Interesting Links for 04-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Privileges Committee Believes Boris Johnson May Have Misled House On Partygate

(tags:BorisJohnson lies fraud politics pandemic )

2. EU countries postpone vote on combustion engine ban (because Germany wants to be allowed to keep making them)

(tags:politics europe cars pollution )

3. ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, And having it pretend to be one leads us in very difficult directions

(tags:philosophy morality ai language )

4. There's a Good Reason Why So Many Terrorists Are Engineers

(tags:terrorism engineering )

5. "Eat Out To Help Out" caused an increase in Covid cases. Matt Hancock covered it up.

(tags:Pandemic restaurant OhForFucksSake murder censorship )

6. Iowa: Republicans propose ban on same-sex marriage

(tags:LGBT marriage USA republicans OhForFucksSake )

7. Happy Weird Pride Day!

(tags:weird pride )

8. Food Timeline: food history research service

(tags:food history )

Comments

[simont]

My first thought, before reading the article, was that it was going to have to do with engineering skills being directly useful in terrorism. The article plays that idea down, suggesting that although a few terrorists in your organisation need to be good at bomb-making, it's not necessary for them all to have those skills. But I wonder if there are a couple of factors that make it more important again:

Firstly, engineering skill isn't just about making things. It also encompasses looking at a thing already made, and having a good idea of how it was made and what parts of it are structural – partly because you see where all the loads and forces must be going, and also because you're in tune with how other engineers design things and can anticipate even the less forced decisions (to some extent). So I'd guess that an engineer would also be better than a non-engineer at figuring out how to bring down a structure or device, or at assessing what targets are feasible in the first place.

Secondly, there's a thing I notice about my own thought processes, which is a kind of two-way feedback between the desirable and the possible. There are a lot of things I know I'd like to do, or to see get done; there are a lot of things I know how to do; for me, a good definition of the experience of "invention" is when I suddenly realise that something is in both categories at once – either because I've just learned the missing piece of how to do it, or just learned the reason I'd been overlooking for why it would be desirable, or simply that both parts have been in my head for a while and I've only just connected them to each other.

So it might not just be a question of the terrorist cell only accepting people with the necessary skills. It might also be that a person with destructive desires, given some engineering skill, begins to see some of them as clearly feasible, giving them the confidence to seek out and join whatever group they can find who's trying to do them – even if the group then turns out to put them to work on a non-engineering part of the task. The same person without engineering skills might have still felt those desires but left them at the level of "unrealistic pipe dream", to the point of not even looking for a group trying to do the thing, because they didn't have quite enough confidence that one even existed or had a chance of succeeding.

[conuly]

My actual first non-snarky thought was networking, and I was surprised that the article didn't look at that more.

If, for whatever reason, your first wave of recruits has a lot of people from one area or one field, then it's hardly surprising if they tend to recruit all their friends and, gosh, those friends have a lot in common with them besides the politis.