital flows up to the wealthy while the bulk of humanity gets less and less. Governments have traditionally provided a bulwark against this, but government is easily swayed by wealth in a number of ways as transparency decreases – and money can help reduce transparency, too.
This is creating a crisis that we can see starting around us – I don’t think I need to prove that with examples, do I? The advent of AI capable of replacing human labour in many fields is only exacerbating this problem, but it’s not the source of the problem. The source of the problem is the way we tie livelihood to production (in my opinion).
I don’t even mind that we have that sort of tie, I’m a mixed-strategy socialist. My issue is in how we place value on some production, and no value on others. This is what needs to change.
If you only value people for the ability to make widgets, or papers with squiggles on them, or the ability to say the proper things in a special room with a flag on top, then you don’t actually value people. We need to respect that value that we do feel for people-as-human-beings with a modest minimum standard of living, and then we need to assign production value to things that we don’t currently. Child-care should be paying. House care. Creative works. Philosophy. Scientific research. Sociological studies. Investigative journalism. We need to value these things enough to pay for them.
What a better world we would live in if we valued these things enough to pay for them! And if the government gave everyone a living wage, we would pay for them, I think.
This leads into thoughts of reputation-as-currency and other post-scarcity weirdness, but, well. We’re approaching that wall. That’s what the author of the article is talking about – what do we do when the things we have traditionally done for work aren’t worth money anymore?
I’m actually hopeful. Many western countries have started this conversation already, and – at least here in Canada – are looking at a minimum living wage seriously. The progressive movement is also getting traction again, after long years of being flattened by neoliberal politics and economic talking points designed to funnel money into the pockets of the wealthy. It’s a good time to be alive.
This won’t end human work – it’ll transform it. Greatly for the better, I think, too.
Anyways, those are my thoughts on the article! A good topic, and an important one that doesn’t get talked about enough these days. When techno-futurists talk about the Singularity? This is what I suspect it is. Not the computer-rapture where everyone gets uploaded into utopia, but the gentle sigh of a civilization which has finally started to come to terms with what real values ought to be.
EDIT: eep! Longer than I thought it would be. Sorry for the wall of text everyone.
Saphira,
Holy shit!
There’s a sort of morbidly curious part of me that would like Trump to win just to see how the alt-right/Nazi crowd would react. As terrible as Trump is, he’s not resurrect the Third Reich terrible like they’ve talked themselves into believing that he is. The meltdown they would have would be highly entertaining.
However, the good part of me prevails and no, I don’t really want a Trump presidency.
@’scildfreja
Please don’t apologise, I’m sure I’m not the only one here who loves your posts on stuff like this.
Any thoughts on the Angry Birds movie?
I thought the pigs were supposed to represent the European migrant crisis. It’s interesting how many people make Red out to be a Donald Trump character. It seems a better fit to make Mighty Eagle the Trump because he appears to be a great hero “make America great again”, but in reality he is a posturing buffoon with no real power. (Also bankrupt and a voyeur)
Red might represent the Republicans, but red is a loaded word, might mean Communism. Piggy Island = the UK (David Cameron)
@Saphira
They NEED to believe that they are more popular than they appear to be. They need to convince themselves that they can come out from their dark corners soon. It also ties into the whole ”silent majority” bullshit. They can’t accept that they are widely disliked.
…So the Greeks are Aryan now?
@katz
yeah, the ancient Greeks (and, of course, all their super-real gods) were all fair skinned, blonde, and blue-eye, obvs.
ugh, gross. I actually do like Taylor Swift. it started semi-ironically with following @SwiftOnSecurity, and listening to David Rees’s AphexSwift mashup, but then I bought 1989 and that’s some real good pop music.
hey are any of the cool people on here playing Overwatch by any chance? on PC?
Captain America is now, and has always been, a Nazi, y’all.
@Falconer, Ugh what? WHY. What a terrible idea. I’m so glad that the only books I read from Marvel are Ms Marvel and Squirrel Girl.
@Katz
Well, they are (according to these dipshits) the founders of Western Civilisation ™ , so they must be. OTOH, if you went back in time to , say, Athens in the 400s bce and called one of the locals an Aryan, you’d probably be looking for your teeth, if you didn’t just get stabbed.
@Viscaria, apparently for no better reason than to sell comic books. It’s from Steve Rogers, Captain America #1.
My money’s on “Skrull impostor who doesn’t think things through.”
It’s my little brother’s birthday (or is this personal stuff?), and he’s playing Overwatch right now. I don’t know much about it and I’m continuing to play Fallout 4. I hear Xbox mods are going to be available soon, and I can’t wait.
As for what Scild said above, I think your comment about singularity/utopia makes sense. For me, an ideal world isn’t a world without weapons, its a world where everyone has a rotary gun firing 20mm HE rounds at 5000rpm, but no one hurts each other with them. Or, as my grandpa puts it, “we’d be civilized”.
Also, what do the people here think of white people with piercings? My buddy showed me someone that goes by “antiwhiteactivist” saying that white folks cannot wear any piercings because it’s all appropriation, and I think that’s…not true. It’s not being done to appropriate black culture or anything (at least not usually), and so that means it isn’t appropriating any more than both Europe and Africa having thatched roof huts.
That’s a very interesting response, Scildfreja. Thanks for that.
My gut feeling on the matter of AI is to point out that with all other things being equal (a big if, admittedly) increases in productivity will only ever lead to a decrease in employment. As such, increasing productivity without increasing society’s ability to cope with unemployment risks accelerating into the problem.
As you point out, post-scarcity society is the long-term solution, but that’s a political deliverable rather than a technological one, and we should be wary of creating the need for it before we can plausibly realise it.
Also, AI is totally awesomely cool and we should definitely do it as much as we can just for that reason.