National Security at Mar-a-Lago

The Trump indictment is out, and it is amazing. Please take the time to read it HERE. The evidence and charges are so sprawling and impacting I barely know where to start. And yes, Trump is charged with 31 counts under the Espionage Act. (...)

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document [and] willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it . . . Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Keith via: (Read more:)
Image: uncredited

Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?

The organization would be called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs. (...)

FAIR launched in March of 2021. “An intolerant orthodoxy is undermining our common humanity and pitting us against each other,” Weiss tweeted in an announcement. Bartning was featured in the Wall Street Journal, telling the story of the changes at Riverdale and writing that “millions of American children are being taught to see the world in this reductionist way.” According to Bartning and others involved in the founding, FAIR was immediately flooded with hundreds of inquiries from people who were interested in donating and volunteering, many of whom were worried about their children’s schools. Bartning became the organization’s head—in his view, the whole thing had been his idea. The other founders were fine with the arrangement. Chen had her nonprofit, and Weiss was launching a new media company. They were too busy to run FAIR, anyway.

The world of anti-woke nonprofits is relatively small. There are the alarmed-parent groups, like Parents Defending Education, which aims to “reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.” There are the anti-anti-racist groups, such as Free Black Thought, with its “mission of uplifting heterodox Black voices.” And then there are the catchall groups that purport to oppose any kind of ideological orthodoxy, such as the Institute for Liberal Values.

Few of these groups have true influence. The most effective actors in the anti-woke space tend to be overtly political: the activist group Moms for Liberty, for example, or Rufo, whose rhetoric seems to have single-handedly shaped the way that conservative politicians such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, take stands against progressive movements. Their unabashedly partisan approach offers useful ideological clarity: these activists share core values and beliefs, and they know precisely who and what they’re fighting against.

Bartning, though, felt strongly that FAIR should take a nonpartisan stance. “I saw the solution to these issues as something that is relentlessly positive,” he told me recently. He was interested in articulating a mission that wasn’t primarily against things—anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-critical race theory—but rather for something. He settled on a term: “pro-human,” which he described as “seeing yourself and other people as a unique individual who is connected with everyone else through our shared humanity.”

At first, the money came easily. One Boston-based donor, who asked not to be named, told me that she had come across FAIR on Twitter, where she had started reading about identity politics during the pandemic. fair’s nonpartisan, “pro-human” mission “just really resonated,” she told me. “It was the only organization that was actually trying to do something a better way.” After attending a FAIR meetup in her city, she started getting to know the organization’s leaders, and eventually offered a million-dollar donation—the largest amount that her family had ever given away. Ken Schwartz, a former AIPAC volunteer who supported FAIR, told me that Bartning, “without a lot of experience, raised a hell of a lot of money” for the organization. 

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave FAIR a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When FAIR was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.

Under Bartning’s direction, FAIR created its own ethnic-studies curriculum, which was free for teachers and school districts to adapt. “Bion, it seemed to me, really pinpointed what our culture needs, which is an understanding of identity that is both culturally nuanced and culturally sensitive, but that also puts that in the context of what we share,” Adam Seagrave, a professor at Arizona State University who helped to develop the materials, told me. In one lesson, called “Our Shared Human Story,” students are presented with cartoons about the overwhelming biological similarities of all humans, including across racial groups. “Students will understand that people are all members of one human race, Sapiens,” the objectives read. FAIR also started developing a corporate diversity-training program—taking a kind of Goldilocks approach, neither woke nor anti-woke, which acknowledged the need for education about diversity while avoiding, for example, separating participants by affinity group. Sodexo, a food-services company that provides school lunches, gave FAIR a contract after Weiss introduced Bartning to one of the company’s executives.

There are roughly eighty FAIR chapters around the country, and the organization claims to have thirty-five thousand members, but it counts everyone who signs up on the group’s Web site, so that figure isn’t necessarily meaningful. The organization named chapter leaders all over America, and made them responsible for starting local groups. The model was challenging: FAIR was trying to achieve professional-level work with volunteers, often inexperienced ones. Some volunteers found it difficult to make much progress. Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into FAIR's mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “FAIR was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”

FAIR's main activity was talking about stuff. It produced a series of animated videos, with titles such as “The Media’s Haste to Cry Race,” narrated by Chen, and “The Spiral of Silence in Social Justice,” narrated by the conservative-leaning Brown University economist Glenn Loury. They held Zoom Webinars on subjects such as parental rights in K-12 education. The group started publishing a Substack and hosting panel discussions—the bread and butter of the heterodox crowd. FAIR was preoccupied with language; its leaders discouraged staff, contractors, and volunteers from using terms like “neo-Marxism” and “critical race theory” because they were too charged, for example.

By the summer of 2021, there was discontent brewing. The organization had around a half-dozen staffers and contractors, who mostly answered to Bartning. A few workers started chafing under his leadership, complaining that they felt simultaneously micromanaged and unable to get clear direction on projects. They started calling around to anyone who had had contact with Bartning or FAIR, compiling a dossier of complaints. Jason Littlefield, an employee at the time who contributed to the dossier, told me that Bartning seemed to see other similar organizations as competitors: “It felt like he was trying to corner the market on humanity.” Paul Rossi, a former private-school teacher who helped to compile the dossier, reported that Bartning was “unreceptive to any constructive criticism about how to be a ‘good citizen’ in the movement.” Leaders of other organizations in the broadly defined anti-woke space were willing to promote FAIR's work but felt like FAIR wasn’t willing to promote theirs. Shaw, the former Smith College administrator, who also contributed to the dossier, told me that she came to see FAIR as “a make-work program for journalists and podcasters.”

by Emma Green, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ben Hickey

June K., Water Bottle Chihuly
Image: markk

June K., Warhol
Image: markk

June K., Sunflowers (Van Gogh)
via: markk

F-35 Sustainment Costs: $1.27 Trillion

DOD Needs to Cut Billions in Estimated Costs to Achieve Affordability

DOD plans to acquire nearly 2,500 F-35 aircraft for about $400 billion. It projects spending another $1.27 trillion to operate and sustain them—an estimate that has steadily increased since 2012.

The military services collectively face tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project will be unaffordable. For example, the Air Force needs to reduce estimated annual per-plane costs by $3.7 million (47%) by 2036, or costs in that year alone will be $4.4 billion more than it can afford. (...)

F-35 mission capable rates—a measure of the readiness of an aircraft fleet—have recently improved, but still fall short of warfighter requirements. Specifically, from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020, the U.S. F-35 fleet's average annual (1) mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can fly and perform one of its tasked missions—improved from 59 to 69 percent; and (2) full mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can perform all of its tasked missions—improved from 32 to 39 percent. Both metrics fall below the services' objectives. For example, in fiscal year 2020 the Air Force F-35A full mission capable rate was 54 percent, versus a 72 percent objective.

Since 2012, F-35 estimated sustainment costs over its 66-year life cycle have increased steadily, from $1.11 trillion to $1.27 trillion, despite efforts to reduce costs. The services face a substantial and growing gap between estimated sustainment costs and affordability constraints—i.e., costs per tail (aircraft) per year that the services project they can afford—totaling about $6 billion in 2036 alone (see fig.). The services will collectively be confronted with tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project as unaffordable during the program.

by US Government Accountability Office (GAO |  Read more:

Image: US Air Force/Senior Airman Alexander Cook via

[ed. Why? See also: Flying the F-35 stealth fighter can leave pilots looking 'like they are 100 years old,' says test pilot (Business Insider).]

Will GPT Models Choke on Their Own Exhaust?

Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these have popped up as writing assistants in our editing tools. So more and more of the text will be written by large language models (LLMs). Where does it all lead? What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute most of the language found online?

And it’s not just text. If you train a music model on Mozart, you can expect output that’s a bit like Mozart but without the sparkle – let’s call it ‘Salieri’. And if Salieri now trains the next generation, and so on, what will the fifth or sixth generation sound like?

In our latest paper, we show that using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects. The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.

After we published this paper, we noticed that Ted Chiang had already commented on the effect in February, noting that ChatGPT is like a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Internet, and that copies of copies get worse. In our paper we work through the math, explain the effect in detail, and show that it is universal.

by Ross Anderson, Light Blue Touchpaper |  Read more:

Image: Reddit via:

[ed. Do read Ted Chiang's excellent essay - ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; and also: The Age of Chat (New Yorker - excerpt below). I had to work with N.P.C's all my career and until now didn't have a good term for them, other than idiots...lol.]

"The gaming industry has long relied on various forms of what might be called A.I., and at G.D.C. at least two of the talks addressed the use of large language models and generative A.I. in game development. They were focussed specifically on the construction of non-player characters, or N.P.C.s: simple, purely instrumental dramatis personae—villagers, forest creatures, combat enemies, and the like—who offer scripted, constrained, utilitarian lines of dialogue, known as barks. (“Hi there”; “Have you heard?”; “Look out!”) N.P.C.s are meant to make a game feel populated, busy, and multidimensional, without being too distracting. Meanwhile, outside of gaming, the N.P.C. has become a sort of meme. In 2018, the Times identified the term “N.P.C.” as “the Pro-Trump Internet’s new favorite insult,” after right-wing Internet users began using it to describe their political opponents as mechanical chumps brainwashed by political orthodoxy. These days, “N.P.C.” can be used to describe another person, or oneself, as generic—basic, reproducible, ancillary, pre-written, powerless.

When I considered the possibilities of N.P.C.s powered by L.L.M.s, I imagined self-replenishing worlds of talk, with every object and character endowed with personality. I pictured solicitous orcs, garrulous venders, bantering flora. In reality, the vision was more workaday. N.P.C.s “may be talking to the player, to each other, or to themselves—but they must speak without hesitation, repetition, or deviation from the narrative design,” the summary for one of the talks, given by Ben Swanson, a researcher at Ubisoft, read. Swanson’s presentation promoted Ubisoft’s Ghostwriter program, an application designed to reduce the busywork involved in creating branching “trees” of dialogue, in which the same types of conversations occur many times, slightly permuted depending on what players say. Ghostwriter uses a large language model to suggest potential barks for N.P.C.s, based on various criteria inputted by humans, who then vet the model’s output. The player doesn’t directly engage the A.I.

Yet it seems likely that “conversations” with A.I. will become more common in the coming years. Large language models are being added to search engines and e-commerce sites, and into word processors and spreadsheet software. In theory, the capabilities of voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, could become more complex and layered. Call centers are introducing A.I. “assistants”; Amazon is allegedly building a chatbot; and Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, has been promoting a drive-through A.I. Earlier this spring, the Khan Lab School, a small private school in Palo Alto, introduced an experimental tutoring bot to its students, and the National Eating Disorders Association tried replacing its human-run telephone helpline with a bot dubbed Tessa. (neda suspended the service after Tessa gave harmful advice to callers.)

Chatbots are not the end point of L.L.M.s. Arguably, the technology’s most impressive capabilities have less to do with conversation and more to do with processing data—unearthing and imitating patterns, regurgitating inputs to produce something close to summaries—of which conversational text is just one type. Still, it seems that the future could hold endless opportunities for small talk with indefatigable interlocutors. Some of this talk will be written, and some may be conducted through verbal interfaces that respond to spoken commands, queries, and other inputs. Anything hooked up to a database could effectively become a bot, or an N.P.C., whether in virtual or physical space. We could be entering an age characterized by endless chat—useful or skimmable, and bottomless by design."

This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength,” the last book in his Space Trilogy, and since I wrote about aliens last weekend it seems like a good week to talk a little bit about the novel’s contemporary relevance.

For those who haven’t read it, the book is a curious hybrid, mixing the anti-totalitarian style of dystopia familiar from Lewis’s contemporaries like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley with a blend of supernaturalism and science fiction that anticipates Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” among other works. (Lewis’s preferred subtitle for “That Hideous Strength” was “A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups.”)

The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which looks like the World State from Huxley’s “Brave New World” in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to N.I.C.E.’s inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I’ll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch I’ll draw out a couple of points about the book’s interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning “postrationalist,” where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point. (For a small example of what I mean, just read this 2021 account of life inside one of the stranger tech-associated research institutes.) Although like some of the characters in “That Hideous Strength,” these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they’re just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternate dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.

Then, too, the book’s totalitarian dystopia is interesting for being incomplete, contested and plagued by inner rivalries and contradictions. Unlike in “Brave New World” and “1984,” we don’t see a one-party regime holding absolute sway; in Lewis’s story, we see a still-disguised tyranny taking shape but still falling prey to various all-too-human problems, blunders and failures that contrast with the smooth dominance of Orwell’s O’Brien or Huxley’s Mustapha Mond.

Lewis, no less than his fellow mid-20th-century speculators, feared the rise of what he dubbed the “controllers” — basically a hyper-intelligent, omnicompetent bureaucratic caste granted extraordinary powers by modern science and technology and bent on reshaping human nature to fit some ideal of stability or ideology or both. And that vision still informs a lot of contemporary anxieties, from Covid-era fears about biosurveillance and digital censorship to more recent anxieties about what the invention of super-intelligence might mean for human equality and freedom.

But the relative incompetence of the would-be controllers in Lewis’s novel, their prideful overestimation of their faculties and their reckless spiritual gambles seem better fitted to the world we inhabit — in which powerful institutions seeking global mastery are constantly frustrated by the blowback to their stratagems, and our elites are storm-tossed by social, political and psychic forces they don’t expect or recklessly unleash. (...)

I’m a defender of conspiracy theorizing as a legitimate form of speculation — because conspiracies and weird secrets really are part of the fabric of existence, official knowledge only goes so far, and if you leave certain kinds of speculation to the paranoid, you’ll be constantly surprised when it turns out they were on to something. But a typical folly of conspiracists is to leap from a weird pattern (which the U.F.O. phenomenon certainly presents) or a scattering of bizarre details to a scenario that requires everyone to be in on the secret, at least aware of the mind-blowing truth if not participating in the plot.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alain Pilon
[ed. In a sense, everything is a conspiracy - business, politics, national security - everything - if one defines it as an act of people conspiring with each other to achieve some specific purpose. Propaganda is conspiracy. Advertising. The world is a complex place, and conspiracy thinking is fundamentally a response to the helplessness/ambivalence many people feel when buffeted by forces over which they have little or no control (and even then, perhaps, a hope that someone or something actually is in control). And, as Lauren Oyler has observed: "something of a misdirection... a tool for distraction and a way to manipulate people who might need a sense of purpose, clarity, or self-esteem. (...) You could say conspiracy theories are like bad fiction, which attempts to tie everything up and explain it all. Neither leave room for randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness. But life is full of all these, and our desire to eliminate them leads us down narrower and narrower paths." See also: Does the U.S. Government Want You to Believe in U.F.O.s? (NYT):]

"The possibility of literal spacecraft stashed in U.S. government hangars, meanwhile, piles up two immense-seeming improbabilities. First, that inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving souvenirs behind. Second, that human governments have been collecting evidence for generations without the truth ever being leaked or uncovered or just blurted out by Donald Trump.

But this whistle-blower’s mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.

The evidence for this shift includes the military’s newfound willingness to disclose weird atmospheric encounters."

Turnpike Troubadours

[ed. A buddy's favorite. Texas honky tonk.]

Image: uncredited
via:
[ed. A strong disincentive to moving.]

Cultural Amnesia: Revisiting Doom-and-Gloom Forecasts

Netflix movies by decade

Last year I looked skeptically at the myth of the long tail—a theory that promised more cultural choices and options in the digital age.

“The Long Tail is a cruel joke,” I wrote. “It’s a fairy tale we’re told to make us feel good about all those marginalized creative endeavors. . . . We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.”

And what’s happening now? (...)

Here’s a breakdown of movies on Netflix by decade—the online archive where cinema history goes to die. (above)

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: AdWeek

[ed. Interesting graphic. See also: Where Did the Long Tail Go? (THB):

"Not only has Netflix sharply reduced the number of movies it offers on its streaming platform, but now has a lot of competitors (Disney, Apple, Paramount, etc.) that are also tightly managing the titles they feature."

Also, this: I warned in December that TikTok may have already peaked. But new numbers show how quickly the decline is taking place.

AdWeek

Tom Gauld
via:

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands

The complex relationship between the mind of someone with dementia and the mind of the person caring for them.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands is that rarity: true biblio-therapy. Lucid, mature, wise, with hardly a wasted word, it not only deepens our understanding of what transpires as we care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, it also has the potential to be powerfully therapeutic, offering the kind of support and reorientation so essential to the millions of people struggling with the long, often agonizing leave-taking of loved ones stricken with the dreaded disease. The book is based on a profound insight: the concept of “dementia blindness,” which identifies a singular problem of caring for people with dementia disorders—one that has generally escaped notice but, once understood, may make a significant difference for many caregivers. (...)

Travelers is sorely needed, for several reasons. As of this moment, none of the mainstream drugs for dementia disorders does much to reverse cognitive decline, except to offer a few months of lessening symptoms. When it comes to the treatment of people with Alzheimer’s, all the promissory notes of medical science, and the monthly hype about a single magic bullet that will cure this disease, clash with real-world medicine. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the amyloid hypothesis upon which so many of these claims have been based—the idea that Alzheimer’s is caused by nothing but the buildup of plaque in the brain—is woefully inadequate to explain the disease.

In the meantime, it is up to family members and friends, where possible, to take care of their loved ones for much of the duration of their cognitive and physical decline. And yet there has been far too little clinical attention paid to the caregivers themselves. How can we help them through a process that is profoundly difficult, if not traumatic? Remember, alongside the rigors of providing day-to-day care, the caregivers often suffer from what might best be called “anticipatory grief,” as familiar aspects of their loved ones slip away. And this may be compounded by a fear, in family members, that they might inherit the disease unfolding in front of them. (...)

Alzheimer’s has different presentations and takes a different course in each patient, depending, in part, on where the process begins in the brain. That said, it’s often noted that Alzheimer’s interferes with short-term memory, leads to other deficits, includes a lot of denial, and, ultimately, leads many victims to gradually “lose their minds.”

The genius of this book is to show more precisely the process of resisting such losses as it unfolds between patient and caregiver, affecting not just one but both. To learn about this process is surprisingly helpful—not curative, but helpful.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands clarifies why we, the caregivers, often behave like Sisyphus of the Greek myth, doomed eternally to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. In similar fashion, we find ourselves repeating the same errors, making the same requests, and getting pulled into the same power struggles, pointless quarrels, and seething ambivalences as we care for our patients. This is partly because Alzheimer’s patients seem unable to learn from their mistakes. But it is also because, weirdly enough, caregivers experience the same problem. In an uncanny mirroring, we get pulled into a parallel process with our charges, forgetting what happened yesterday, repeating what didn’t work last time, becoming ever more prone to agitation and impatience, even as we’re engaged in a trial of devotion that pushes love to its limit.

Why does this happen? Precisely because, as Kiper shows, the healthy brain has evolved to automatically attribute to other people the existence of a self that is sustained over time, has self-reflective capacities, and is capable of learning and absorbing new information. This attribution is the brain’s unconscious default position, or cognitive-emotional bias, and does not simply disappear when we become caregivers for people whose own brains begin to falter. It is the invisible projection upon which each human encounter begins, a projection that is implicit in our every conversation and even in the structure of human language itself.

When we say “you,” we believe we’re talking to another “self,” an essence, or perhaps process, that somehow persists over time. But this self—and the continuity it implies— depends on having the memory capacity to knit together our different mental states. This same capacity contributes to the ability to self-reflect, which is a key component of human consciousness. Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders silently strip their victims of the cognitive infrastructure that helps construct this self.

The “loss of self” described in the Alzheimer’s literature can happen slowly—over a decade in some cases—and may be stealthy enough that neither the victim (and this is the key point) nor the caregiver appreciates its full extent. Alzhei­mer’s notwithstanding, the person remains in front of us, in their usual form and appearance, exhibiting the same expres­sions, carrying the same music in their voices, evoking in us thousands of familiar memories and emotional associations. There are better and worse days, and sometimes the old self seems to return, with strong will intact—a viable simulacrum of who they once were. Clearly, there is a person there.

Yet as the disease advances, we may come to see just the shell or the husk of the self we once knew. But this new understanding does not stop us from projecting a continu­ous self, because, as Kiper explains, it is the brain’s default position—that is, we cannot help but see what was once there. This brilliant insight is the entry point into the hitherto difficult-to-imagine land she goes on to describe.

We often say of people caught in this bind—knowing the loved one’s self is diminished but continuing to see it as whole—that they are “in denial,” as if this was only a defense mechanism at work. But that is a misapplication of the valuable term “denial.” Yes, there can be denial, and Kiper describes some of it. But those caught in the Sisyphean entanglement are not simply denying that their loved ones are ill—after all, they’re the ones accepting infirmity and trying to help. Though it may accompany denial or even reinforce it, dementia blindness isn’t simply the defense mechanism of a stressed mind; it is, as Kiper shows, a product of how the healthy mind normally works.

by Norman Doige, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images

Crispy, Salty, Salmon Skin

Make salty, crispy skin the star of your salmon dinner

So, you go to start up the backyard grill, open it and find two dry, forgotten, charred salmon skins left from the last time someone grilled a couple fillets and forgot to clean up. Sound familiar? The other day, I came across a couple of these skins on a friend’s grill, and then I started thinking about how delicious crispy salmon skin is. What if instead of being something we leave on the grill, the crispy charred skin becomes the showpiece?

That’s what led me into a week of trying techniques for cooking salmon that get skin extra crispy and delicious. Per-pound prices on early summer red salmon are great, so if you’re curious, now’s the time to try it for yourself.

My favorite technique comes from Seattle-based J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who wrote last month in The New York Times food section about dry-brining. This technique really blew my mind because it was so simple and made for glorious perfect bites of flavorful salmon with extra crispy skin. He offers the option of broiling the fish, but I went with his pan-fry technique. I modified his instructions slightly because of what I had on hand. The only essential tool is a good instant-read thermometer.

Here’s what I used, which was enough for four people:

• One red salmon fillet, weighing roughly a pound

• A teaspoon of sea salt

• Canola oil

Following Lopez-Alt’s instructions, I dried my fillet well, covered it with the salt and put it in a paper towel-lined lasagna pan. I then put it in the fridge uncovered for 8 hours. (My fridge smelled fine.) It came out dry and a little sticky on the outside — it reminded me of the smoking process when you dry salmon after a wet brine to form a pellicle.

When I was ready to cook, I cut the fish into individual portions. After that, I heated a large frying pan over medium-low heat, rubbed the portions down with a little neutral oil and fried them for about 5 minutes, skin-side down. When the skin was brown and crispy, I had no trouble separating them from the cooking surface with a spatula.

I flipped them and fried each flesh-side down until it reached about 110 degrees on my instant-read thermometer. That leaves the fish on the rare side. Well done, Lopez-Alt says, is 135 degrees. I did not try cooking salt-brined fish on the grill, but stands to reason it would be extra crispy, well-charred and good.

The next method I liked was to pan-fry the fish on parchment paper — a technique that’s making the rounds on the internet. This method also made for crispy skin — though not quite as flavorful or crispy as the Lopez-Alt method.

Here’s what I used to make roughly enough for two people:

by Julia O'Malley, ADN |  Read more:

Image: Julia O'Malley

Trapped Priors

Introduction and review

Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.

To review: the brain combines raw experience (eg sensations, memories) with context (eg priors, expectations, other related sensations and memories) to produce perceptions. You don’t notice this process; you are only able to consciously register the final perception, which feels exactly like raw experience.

A typical optical illusion. The top chess set and the bottom chess set are the same color (grayish). But the top appears white and the bottom black because of the context (darker vs. lighter background). You perceive not the raw experience (grayish color) but the final perception modulated by context; to your conscious mind, it just seems like a brute fact that the top is white and the bottom black, and it is hard to convince yourself otherwise.

Or: maybe you feel like you are using a particular context independent channel (eg hearing). Unbeknownst to you, the information in that channel is being context-modulated by the inputs of a different channel (eg vision). You don’t feel like “this is what I’m hearing, but my vision tells me differently, so I’ll compromise”. You feel like “this is exactly what I heard, with my ears, in a way vision didn’t affect at all”. 

This is called the McGurk Effect. The man is saying the same syllable each time, but depending on what picture of his mouth moving you see, you hear it differently. Your vision is context-modulating your hearing, but it just sounds like hearing something.

The most basic illusion I know of is the Wine Illusion; dye a white wine red, and lots of people will say it tastes like red wine. The raw experience - the taste of the wine itself - is that of a white wine. But the context is that you're drinking a red liquid. Result: it tastes like a red wine. (...)

The placebo effect is almost equally simple. You're in pain, so your doctor gives you a “painkiller” (unbeknownst to you, it’s really a sugar pill). The raw experience is the nerve sending out just as many pain impulses as before. The context is that you've just taken a pill which a doctor assures you will make you feel better. Result: you feel less pain. (...)

The cognitive version of this experience is normal Bayesian reasoning. Suppose you live in an ordinary California suburb and your friend says she saw a coyote on the way to work. You believe her; your raw experience (a friend saying a thing) and your context (coyotes are plentiful in your area) add up to more-likely-than-not. But suppose your friend says she saw a polar bear on the way to work. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend saying a thing) is the same, but the context (ie the very low prior on polar bears in California) makes it implausible.

Normal Bayesian reasoning slides gradually into confirmation bias. Suppose you are a zealous Democrat. Your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Democratic position. You believe it; your raw experience (an argument that sounds convincing) and your context (the Democrats are great) add up to more-likely-than-not true. But suppose your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Republican position. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend making an argument with certain inherent plausibility) is the same, but the context (ie your very low prior on the Republicans being right about something) makes it unlikely.

Still, this ought to work eventually. Your friend just has to give you a good enough argument. Each argument will do a little damage to your prior against Republican beliefs. If she can come up with enough good evidence, you have to eventually accept reality, right?

But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it. This is where we need to bring in the idea of trapped priors.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/uncredited

[ed. Do check out the McGurk video above to get a good sense of how hard-wired this concept is. Going deeper into the weeds, see also: The Canal Papers (ACX).]

Pat Metheny

Steely Dan

A Conservation Group’s Lawsuit Closed an Iconic Alaska Fishery. Now, it’s Pushing for Endangered Species Act Protections for King Salmon.

‘It’ll be a disaster’: Southeast Alaska fishermen fear looming closure of king salmon fishery (ADN).

Images: James Poulson/Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP; Emily Mesner / ADN.
[ed. The southeast Alaska troll fishery is not an existential threat to Washington's orca whales, but some little-known conservation group managed to convince at least one judge. Now they want to shut down nearly all chinook fishing in Alaska: A conservation group’s lawsuit already closed an iconic Alaska fishery. Now, it’s pushing for Endangered Species Act protections for king salmon. (ADN):]

"A Washington-based conservation group whose actions have already caused the closure of an iconic Southeast Alaska fishery is now planning to ask the federal government to list several Alaska king salmon stocks under the Endangered Species Act.

The Wild Fish Conservancy, last month, formally notified the state of Alaska of its plans to file the Endangered Species Act petition for multiple populations of king salmon, also known as chinook — in Southeast Alaska, Southwest Alaska and Cook Inlet. [ed. basically, nearly all of Alaska).]

The Failed Affirmative Action Campaign That Shook Democrats

The 2020 campaign to restore race-conscious affirmative action in California was close to gospel within the Democratic Party. It drew support from the governor, senators, state legislative leaders and a who’s who of business, nonprofit and labor elites, Black, Latino, white and Asian.

The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco Giants and 49ers and Oakland Athletics urged voters to support the referendum, Proposition 16, and remove “systemic barriers.” A commercial noted that Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, had endorsed the campaign, and the ad also suggested that to oppose it was to side with white supremacy. Supporters raised many millions of dollars for the referendum and outspent opponents by 19 to 1.

“Vote for racial justice!” urged the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

None of these efforts persuaded Jimmie Romero, a 63-year-old barber who grew up in the working-class Latino neighborhood of Wilmington in Los Angeles. Homelessness, illegal dumping, spiraling rents: He sat in his shop and listed so many problems.

Affirmative action was not one of those.

“I was upset that they tried to push that,” Mr. Romero recalled in a recent interview. “It was not what matters.”

Mr. Romero was one of millions of California voters, including about half who are Hispanic and a majority who are Asian American, who voted against Proposition 16, which would have restored race-conscious admissions at public universities, and in government hiring and contracting.

The breadth of that rejection shook supporters. California is a liberal bastion and one of the most diverse states in the country. That year, President Biden swamped Donald Trump by 29 percentage points in California, but Proposition 16 went down, with 57 percent of voters opposing it.

That vote constitutes more than just a historical curiosity. The U.S. Supreme Court is soon expected to rule against, or limit, affirmative action in college admissions, which the court supported for decades. (...)

The No Vote: ‘Why Do We Need This?’

Gloria Romero, a Democrat and former majority leader of the State Senate, was term-limited and left politics in 2010 out of frustration with the poor health of public education and her party’s opposition to charter schools.

Ten years later, she voted against affirmative action.

“Why are we going back to the past?” she said. “We’re no longer in a ‘walk over the bridge in Selma’ phase of our civil rights struggle.”

Like many Hispanic voters interviewed, Ms. Romero worried less about blatant discrimination and more about health care, education and housing.

The Hispanic populations is at an inflection point in California, progress vying with lingering disparity. Slightly more than half of public school students are Hispanic, and the percentage of Hispanic undergraduates in the elite University of California system is roughly half that. The well-regarded if less competitive California State system has 23 four-year campuses and almost 460,000 students, and those who are Hispanic make up almost half of the total.

“We’re debating affirmative action when we have more Latinos than ever in college,” Ms. Romero said. (...)

Valerie Contreras, a crane operator, is a proud union member and civic leader in Wilmington, where half the voters were against the referendum. She had little use for the affirmative action campaign.

“It was ridiculous all the racially loaded terms Democrats used,” she said. “It was a distraction from the issues that affect our lives.”

Asian voters spoke of visceral unease. South and East Asians make up just 15 percent of the state population, and 35 percent of the undergraduates in the University of California system.

Affirmative action, to their view, upends traditional measures of merit — grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and threatens to reduce their numbers. (...)

Kevin Liao, a consultant and former top Democratic Party aide, supported the affirmative action referendum, arguing it would help Asian American small businesses and was the only way universities could deliver diverse classes. High-achieving Asian students will succeed, he said, even if they settle for third or fourth choices in colleges.

He was not surprised, however, that many Asian Americans balked. “The notion that you would look at anything other than pure academic performance is seen by immigrants as antithetical to American values,” he said.

by By Michael Powell and Ilana Marcus, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Voters. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Anybody Got a Request?

When Someone Requests Fleetwood Mac and This Waitress Steals The Show

[ed. Weird and wonderful (and what's with those diners? really out to lunch... lol). Starting around 2:15]