Kelly Bets On Civilization (and More)

Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:

Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?

We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it’s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.

Read carefully, he and I don’t disagree. He’s not scoffing at doomsday predictions, he’s more arguing against people who say that AIs should be banned because they might spread misinformation or gaslight people or whatever.

Still, I think about this argument a lot. I agree he’s right about nuclear power. When it comes out in a few months, I’ll be reviewing a book that makes this same point about institutional review boards: that our fear of a tiny handful of deaths from unethical science has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from delaying ethical and life-saving medical progress. The YIMBY movement makes a similar point about housing: we hoped to prevent harm by subjecting all new construction to a host of different reviews - environmental, cultural, equity-related - and instead we caused vast harm by creating an epidemic of homelessness and forcing the middle classes to spend increasingly unaffordable sums on rent. This pattern typifies the modern age; any attempt to restore our rightful utopian flying-car future will have to start with rejecting it as vigorously as possible.

So how can I object when Aaronson turns the same lens on AI?

First, you are allowed to use Inside View. If Osama bin Laden is starting a supervirus lab, and objects that you shouldn’t shut him down because “in the past, shutting down progress out of exaggerated fear of potential harm has killed far more people than the progress itself ever could”, you are permitted to respond “yes, but you are Osama bin Laden, and this is a supervirus lab.” You don’t have to give every company trying to build the Torment Nexus a free pass just because they can figure out a way to place their work in a reference class which is usually good. All other technologies fail in predictable and limited ways. If a buggy AI exploded, that would be no worse than a buggy airplane or nuclear plant. The concern is that a buggy AI will pretend to work well, bide its time, and plot how to cause maximum damage while undetected. Also it’s smarter than you. Also this might work so well that nobody realizes they’re all buggy until there are millions of them.

But maybe opponents of every technology have some particular story why theirs is a special case. So let me try one more argument, which I think is closer to my true objection.

There’s a concept in finance called Kelly betting. It briefly gained some fame last year as a thing that FTX failed at, before people realized FTX had failed at many more fundamental things. It works like this (warning - I am bad at math and may have gotten some of this wrong): suppose you start with $1000. You’re at a casino with one game: you can, once per day, bet however much you want on a coin flip, double-or-nothing. You’re slightly psychic, so you have a 75% chance of guessing the coin flip right. That means that on average, you’ll increase your money by 50% each time you bet. Clearly this is a great opportunity. But how much do you bet per day?

Tempting but wrong answer: bet all of it each time. After all, on average you gain money each flip - each $1 invested in the coin flip game becomes $1.50. If you bet everything, then after five coin flips you’ll have (on average) $7,500. But if you just bet $1 each time , then (on average), you’ll only have $1,008. So obviously bet as much as possible, right?

But after five coin flips of $1000, there’s an 76% chance that you’ve lost all your money. Increase to 50 coin flips, and there’s a 99.999999….% chance that you’ve lost all your money. So although technically this has the highest “average utility”, all of this is coming from one super-amazing sliver of probability-space where you own more money than exists in the entire world. In every other timeline, you’re broke.

So how much should you bet? $1 is too little. These flips do, on average, increase your money by 50%; it would take forever to get anywhere betting $1 at a time. You want something that’s high enough to increase your wealth quickly, but not so high that it’s devastating and you can’t come back from it on the rare occasions when you lose.

In this case, if I understand the Kelly math right, you should bet half each time. But the lesson I take from this isn’t just the exact math. It’s: even if you know a really good bet, don’t bet everything at once.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex/ACX |  Read more:

Image: Hansueli Krapf/Wikipedia
[ed. See also: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus (Charlie Stross/Charlie's Diary):]

"Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer: I have about thirty novels in print, translated into a dozen languages, I've won a few awards, and I've been around long enough that my wikipedia page is a mess of mangled edits.

And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

Obviously, I'm talking about Elon Musk. (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead). But he's not the only one. There's Peter Thiel (who funds research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. when he's not getting blood transfusions from 18 year olds in hope of living forever). Marc Andreesen of Venture Capitalists Andreesen Horowitz recently published a self-proclaimed "techno-optimist manifesto" promoting the bizarre accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land, among other weirdos, and hyping the current grifter's fantasy of large language models as "artificial intelligence". Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is another. He's another space colonization enthusiast like Elon Musk, but while Musk wants to homestead Mars, Bezos is a fan of Gerard K. O'Neill's 1970s plan to build giant orbital habitat cylinders at the Earth-Moon L5 libration point. And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, only for it to turn out that his ambitious commercial virtual reality environment had no legs.

(That was a deliberate pun.)

It'd be amusing if these guys didn't have a combined net worth somewhere in the region of half a trillion euros and the desire to change the human universe, along with a load of unexamined prejudices and a bunch of half-baked politics they absorbed from the predominantly American SF stories they read in their teens. I grew up reading the same stuff but as I also write the modern version of the same stuff for a living I've spent a lot of time lifting up the rocks in the garden of SF to look at what's squirming underneath.

Science fiction influences everything this century, both our media and our physical environment. Media first: about 30% of the big budget movies coming out of the US film industry these days are science fiction or fantasy blockbusters, a massive shift since the 1970s. Computer games are wall-to-wall fantasy and SF—probably a majority of the field, outside of sports and simulation games. (Written fiction is another matter, and SF/F combined amount to something in the range 5-10% of books sold. But reading novels is a minority recreation this century, having to compete with the other media I just named. The golden age of written fiction was roughly 1850 to 1950, give or take a few decades: I make my living in an ageing field, kind of like being a classical music composer or an 8-bit games programmer today.)

Meanwhile the influence of science fiction on our environment seems to have been gathering pace throughout my entire life. The future is a marketing tool. Back in the early 20th century it was anything associated with speed—recall the fad for streamlining everything from railway locomotives to toasters, or putting fins on cars. Since about 1970 it becme more tightly associated with communication and computers.

For an example of the latter trend: a decade or two ago there was a fad for cellular phones designed to resemble the original Star Trek communicator. The communicator was movie visual shorthand for "a military two-way radio, but make it impossibly small". But it turns out that enough people wanted an impossibly small clamshell telephone that once semiconductor and battery technology got good enough to make one, they made the Motorola Razr a runaway bestseller.

It's becoming increasingly unusual to read a report of a new technology or scientific discovery that doesn't breathlessly use the phrase "it seems like science fiction". The news cycle is currently dominated by hype about artificial intelligence (a gross mis-characterisation of machine learning algorithms and large language models). A couple of years ago it was breathless hype about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies—which turned out to be a financial services bubble that drained a lot of small investors' savings accounts into the pockets of people like convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

It's also driving politics and law. (...)

Now I've shouted as passing clouds for a bit—or dangerous marketing fads based on popular entertainment of decades past—I'd like to talk about something that I personally find much more worrying: a political ideology common among silicon valley billionaires of a certain age—known by the acronym TESCREAL—that is built on top of a shaky set of assumptions about the future of humanity. It comes straight out of an uncritical reading of the bad science fiction of decades past, and it's really dangerous.

TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity." [Read more:]

[ed. And, if you're feeling extra gloomy lately and would love nothing more than immersing yourself in more AI speculation, See also: Nick Bostrom: Will AI lead to tyranny? (Undark); and, Thoughts on responsible scaling policies and regulation (Less Wrong).]

Great Heirloom Transfer

Everyone is talking about the Great Wealth Transfer but what’s already underway is the Great Heirloom Transfer (via)

via: ScarletAstrorum (X/Formerly Twitter)

Images: uncredited

[ed. I just helped a buddy move a heavy old rolltop desk and a few other items last weekend. Not exactly his design scheme, but I think his parents really didn't want them to be sold. My mom used to collect china, how often do you see that pulled out these days? And, where do you store it?]

Minnesota Designs a New State Flag

There are 67 circles, 19 stars, at least six colors, three dates, a bunch of flowers, one French phrase, and between three and seven pine trees, depending who you ask.

As far as flags go, Minnesota’s state flag … has a lot going on. It’s a branding nightmare, critics say.

And then there’s the naked Indian, spear in hand, riding bareback on a horse toward the setting sun, under the gaze of a white farmer plowing his field, his rifle and powderhorn within reach. Some say that’s downright offensive, a diminution and glorification of a history that we now see differently than we did around 1858, when Minnesota and the nation waged war on Native Americans, and when the image was adopted as the state seal. (via: Twin Cities/Pioneer Press)

***

State Emblems Redesign Commission:

Develop and adopt a new design for the official state flag and the official state seal no later than January 1, 2024.

The Commission shall develop and adopt a new design for the official state seal and a new design for the official state flag. The designs must accurately and respectfully reflect Minnesota's shared history, resources, and diverse cultural communities. Symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community or person, regardless of whether real or stylized, may not be included in a design. The Commission may solicit and secure the voluntary service and aid of vexillologists and other persons who have either technical or artistic skill in flag construction and design, or the design of official seals, to assist in the work. The Commission must also solicit public feedback and suggestions to inform its work. The Commission shall certify its adopted designs in a report to the legislature and governor no later than January 1, 2024. The Commission's report must describe the symbols and other meanings incorporated in the design. (State of Minnesota)

[ed. Examples above. All flag design submissions (2,127) can be viewed here.]

Images: Dave Orrick / Pioneer Press; various submissions State of Minnesota

Vexillologists - the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags or, by extension, any interest in flags in general. A person who studies flags is a vexillologist, one who designs flags is a vexillographer, and the art of designing flags is called vexillography. One who is a hobbyist or general admirer of flags is a vexillophile. (Wikipedia).

Clooney's 'Boys In the Boat' Out in December

UW pulling for ripple effect from Clooney’s ‘Boys in the Boat’ film (Seattle Times)

The first time author Daniel James Brown saw the inside of the University of Washington Shell House, he’d sneaked through an unlocked back door with Judy Rantz, the daughter of a crew member he’d later feature in his bestselling book “The Boys in the Boat.” And he felt like he’d just walked into a cathedral.

Here, the eight-oar UW crew team learned the art of rowing and prepared for the 1936 Olympics. Above them, in a second-story loft, legendary boat maker George Pocock built by hand the fastest wooden crew shells in the world — lightweight, expertly designed, lightning-fast.

If the Shell House was like a cathedral, “that space upstairs is the holiest of holiest for me,” Brown said.

The Shell House will play a starring role in the adaptation of “The Boys in the Boat,” directed by George Clooney. The movie, out Dec. 25, tells the story of the underdog UW crew team, which rowed to victory over the elite colleges of the East Coast, then went on to earn Olympic gold for the U.S. in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.

Brown, who was a special guest of Clooney’s for a preview in Los Angeles in August, called it a “feel-good, slightly old-fashioned” movie, just as he had hoped. And “it’s very UW-centric,” he said.

He also hopes the story speaks to the value of public higher education, at a time when some question the value of a college degree. “It is one of the things I care about,” said Brown (who, for the record, went to the University of California, Berkeley, and to UCLA). “Anything that lifts the boat, lifts the tide of higher education, is a good thing.” (...)

Both the book and movie center on student Joe Rantz, who as a teen was abandoned by his father and stepmother and grew up in an unfinished house in Sequim. Rantz eventually moved to Seattle, graduated from Roosevelt High, and used college as a way out of poverty.

He and several other crew members earned engineering degrees at the UW and went on to successful careers at Boeing. The UW was a springboard for opportunity, Brown said — “it’s one of the through lines in the movie.” 

by Katherine Long, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images: Luke Johnson/The Seattle Times; MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, 1986.5.15874.1
[ed. Enjoyed the book, hoping the movie's just as good.]

via: On Baseball

Image: uncredited

America is Going to Need a Lot More Electricians

To cut greenhouse gas emissions on pace with the best available science, the United States must prepare for a monumental increase in electricity use. Burning fossil fuels to heat homes and get around isn’t compatible with keeping the planet at a livable temperature. Appliances that can be powered by clean electricity already exist to meet all of these needs.

The race to “electrify everything” is picking up. President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in August, contains billions of dollars to help Americans electrify their homes, buy electric vehicles, and install solar panels. Meanwhile, cities all over the country, including New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco are requiring that new buildings run only on electricity, after the city of Berkeley, California, pioneered the legislation in 2019.

The problem is, most houses aren’t wired to handle the load from electric heating, cooking, and clothes dryers, along with solar panels and vehicle chargers. Rewiring America, a nonprofit that conducts research and advocacy on electrification, estimates that some 60 to 70 percent of single-family homes will need to upgrade to bigger or more modern electrical panels to accommodate a fully electrified house.

“It’s going to be the electrification worker, the electricians that are going to see a real surge in demand,” said Panama Bartholomy, executive director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a national nonprofit working to get fossil fuels out of homes.

But in the Bay Area, arguably the birthplace of the movement to “electrify everything,” homeowners are struggling to find technicians to upgrade their electrical panels or install electric heat pumps, let alone for everyday repairs. Residential electrical contractors are swamped with calls and struggling to find experienced people to hire. The schools tasked with training the next generation of electricians are tight on funds and short on teachers. It’s a story that’s playing out across the country. And what might be inconvenient today could soon hamstring attempts to cut carbon emissions even as these efforts become more urgent.

“It is hard to imagine tens of millions of households in the U.S. individually undertaking the sort of time consuming, expensive process that I experienced,” wrote Andrew Campbell in a blog post chronicling his experience.

The contractor Campbell ended up working with was Boyes Electric, a small company based in Oakland owned by Borin Reyes.

Reyes, who’s 28, moved to California from Guatemala when he was 16 and got introduced to electrical work in high school. His dad was a general contractor and would take him out in the field during summer break. On one job, there was an electrical subcontractor who needed an extra set of hands, and Borin started working for him from time to time. He liked the work — but more so he liked the money he was making. After graduating from high school, he saw electrical work as a path to moving out of his parents’ house, so he enrolled in a training program at a now-shuttered for-profit technical school in Oakland to get more experience.

After graduating in 2013, Reyes spent several years working for a larger company before starting his own. Today, he loves the job. “You really have to be focused, because of safety,” he said. “You have to be hands-on most of the time and solving problems. That’s one of the things that I like best — solving problems.”

Reyes’ company has always focused on rewiring homes undergoing renovations rather than new construction. But at the beginning of 2022, he added a new specialty when his business partnered with a company called Qmerit, a middleman between electric vehicle dealerships and electricians. Dealerships send new car owners to Qmerit to get help finding qualified technicians to install EV chargers, and Qmerit connects them with local businesses like Boyes Electric.

Electric vehicles make up less than 1 percent of cars on the road, but that’s changing fast as sales soar. The number of electric vehicles registered in the U.S. jumped nearly 43 percent between 2020 and 2021, according to the Department of Energy. Government incentives are sure to give the market another boost: The Inflation Reduction Act offers as much as $7,500 in rebates for new EVs and $4,000 for used EVs. In California, Washington state, and New York, you won’t even be able to buy a new model with an internal combustion engine after 2035. The number of public charging stations is also growing, so EV owners don’t necessarily need to install their own charging equipment at home, though many do. It’s convenient, and can also turn a car into a backup power source when the lights go out.

Before Boyes Electric partnered with QMerit, Reyes was installing around one EV charger every week; now it’s up to about five each week. “That’s huge for a small business,” he said. Reyes wants the company to expand into solar installations, too — just not yet.

Boyes Electric employs 12 technicians, and these days Reyes spends most of his time in the office taking calls and coordinating jobs. His electricians are usually booked up about three weeks to a month out.

“Customers are literally looking for electricians every single day,” he said. “We’re not taking emergency calls anymore because we don’t have the manpower. All of our current technicians are out on the field, they’re busy trying to get jobs done.”

Reyes would like to hire more electricians, but he said there just aren’t any experienced people looking for work; they’re already hired. “It is a problem finding people right now,” he said. “Most of the electrical companies, you can ask around, all of them are busy.”

In 2021, the website Angi, which helps homeowners find services, surveyed 2,400 contractors across different trades. Half reported that they couldn’t fill open positions, and 68 percent said it was a struggle to hire skilled workers. In a recent survey of 661 building contractors by the Associated General Contractors of America, 72 percent reported having open, salaried positions. The number one reason for all the openings: “Available candidates are not qualified to work in the industry.”

In the past, Reyes recruited workers out of high school and trained them up. But he’s reluctant to do it again. It costs his technicians time, it costs him money, and there’s no guarantee that the people he invests in will stick around because the job market is so competitive.

The workforce is also aging. Reyes said he knows of a few electricians getting ready for retirement who would like to hand over the business to their kids, but they just aren’t interested. The way he sees it, younger people are getting lured into the tech industry with the promise of big salaries and just aren’t as interested in getting dirty underneath houses.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that about 21 percent of electricians will have hit retirement age in the next 10 years. The agency estimates that demand for electricians will grow by 7 percent over the same span and that between retirements and new demand, there will be nearly 80,000 job openings in the field every year. That estimate doesn’t account for all the incentives — rebates for solar panels, electrical panels, heat pumps, stoves, cars, and clothes dryers — contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, nor does it account for the possibility that demand might soar if local governments keep pushing to electrify buildings.

Several contractors and labor experts, when asked why electricians are so hard to find, pointed to the widespread belief that the main path to adulthood runs through a four-year university, and the related decline of vocational education in high schools. According to Pew Research, 39 percent of millennials earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 29 percent of Gen Xers and 24 to 25 percent of boomers.

Even for those drawn to a career in the trades, there’s another obstacle: The technical schools built to train them are short of money and people, too.

by Emily Pontecorvo, Grist | Read more:
Image: Borin Reyes holds an electric vehicle charger. Brett Marsh/Grist
[ed. Trades are where it's at (and well compensated).]

Farewell to George Santos, the Perfect MAGA Republican

Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.

That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness. (...)

Much of the MAGAverse loved it. Greene became a loyal friend. As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”

Adam Serwer famously wrote that, when it comes to Trump, “the cruelty is the point,” but maybe the criminality is as well. Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions. That’s a big part of the reason his multiple indictments appeared to only solidify his Republican support. Sure, some of his backers probably identified with his epic persecution complex, but that alone doesn’t explain the worshipful enthusiasm among some of his fans for his mug shot. (“He looks hard,” gushed the Fox News host Jesse Watters.) Rather, many people on the right thrill to displays of impunity from people who share their politics. 

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson
[ed. Not being hip enough myself I had to look up the term Based - "different but bold, agreeable but not popular". Ha. Haha. Hahahaha... yep, I'd guess that's one way of putting it. How about lying liar but shameless? Scamming grifter but good dresser? See also: House Expels George Santos From Congress in Historic Vote (NYT).]

DAS: Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. [ed. letter here.]

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter. (...)

There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes. Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance.

In 2020, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement data stolen from agencies around the US. A WIRED review of the files unearths extraordinary detail regarding the processes and justifications that agencies use to monitor the call records of not only criminal suspects, but of their spouses, children, parents, and friends. (...)

First disclosed by The New York Times in September 2013 as Hemisphere, the DAS program—renamed in 2013—has since flown largely under the radar. Internal records concerning the program’s secrecy that were obtained by the newspaper at the time show that law enforcement had long been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”

Following the Times’ story, former US president Barack Obama reportedly suspended funding for the Hemisphere program in 2013. And while discretionary funding was withheld over the following three years, a White House memo obtained by WIRED shows that individual law enforcement organizations across the US were permitted to continue contracting with AT&T directly in order to maintain access to its data-mining service. Funding resumed under former president Donald Trump but was halted again in 2021, according to the White House memo. Last year, under president Joe Biden, the funding resumed once more, the memo says. (...)

The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time. Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018. (...)

Orders targeting a nexus of individuals are sometimes called “community of interest” subpoenas, a phrase that among privacy advocates is synonymous with dragnet surveillance.

“The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope,” Wyden’s letter to Garland says.

The White House has provided at least $6.1 million in discretionary funding to the DAS program since 2013, according to a two-page memo authored last year by White House officials. An internal HIDTA “participant guide” reviewed by WIRED shows that HIDTA funding exceeded $280 million in 2020 alone. It remains unclear how much HIDTA funding is spent to support AT&T’s vast collection of American call records. 

It is not currently known how far back the call records accessible under DAS go. A slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that up to 10 years’ worth of records can be queried under the program, a statistic that contrasts with other internal documents that claimed AT&T could reach decades into the past. AT&T’s competitors, meanwhile, typically retain call records for no more than two years. (The necessity for phone companies to track call records for extended periods of time has gradually decreased with the disappearance of long-distance charges.)

The DAS Program echoes multiple dragnet surveillance programs dating back decades, including a Drug Enforcement Agency program launched in 1992 that forced phone companies to surrender records of virtually all calls going to and from over 100 other countries; the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program, which the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals deemed illegal in 2014; and the Call Details Records program, which suffered from “technical irregularities” leading the NSA to collect millions of calls it was “not authorized to receive.”

Unlike these past programs, which were subject to congressional oversight, DAS is not. A senior Wyden aide tells WIRED the program takes advantage of numerous “loopholes” in federal privacy law. The fact that it’s effectively run out of the White House, for example, means it is exempt from rules requiring assessments of its privacy impacts. The White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, reducing the public’s overall ability to shed light on the program.

by Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Panithan Pholpanichrassamee 

[ed. A massive government spying program that takes total surveillence to a whole new level (trillions of records) allowing anyone in law enforcement to track you, your location, your calls, everyone in your phone's contact list, everyone in their contact list, and so on and so on. Who would have thought? See also: US Senator calls for the public release of AT&T ‘Hemisphere’ surveillance records (Endgadget); and, do read Senator Wyden's entire letter at the end of the article (or here - pdf).

"AT&T has kept and queries as part of the Hemisphere Project call records going back to 1987, with 4 billion new records being added every day. That slide deck was apparently disclosed by a local law enforcement agency in response to a public information request and was published by the New York Times in 2013. 

The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope. One law enforcement official described the Hemisphere Project as “AT&T's Super Search Engine” and ... "Google on Steroids,” according to emails released by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Freedom of Information Act."

Isabel Oliver Cuevas — Good Meeting (from the series “The Woman”) [acrylic on canvas, 1970-1973]

via:

Rosaire Appel, Untitled
via:

Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite (NYT)

Image: via

The Essential Larry McMurtry

“Texas has produced no major writers or major books,” wrote Larry Jeff McMurtry, rather despairingly, in 2011. He was being modest. McMurtry, who died in 2021 at 84, was himself an undisputed titan of the Lone Star State and a wildly prolific one at that. During his lifetime, McMurtry published 33 novels and a baker’s dozen of memoirs, essays and assorted balooey. McMurtry’s best-known works weren’t just major — they became major motion pictures like “Hud” (adapted from “Horseman, Pass By”), “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment.” And the rest were only as minor as the descending chords in a bluegrass ballad, idiosyncratic variations on a warm and wistful twang. You don’t need to know all the songs by heart for the melodies to linger.

McMurtry’s life, like his bulging bibliography, is tough to get one’s arms around. (To paraphrase a regional cliché, everything is bigger in a McMurtry novel — especially the page count.) Raised on the outskirts of tiny Archer City, Texas, to a cattle-ranching family and educated in the California hills of Berkeley alongside Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions. He was a known crank and an infamous flirt; a small-town bohemian; an Oscar winner (for adapting “Brokeback Mountain”) and a pathological antiquarian.

But, through it all, he was a writer — averaging between five and 10 pages a day of something, every morning, for decades. And though he was an unlikely exemplar of his home state in appearance — teetotaling, bespectacled, with a mild phobia of horses — Larry McMurtry was, in fact, a peerless interlocutor of Texas, bridging the gap between its rural past and its noisy, urban present. And despite dalliances on the West Coast (with Cybill Shepherd and Diane Keaton, among others) and expensive habits (rooms at the Chateau Marmont, caviar at Petrossian), he always returned, somewhat grudgingly, to his birthplace. By refusing to let Texas define him, he helped redefine it.

For someone with such a keen and penetrating voice, he sure loved to listen. In a McMurtry book, everyone is interesting — even tertiary characters are a riot of quirk and detail. And, most notably for a white male writer of a certain age, McMurtry was fascinated by women, not in an objectifying manner, but rather with a dogged, almost courtly interest in the particulars of their lives.

Where most authors would align themselves with the swashbuckling rangers of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, the most revealing character in the extended McMurtryverse might be the least likely: Patsy Carpenter, the winsome protagonist of the novel “Moving On,” who spends her happiest hours curled up in a rickety Ford with a melted Hershey’s bar and a box of old paperbacks. “Sometimes she ate casually and read avidly — other times she read casually and ate avidly,” he wrote of her and likely of himself, too. 

by Andy Greenwald, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Diana Walker/Getty Images via

[ed. Had to look up pathological antiquarian. See also: A Literary Hero, Keeping the Last Bookshop Alive (NYT).]

“Lonesome Dove” (1985), a.k.a. Your Dad’s Favorite Novel, is the book McMurtry avoided writing for the first half of his life — and spent the second half of his life relitigating. Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (released the year before), the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove” is a masterpiece of missed intentions.

“One of McMurtry’s aims in ‘Lonesome Dove’ was to pierce the romantic image of the trail-riding cowboy,” Tracy Daugherty writes in his recent biography. And the novel does its level best: As two retired Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, their quixotic caravan encounters the worst the world has to offer. The young and innocent die terrible deaths; the open country, far from romantic, is arid and hostile. “It’s mostly bones we’re riding over anyway,” Gus thinks, in a cheerful attempt to keep despair at bay.

And yet the book — which began life as a proposed screenplay that would bring James Stewart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne back for one last rodeo — is undeniable, awash in wit and wonder. With a canvas close to 1,000 pages, painted like a prairie sunset across a proscenium of sky, “Lonesome Dove” remains one of the best and happiest reading experiences of my life. To McMurtry’s chagrin, few myths were busted — in fact, quite the opposite. Multiple generations have now replaced their memories of the Alamo with those of the Hat Creek Cattle Company: something else rather foolish, noble and fleeting that’s nonetheless impossible to forget."

Tiger's Golf Equipment - 2023 Hero World Challenge

Tiger Woods' golf equipment at the 2023 Hero World Challenge (Golfweek)

Image: Adam Schupak/Golfweek
[ed. Golf nerd alert. My son has these clubs (not the TW version), and they're great. Wedge is rusted purposely for grabby-ness. Apparently an M grind of some sort (see below for examples of various grind options):]

• L Grind: lowest bounce option with a lot of versatility; the L Grind is best for the better player looking for more control around the greens.
• F Grind: an all-purpose wedge used for more full swing shots; we like this one in a pitching wedge or gap wedge loft; some may even find this to be versatile for a sand wedge.
• M Grind: to remember what M grind stands for, we always think about the “most” versatile; for golfers that like to manipulate the clubface, the M Grind is a great option in a variety of lofts.
• S Grind: the S Grind is a narrower-looking wedge designed for golfers that like to hit square face shots; if you don’t play with the clubhead all that much, the S Grind is a good choice.
• D Grind: the D Grind is a high bounce wedge that works well for golfers that have a steeper swing and need more bounce to get through the turf.
• K Grind: Titleist calls the K Grind the ultimate bunker club as it has the highest bounce and is built for those that prefer playing shots with a bit more forgiveness in softer turf conditions.

Not Just Electricity — Bitcoin Mines Burn Through a Lot of Water, Too

It’s not just electricity — Bitcoin mines burn through a lot of water, too (The Verge)

Report: Justine Calma. Image: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Bitcoin mines aren’t just energy-hungry, it turns out they’re thirsty, too. The water consumption tied to a single Bitcoin transaction, on average, could be enough to fill a small backyard pool, according to a new analysis. Bitcoin mines are essentially big data centers, which have become notorious for how much electricity and water they use. (...)

All in all... cryptocurrency mining used about 1,600 gigaliters of water in 2021 when the price of Bitcoin peaked at over $65,000. That comes out to a small swimming pool’s worth of water (16,000 liters), on average, for each transaction. It’s about 6.2 million times more water than a credit card swipe."

There’s another way to get the cryptocurrency to use a fraction of the water and electricity it eats up now and slash greenhouse gas emissions: get rid of the mining process altogether and find a new way to validate transactions. That’s what the next biggest cryptocurrency network, Ethereum, accomplished last year. (Ethereum just completed The Merge — here’s how much energy it’s saving):

"Ethereum’s electricity use is expected to drop by a whopping 99.988 percent post-Merge, according to the analysis published today by research company Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI). The network was previously using about 23 million megawatt-hours per year, CCRI estimates."

The Moral Injury of Having Your Work Enshittified

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing. (...)

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references. (...)

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh.

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too.

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years.

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits.

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world.

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. (...)

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design.

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own.

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products.

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket.

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Some link modifications to enhance readability. See also: Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder (Intelligencer). And, from the Today in Tabs/Rusty Foster essay (Defective Accelerationism) on Sam Altman, mentioned above:]

"Imagine I awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find myself transformed in my bed into someone with an idea for how, if a global mega-corporation gave me tens of billions of dollars, and if I could collect a thousand of the smartest scientists, engineers, and coders who have ever lived, and if I had access to quantities of energy and computing power that would stretch the limits of what is technically imaginable in the next decade, I could build a machine that would relentlessly turn every atom of matter in the universe into paper clips. I feel like I would… simply not do that. Should I devote a huge amount of expense and effort to accomplish something objectively terrible? It’s not even a tough call for me, a person with what I flatter myself is a normal working brain.

But however implausible it is, imagine that instead of thinking “lol no?” someone had that idea and thought “lol, I better build this machine so that rather than paper clips, it will turn every atom of the universe into something positive for humanity, like ice cream.” This is incredibly stupid and abstrusely metaphysical, but also a pretty accurate overview of today’s business news. Yes, regrettably, I’m talking about OpenAI."

Perfectly Designed Climate Report Cover

Cover to the just-released: United Nations Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report 2023 (full report here).

Amazing that an official UN climate report has this much biting personality. You can just sense the no-fucks-givenness of the people who put this together. After all:

Humanity is breaking all the wrong records when it comes to climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high in 2022. In September 2023, global average temperatures were 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels. When this year is over, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, it is almost certain to be the warmest year on record.

The 2023 edition of the Emissions Gap Report tells us that the world must change track, or we will be saying the same thing next year — and the year after, and the year after, like a broken record. The report finds that fully implementing and continuing mitigation efforts of unconditional nationally determined contributions (NDCs) made under the Paris Agreement for 2030 would put the world on course for limiting temperature rise to 2.9°C this century. Fully implementing conditional NDCs would lower this to 2.5°C. Given the intense climate impacts we are already seeing, neither outcome is desirable.

by Jason Kottke, Kottke.org | Read more:
Image/Cover Design: Beverley McDonald

Growing Pains

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a biographical gospel about the childhood of Jesus, believed to date at the latest to the second century.

Scholars generally agree on a date in the mid-to-late-2nd century AD. There are two 2nd-century documents, the Epistula Apostolorum and Irenaeus' Adversus haereses, that refer to a story of Jesus's tutor telling him, "Say alpha," and Jesus replied, "First tell me what is beta, and I can tell you what alpha is." 

The text describes the life of the child Jesus from the ages of five to twelve, with fanciful, and sometimes malevolent, supernatural events. He is presented as a precocious child who starts his education early. The stories cover how the young Incarnation of God matures and learns to use his powers for good and how those around him first respond in fear and later with admiration. One of the episodes involves Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life, an act also attributed to Jesus in Quran 5:110, and in a medieval Jewish work known as Toledot Yeshu, although Jesus's age at the time of the event is not specified in either account. In another episode, a child disperses water that Jesus has collected. Jesus kills this first child, when at age one he curses a boy, which causes the child's body to wither into a corpse. Later, Jesus kills another child via curse when the child apparently accidentally bumps into Jesus, throws a stone at Jesus, or punches Jesus (depending on the translation).

When Joseph and Mary's neighbors complain, Jesus miraculously strikes them blind. Jesus then starts receiving lessons, but tries to teach the teacher, instead, upsetting the teacher who suspects supernatural origins. Jesus is amused by this suspicion, which he confirms, and revokes all his earlier apparent cruelty. Subsequently, he resurrects a friend who is killed when he falls from a roof, and heals another who cuts his foot with an axe.

After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them instead. Another set of miracles is mentioned, in which Jesus heals his brother, who is bitten by a snake, and two others, who have died from different causes. Finally, the text recounts the episode in Luke in which Jesus, aged 12, teaches in the temple.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Images: Christ among the Doctors, c. 1560, by Paolo Veronese, a depiction of the Finding in the Temple; Jesus raises the clay birds of his playmates to life - Unknown artist (more)
[ed. The things you learn every day. Given the bible's overall and some would say excrutiating detail, it seems odd that certain events, like the early life of Jesus, would be left inexplicably vague. Another example would be everything Jesus said and did after the Resurrection.]

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.

Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother. The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman (and stole his identity). Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who – consistently – offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.

The priest tells them:

It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.

After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

Tolerance is also considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished expectations forgiveness does.

The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”

Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.

The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.

Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”

The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”

And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously promote and defend their outgroups, the outer the better.

What is going on here? (...)

The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. (...)

VII.

Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this.

“It’s not that we’re, like, against America per se. It’s just that…well, did you know Europe has much better health care than we do? And much lower crime rates? I mean, come on, how did they get so awesome? And we’re just sitting here, can’t even get the gay marriage thing sorted out, seriously, what’s wrong with a country that can’t…sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, America. They’re okay. Cesar Chavez was really neat. So were some other people outside the mainstream who became famous precisely by criticizing majority society. That’s sort of like America being great, in that I think the parts of it that point out how bad the rest of it are often make excellent points. Vote for me!”

(sorry, I make fun of you because I love you) (...)

My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.

That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory. (...) 

Spending your entire life insulting the other tribe and talking about how terrible they are makes you look, well, tribalistic. It is definitely not high class. So when members of the Blue Tribe decide to dedicate their entire life to yelling about how terrible the Red Tribe is, they make sure that instead of saying “the Red Tribe”, they say “America”, or “white people”, or “straight white men”. That way it’s humble self-criticism. They are so interested in justice that they are willing to critique their own beloved side, much as it pains them to do so. We know they are not exaggerating, because one might exaggerate the flaws of an enemy, but that anyone would exaggerate their own flaws fails the criterion of embarrassment.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Dated, but same as it ever was (actually, worse). Wonder how this relates to pricing of carbon credits, farm subsidies, etc. re: utility vs. value points.]