Interesting Links for 25-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Anyone I know fancy a plush sphinx?

(tags:toys )

2. Google is changing how it provides its services so it can track you better

(tags:viaSwampers Google web surveillance )

3. Want your car to accelerate faster? Then you'll need to pay a monthly fee

(tags:OhForFucksSake cars business )

4. DragonForce - My Heart Will Go On

(tags:music Titanic cover )

5. LessWrong/Effective Altruism as racists

(tags:racism )

6. 10 years after stalking was made illegal, victims feel abandoned by the law

(tags:UK stalking law fail OhForFucksSake )

7. Oxford scientists crack case of why ketchup splatters from near-empty bottle

(tags:food physics )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

I find that sphinx toy is ASTONISHINGLY ugly

[bens_dad]

My first reaction was that it didn't have the right emotional vibe, then I realised that it *does* give the same air as the original.

But yes, it is not a face I would want to look at.

[channelpenguin]

Sphinxes are elegant. The overproportioned doll head is hitting an uncanny valley for me I think. Absolutely does NOT make it cute!

[danieldwilliam]

I am confused by the Less Wrong thing.

[dewline]

The philosophy is providing new ideological cover for old-style racism and other bigotries.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes, sorry, I should be more clear about what I'm confused about.

I knew that that group had drifted in to some weird hard right view points (at which point I stopped paying attention to them).

What I'm confused about is this. What I'm seeing when I follow the link is a bunch of toots (are they toots?) saying the same thing. And I'm not sure why people are doing that or what it's for.

[andrewducker]

Aah, what you're seeing there is a content warning. Click on the top one and you should see what's under it.

[danieldwilliam]

Aha!

That's sad. When I paid attention to Scott Alexander I generally found him interesting

It's not quite as sad as the implications of the most interesting analysis of why you might get noticiable difference in measured IQ between Westerners and Sub-Saharan Africans - that Sub-Saharan Aficans are much, much more likely to have been malnourished at exactly the time and in exactly the way that most impact brain development, that they are much, much more likely to have had severe fever from a preventable infectious disease at the time that that most impacts brain development and that they are much, much likely to have suffered some severe emotional trauma by witnessing or experiencing violence or parental loss at an age where that is most likely to impact brain development.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. I'm totally in favour of looking at population groups, and understanding what's going on with their development. But not in the rather reductive manner that's going on there.

(And I am also sad, because I liked a fair bit of what Scott wrote, although I also got annoyed by it regularly.)

[danieldwilliam]

what's going on with their development.

I'm just left wanting to shout at the scientific racists:-

There are two common factors that Sub-Sharahan people of colour share that are not as commonly shared by Westerners.

One is that their skin is darker.

The other is that the places they live have been systematically robbed over hundreds of years, sometimes so badly as to cause famine, leading to a situation where they are still today poor and often unstable.

I wonder which common factor might best explain what is going on with their physical development...

[calimac]

Does your system not show the little "SHOW MORE" button after each of the identical toots? That's what clued me in as to what was going on here, after being initially as puzzled as you were.

[danieldwilliam]

It does.

And I can see it now that Andy has pointed it out to me.

I fear I may have mentally filled Mastodon under "weird and difficult" and that's colouring my ability to interact with it.

[andrewducker]

Following the link to Scott's explanations of his actions, he's admitting that he's largely convinced by "HBD" (Human Biodiversity -> "people are diverse", but as "scientific racism", rather than, say, neurodiversity), and also that he wants to encourage the spread of (Neo-)Reactionary thought, which you can read about here and is about as lovely as you'd expect.

[channelpenguin]

Another astonishingly ugly thing. Was never quite comfortable with a lot of that stuff, glad they 'outed' themselves to confirm that I am really just not interested in that movement.

[calimac]

That article seems to attribute most of this to a guy called Moldbug, whom I've only ever previously heard of through Scott Alexander's posts, of whom Scott's opinion seems to be that he finds Moldbug fascinating but mostly disagrees with him.

If, as accused in various deep-down places in #5, Scott A. is secretly pushing eugenics and scientific racism, my reading of his posts is that he's doing so secretly enough that it doesn't come across. Scientific racism is a stupid philosophy characterized by jumping to entirely unwarranted conclusions in a way that Scott A. doesn't. I've read The Bell Curve, which is scientific racism, and the difference seems pretty obvious to me.

(I read The Bell Curve, by the way, in response to a conversation with friends who said it wasn't racist. I wanted to see for myself. I came back afterwards and told them that yes it is, and why.)

[hairyears]

It is deeply saddening to read that about Scott: I found him a very engaging and entertaining conversationalist at the Pembury but...

Yes this does seem to be true.

I regret that I have recommended and promoted his work.

[dewline]

2. Dirty pool.

3. One more reason why I won't be buying a car if I ever become able to afford one.

6. Neglect as cruelty, huh?

[bens_dad]

3. I remember hearing that in return for some software that a university had written, an engineer came and cut a link on a board in their mainframe. The machine became twice as fast.

What Mercedes and BMW are doing is "just" Software as a Service in action.
Stress testing the car for 0-60 in 5.2sec instead of 6.2sec is going to cost something; I can't really object to them charging people less not to have that extra performance.
----
My problem is a general one; I like ownership; I don't like rental, and SaaS drives right into that conflict.

Software rips up previous economic models and I don't know of any fair replacement model, never mind how we move to it.

Programmers need to eat, but I don't see how software is going to produce more food at less cost. OK, no dramatic increase in productivity beyond about the third iteration.
---
Twenty years ago car mags had classified ads for chips that would tweak the performance of your car. VW kept hiring the guys who wrote these chips, which may be how the performance of the diesel Golf improved so radically (a least until they started cheating the tests).
---
The problem I fear with these software upgrades is that people will try to hack the cars to get the performance without paying, but what else will the hacks change ? Brakes ? Steering ? Security ?

[dewline]

SaaS is rentier logic in software, and I'm not interested either.

[andrewducker]

I think people should be able to hack their own cars.

And I'd be fine with them selling the more expensive version of the car, but I object to it being a monthly charge...

[bens_dad]

I agree people should be able to hack their own cars, but part of me says a car is not the same as the central heating or mood-lighting. But I don't worry that you might have changed your own brake-pads, so I probably shouldn't worry about you tweaking the braking software.

I am not happy about a monthly charge, but ...
I might want to hire a sports-car for a weekend away. Upgrading my existing hardware would be less hassle. So I could be interested in casual rental, though the economics for the manufacturer would mean I would end up paying the same, so I think it a full purchase extra or nothing.

How do bug-fixes (as opposed to feature upgrades) fit into the picture ? Are they part of the service ?
Does the MoT require the software is up to date, or even the sat-nav ?

[andrewducker]

It's complex, and I agree that some software changes might make the car unsafe, and some hardware changes likewise.

If the government decides to regulate software as part of vehicle safety then I'll be very interested to see how they balance things.

[drplokta]

It’s been common for decades to sell the same hardware at different price points, with some functionality disabled on the cheaper versions. See for example the 486SX CPU from Intel, which was just a 486DX with the floating-point unit disabled.

[andrewducker]

And I'd be okay with that.

A monthly charge for floating point calculations on your chip, on the other hand...

[hairyears]

5: One of the very best things about buying David Gerard a pint is that is so enriches my vocabulary:

...LessWrong rationalists, Effective Altruists etc as disaster chucklefucks

Lesswrong 'Rationalist' is not the same as rational and it seems that all their ponderous logic of priors and maximisation leaves them horribly vulnerable to an elegant argument that turns human beings into lesser beings, untermensch, and ashes.

I was invited-in to meet the Effective Altruists a few years ago: idealist junior civil servants and early-career professionals, lovely, lovely people that I think andrewducker knows from Cambridge...

Some of them are now becoming senior civil servants and, I think, partner-track professionals.

...And I think they all went cool, then cordially distant, from the EA fundamentalists as their agenda and their values started to show through.

Or maybe hate cults and racists and Nazis are that damn' good at infiltrating and corrupting *any* community founded on ideals but lacking some kind of anchor.

[wildeabandon]

I, for one, have not distanced myself one whit from my beliefs that everyone who is wealthy in global terms has a duty to give to charity, and to do so in a way that has as much positive impact as possible, and I refuse to concede the term to the racists just because Diva has a bee in his bonnet about it.

As with many movements, you hear more about the extreme fringe than you do about those of us who are quietly giving our ten percent and the lives we are saving.

[nancylebov]

Two of the major EA charities are giving malaria nets to save lives in Africa and GiveDirectly, which is about giving money to poor people.

This strikes me as very inefficient racism.

[wildeabandon]

Now now, don't let those pesky facts get in the way of Diva's ranting about how evil we all are...

[nancylebov]

To be fair, it's both true that EA is trying to save black people's lives and has enough respect for people to just give poor people money, *and* that a great many people in the rationalist community believe that there are genetic racial differences in IQ.