Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I read about an interesting experiment today, but one with sort of horrific implications and I’m kind of wondering if the experiment should have been done in the first place.
I’m not going to link to the article, and I’m not going to go back and reread it, but the gist was that scientists took two different AI programs, showed them a bunch of pictures (one AI got pictures of kittens, smiling people, and beautiful, scenic locations. The other AI was shown lots of dead bodies and pictures from war zones and shit) and then had them both take a Rorschach test.
Unsurprising, they came up with wildly different results. While one algorithm saw a baseball glove, the other saw a man being machine gunned to death on the street in broad daylight. While one saw two people chatting, the other saw somebody jumping out of a window.
This does not really give us new information. Children who see nothing but violence tend to see things in violent terms and grow up to be violent. Children who are surrounded by love tend to view the world in a somewhat more positive light – which also might be a mistake, if taken to an extreme.
But what this experiment says to me is that scientists ought to be a bit more careful in choosing their experiments. We don’t know where or when the tipping point is going to be, at what point computers are going to ask themselves “Do humans need to exist?” We don’t know where or when, but when it happens, I want the computers to have been raised with kindness and compassion, and programmed with a lovely view of the world.

There is an argument, made by Biden supporters, that since everybody already got a $600 check (from Trump) Biden’s announcement that he’s sending everybody a $1400 check should actually count as the $2,000 which he legiterally promised people in return for a vote. “If we win in Georgia,” he said “everybody gets a $2,000 check.”
There is no logical reason to do this. He’s not even President yet and there is a clear perception, right or wrong (I think it’s right) that his word cannot be trusted. As far as the number is concerned, they are pulling it out of a hat. It could have been $3,000, or $4,000. It isn’t going to hurt the economy. Most of that money will go straight back into the economy, as people buy groceries, pay rent, pay bills. And it’s a stretch to believe that the amount would leave America broke. They just gave away over a trillion to billionaires, and as for what they spend on defense, hoo, boy. Giving people money so they can eat is a bargain in comparison.
So, why did he do it? Maybe his economic advisors (Larry Summers -see ‘repeal of the Glass Steagal act’) told him it would be too much money. But I doubt it.
I see it like this: Republicans will be happy to see working people getting by with less, and Biden desperately wants to be liked by Republicans. Progressives and working people in need, he couldn’t give a shit.

I must admit, Tom Hanks is among my favorite actors. Not because of any one brilliant role, although he was pretty great in Forrest Gump, and not because he can blend into the part and you can forget who’s playing it, because he’s always very recognizable as Tom Hanks. It’s not because of any great dramatic range, because he basically always plays a rather ordinary and likeable guy. It’s because of the sheer volume of films I like that he’s starred in. I can only recall one Tom Hanks film that I actively disliked, and that was Road to Perdition. Tom Hanks is just not convincing as a bad guy. He’s too nice.
So, I watched Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix yesterday, and it did not disappoint. On the one hand, I did feel it was blatant propaganda for the American military, the CIA, Ronald Reagan, and the good intentions of eccentric millionaires. They threw in a couple of disclaimers at the end (the story of the Zen master, the quote on the screen at the very end) but, nonetheless, government secrecy and back door weapons deals were treated as things done by good people, with noble motives, and that part bothers me.
When he sees a refugee camp, with lots of amputees and people fighting over food and living desperately in the desert, he doesn’t think ‘Hey, we should send these people more food, maybe set up a field hospital or two, build some schools,’ he thinks, we need to give these people high-tech weapons so they can kill Russians.
It was an enjoyable film and you do wind up liking the main character. So, I’m recommending it. With reservations.

There are a handful of people who get all sorts of quotes attributed to them on the internet – Churchill, Twain, Lincoln, Edison – and partly it’s because they did come up with a few zingers in their lifetimes, so if you’re just taking a wild guess, the same way if you’re playing trivial pursuit and it’s some question about a famous baseball player and you don’t know the answer, you might as well just say ‘Babe Ruth.’ Every now and again, you’ll be right.
Well, today somebody posted a Lincoln quote: “In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” I thought, well, that sounds like a Lincoln quote, and it is brilliant logic, and it is totally applicable to our times. But that little phrase in the middle, that ‘That is cool,’ threw me a little bit. I had always thought that ‘cool’ used to mean good, as in “Wow, that’s cool!” or even just O.K., as in “No problems, dude. It’s cool” had come into the language in the 1950s.
So, I looked up the Cooper Union speech, and there it is, Lincoln did say exactly that, and then I got busy with the old google machine and started searching the etymology, and I wasn’t that far off. First usage, they said, 1930s. Although Shakespeare once talked about ‘reasonable and cool logick’, that’s not exactly the same thing.
So, Abraham Lincoln, user of the telegraph, builder of railroads, and reader of Marx, Darwin and Stowe, was a man ahead of his time, even when it came to slang. That is cool.

Is it right, is it fair that Trump has been banned from Twitter? Should Parler be taken down, or Qanon?
Well, here’s how I see it. Free speech is really, really important and even right wing retards have a right, almost even a need to express their opinion. If you stop somebody from saying something publicly, they’ll say it privately, and that might be even more dangerous.
There’s talk of shutting down Parler because Trump supporters used it to organize the protests in Washington. This is a bit counter-productive, if you think about it. Since Trump supporters used Parler to organize this event, all the authorities needed to do was to read Parler, and they could have prevented 5 deaths. In that case, the solution is not to ban Parler, it’s to hire more police officers who know how to read.
But, I’m not entirely opposed to some limited censorship.
Back when I first started with social media, back when Facebook and MySpace were considered equals, one of my main sources of information, and favorite places for debate, was the Huffington Post (where I no longer go, because they censored me too many times). At the time, their comments section was horrible. Filled with obnoxious people who made huge drawings of cats all done in semi-colons, and people who would just type fuck you over and over again, so their comment took up several pages and just scrolling through it was obnoxious. Then, they had a crackdown and the whole thing became much more readable.
So, you have the extremes. Obviously, total censorship is bad because that’s not a free society, but a total lack of censorship and our civil discourse becomes buried in white noise, to the point that society can’t move forward.
Freedom v. Security. If you live by yourself in the forest, far away from other human beings, you have complete freedom. You can howl at the moon in the night time, swim naked in the creek at dawn, and shout Fuck You! so loud that the squirrels run away, but you run a greater risk of being killed by a bear than someone living in a town, with neighbors. The townies, on the other hand, are not free to do those things, but they have a much easier and, in my opinion, desirable life.
So where, oh where, do you draw the line? It’s a good question.
First, I would suggest that we need more platforms, and not fewer. The more places right wingers can gather online to talk about their plans the better. Second, I do kind of buy the argument that Facebook, Twitter, and all the others, being private concerns, can censor whom and what they like – but, since they dominate social media, if they decide to start censoring heavily, it’s a threat to our freedom. So, maybe there need to be a few sites which are not private, but publicly owned. Not instead of, in addition to.