While We Were Living Our Lives, the Cyberpunk Future Became Our Present, & BRIEFLY NOTED
For 2022-12-06 Tu
CONDITION: No Excuse for Anyone to Vote for This Republican Party Ever Again:
Charlie Sykes: Terminating the Constitution: ‘In the last two weeks, Donald Trump pledged solidarity with the January 6 rioters, dined with two Holocaust-denying fans of Adolf Hitler, and called for the termination of the Constitution. And he remains the front-runner and clear favorite for the GOP nomination for president in 2024….
JesusMaryandJosephandtheweedonkey, Trump put it in writing.
A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.
This was not a one off. As Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short noted on Meet the Press, Trump’s attack on the Constitution was consistent with “what he asked the vice president to do two years ago, when rioters were attacking the Capitol and he asked the vice president to overturn the election results.”… Goddam right I orchestrated coup to overthrow the Constitution — and I’ll do it again! On Earth 2.0 (a rational and totally imaginary world), this would be the clearest, easiest, most obvious moment for Republicans to rid themselves of this troublesome and deranged demagogue…
Scott Lemieux: Party owned by Donald Trump fine with Donald Trump’s call to end American democracy: ‘My position remains that I’ll believe he’s seriously vulnerable in a primary when I see it: [Amy Wang:] “Donald Trump’s suggestion this weekend that the U.S. Constitution should be terminated in response to his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen drew a largely muted response from Republicans…. Only a handful of Republican lawmakers have joined the White House and Democrats in condemning Trump…. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and… Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did not respond on Sunday to requests for comment…. Some GOP lawmakers who were asked on Sunday political shows about Trump’s latest missive said they disagreed with the former president. However, most still hesitated to say that they would oppose Trump if he becomes the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee…
FOCUS: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world:
Well! This is certainly a nice peroration!:
Noah Smith: My cyberpunk city, my cyberpunk world: ‘In 2019 I found myself standing on the roof of a skyscraper in Hong Kong next to a friend in a gas mask as the city’s youth and mirror-faced riot police battled each other with tear gas and firebombs in the electric forest of the megalopolis below…. People around the world fought their governments and their local police forces in the streets, coordinating and inspiring each other and outfoxing the authorities using a global wireless communication network linked to pocket supercomputers running pseudonymous social media services…. A sudden global plague…. In the wake of the plague came war. Drones… quickly became the indispensable, universal battlefield weapon. Where soldiers once sent poetry… now they sent high-quality videos, often with a soundtrack from popular music…. Government operatives, and online fandoms spewing out clouds of information and disinformation — great-power politics played out in forum flame-wars.
Far from the war, I walk through the streets of a strange cyberpunk city. I step around the homeless, destitute people who fill the streets, forsaken by their increasingly distant government. Strange people roll past me on one-wheels carrying boomboxes blasting 90s rap, fly drones in the park, scoot around in homemade go-karts, or drive miniature fake firetrucks blasting sound effects from Godzilla. And laid over this gritty, failing, beautiful metropolis like a second city: the network of the eccentric barons of techno-capital and their hired geniuses…. That girl with the chrome hair and the black leotard and the gizmos implanted under her skin? I know that girl, she lives down the street from me.
We felt this future coming…. Gibson, Stephenson, Shirow, Oshii, Sterling, Cadigan, and all the other cyberpunk creators were simply offering us alternative little slices of a future we all felt being born around us. And now we’re here…
This is the world of unbelievable and strange information technologies and extraordinary, unequal wealth, coupled with social dysfunction, and with a great many people straining their every nerve and muscle to figure out how to misinformed people and hack their brains.
I do confess I did not think a major reason for the bad actors to do what they do would be “to sell ads”.
Wondrous strange it all is…
And now GPT-Chat provides us with a first glimpse into what A Young Lady’s Illustratred Primer would be like:
Noah Smith concludes his essay with a call for reimagination:
The real question, as I see it, is what the next future is. In the 80s and 90s, the vision of a world dominated by information technology and capitalist inequality infiltrated our collective conscious. But what vision is seeping in and assembling itself now?…Honestly, a good answer still hasn’t come to mind…
Why isn’t it: The misuse of biological science for the purpose of acquiring and then excercising social power? There is a Brave New World ahead of us!
Or not. Technology can be used for good rather than evil, after all.
MUST-READ: Hunter Biden Was Supposed to Be the Republicans’ 2020 October Surprise:
Truth, this:
Dave Karpf: ‘The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.” Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election. They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing. And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since. They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will. But they’re actual just blunt instruments. Trump got impeached the first time for trying to condition congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine on Zelenskyy announcing an “investigation” of Biden corruption. He wanted the appearance of corruption, so he could wrap the media’s attention around it.
The laptop was basically Plan B. They wanted everyone to freak out about it for a few weeks. Normally what happens is conservative media shouts about it, mainstream media genuflects and “covers the controversy,” and Bannon and co high-five each other for setting the agenda. It didn’t work this time. They’ve been pouting ever since. It’s a lot like a kid who loses a video game and starts slamming the controller, insisting it’s rigged or the system is cheating.
Musk and Taibbi are tapping into that well of resentment. Why should we care about the President’s adult failson who doesn’t work in the administration? Two years later, what’s the scandal supposed to even be They’re gonna keep bitching about it for years. It’s going to be louder and emptier than the Benghazi hearings. The scandal is that their clever propaganda effort sank like a lead balloon. And that has to be SOMEONE ELSE’S fault.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing…
One Video: Immersed:
One Image: Agriculture!
Oþer Things Þt Went Whizzing by…
Very Briefly Noted:
Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, & Brad DeLong: Transcript: Brad Delong on FTX and the South Sea Company: ‘What history can tell us about the crypto winter… I think this went supremely well!
Martin Wolf: ‘Competitiveness’ mantra must not let risky banking rise again: ‘We should not relax ringfencing, not least because UK banks remain undercapitalised… Oh noes! Are British Conservatives really planning to try to rescue themselves economically from their self-inflicted Brexit disaster by turning London finance regulation-free?
John Ganz: Can the Origins of Today’s Right Be Traced to the 1990s?… Yes!
William Kolasky: Aaron Director and the Origins of the Chicago School of Antitrust: ‘Part III—The Antitrust Project: Laying the Foundations for Chicago School Antitrust… Not “antitrust”: pro-trust!
J.M. Berger: Mister Roboto: ‘My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M. As long as A.I. is created first for verisimilitude, we’re going to have this problem, an arms race to see who can develop the most convincing generative liar. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?… Indeed. Made me laugh. A lot.
John Halpin: More Emotions, Fewer Statistics: ‘Politicians are unable to connect with most Americans because they don’t experience economic anxiety on a regular basis… I am not sure that this is right. Left-wing politicians do connect. So do right-wing politicians, but they connect in a sick way—”those people need to suffer MORE!”
¶s:
I confess that I really cannot accept scenarios logic here. There is a huge demand for safe assets, a shortage of risk, bearing capacity, and governments with exorbitant privilege have enormous powers of financial repression. It seems to me that soft landings are easily attainable with a dose of financial repression.I confess that I really cannot accept scenarios logic here. There is a huge demand for safe assets, a shortage of risk, bearing capacity, and governments with exorbitant privilege have enormous powers of financial repression. It seems to me that soft landings are easily attainable with a dose of financial repression and a dose of governments’ willingness to deploy the risk bearing capacity of rich taxpayers (against their will, I admit). That there is a path between Scylla and Charybdis does not mean that that path will be taken, of course:
Nouriel Roubini: The Unavoidable Crash: ‘Much borrowing goes simply to finance consumption spending above one’s income.... Moreover, investments in “capital” can also be risky.... Over-borrowing has been going on for decades… the democratization of finance.... center-right governments have persistently cut taxes… years of quantitative easing (QE) and credit easing kept borrowing costs near zero.... The explosion of unsustainable debt ratios implied that many borrowers—households, corporations, banks, shadow banks, governments, and even entire countries—were insolvent “zombies” that were being propped up by low interest rates (which kept their debt-servicing costs manageable)…. Insolvent agents that would have gone bankrupt were rescued by zero- or negative-interest-rate policies, QE, and outright fiscal bailouts…. Now... zombies are experiencing sharp increases in their debt-servicing costs… the return of stagflation… the pandemic’s disruptions... Russia’s war in Ukraine... China’s increasingly disastrous zero-COVID policy.... Simply bailing out private and public agents with loose macro policies would pour more gasoline on the inflationary fire. That means there will be a hard landing.... Central-bank deficit monetization will once again be seen as the path of least resistance. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.... The mother of all stagflationary debt crises can be postponed, not avoided...
I think those who asked "why aren’t the Democrats supporting the good-guy Republicans" have been answered: there are next to no good-guy Republicans:
Meghan MacPherson: Trump's call to suspend Constitution not a 2024 deal-breaker, leading House Republican says: ‘Republican Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce…. Chair of the Republican Governance Group, a centrist group in the House…. Joyce ultimately said that Trump's comment should be taken "in context" but that it wouldn't prevent him from supporting Trump if he ends up winning the nomination…
Very nice to see this attention for Glory Liu’s book!”:
Rebecca Brenner Graham: Why the Philosophers Libertarians Love Always Come Out Worse for Wear: ‘Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek have been through the wringer: What isolated me most from the libertarians I met was our approach to history.... Two recent books take on some of the Mercatus Center’s favorite political-economic philosophers, proving, I think, my point. Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, by legal scholar Andrew Koppelman, claims that American libertarians have distorted Hayek’s ideals. Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism, by political scientist Glory Liu, shows how Americans have perceived Adam Smith and his ideas over time. Both aim to follow best practices in historical thought, such as change over time and the provision of tons and tons of context...
“A fast-working intern” is a good characterization. But I prefer Noah Smith and Roon’s “autocomplete for everything”:
Ethan Mollick: The Mechanical Professor: ‘Take a job I know well, and try to see how far I can automate it with AI…. Think of it like having an intern, but one who just happens to work instanteously, can write both code and solid descriptive writing, and has a large chunk of the world’s knowledge in their brain…. Start with a core duty of professors…. I ask it: Create a syllabus for a 12 session MBA-level introduction to entrepreneurship class, and provide the first four sessions. For each, include readings and assignments, as well as a summary of what will be covered. Include class policies at the end. The results are impressive…
On the "Agriculture" image. Of course, mining is much bigger (and much more geographically impactful) than it area hectares indicates. Not counting the 1-2KM underground is sorta like saying the Empire State Building is only 400x200 feet. ;-)
From today's edition of Sayash & Arvind's substack "AI Snake Oil":
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. ChatGPT is shockingly good at sounding convincing on any conceivable topic. But OpenAI is clear that there is no source of truth during training. That means that using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions. Even though the bot often gives excellent answers, sometimes it fails badly. And it’s always convincing, so it’s hard to tell the difference.
Yet, there are three kinds of tasks for which ChatGPT and other LLMs can be extremely useful, despite their inability to discern truth in general:
Tasks where it’s easy for the user to check if the bot’s answer is correct, such as debugging help.
Tasks where truth is irrelevant, such as writing fiction.
Tasks for which there does in fact exist a subset of the training data that acts as a source of truth, such as language translation.