Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Fusion Voting: The Case For More Parties
A path beyond our broken two-party system.
The way forward, I argue in the second part, is to introduce more parties and break the two-party doom loop, specifically by reviving fusion voting: an electoral system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for a public office. I say “revive” because fusion voting was once common in U.S. politics, before it was banned in the early twentieth century by the dominant parties. Though the state-by-state specifics varied, the broad motivation was simple: they didn’t like all the added competition fusion enabled.
Part 1: It’s the Party System, Stupid
The right prescription to our ailing democracy depends on the right diagnosis, so it is important to get the story right about how we got to this moment.
The most common view is a classic decline-and-fall narrative. On this account, there was once a time when American democracy worked, before partisan polarization messed it all up. Moderates dominated; partisans disagreed, but they worked out differences in a spirit of constructive bipartisanship and remained close to the political center. This golden age allegedly peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, and maybe even continued through the 1980s—but then things all went downhill starting in the 1990s with new confrontational politics pioneered by Newt Gingrich, the archetypical villain of this story. The tone in politics turned nasty and dysfunctional; cable news and talk radio, and then social media, destroyed everything. Most of the good, reasonable, compromise-minded politicians either left politics or got primaried by extremists.
The right prescription to our ailing democracy depends on the right diagnosis, so it is important to get the story right about how we got to this moment.
The most common view is a classic decline-and-fall narrative. On this account, there was once a time when American democracy worked, before partisan polarization messed it all up. Moderates dominated; partisans disagreed, but they worked out differences in a spirit of constructive bipartisanship and remained close to the political center. This golden age allegedly peaked in the 1950s or early 1960s, and maybe even continued through the 1980s—but then things all went downhill starting in the 1990s with new confrontational politics pioneered by Newt Gingrich, the archetypical villain of this story. The tone in politics turned nasty and dysfunctional; cable news and talk radio, and then social media, destroyed everything. Most of the good, reasonable, compromise-minded politicians either left politics or got primaried by extremists.
This explanation is a good first approximation of what has gone wrong, and I have told versions of it in the past. But it oversimplifies in significant ways—and because it oversimplifies, it invites the wrong solution. If we want to fix things, this story suggests, we have to re-empower the “exhausted majority” in the middle—the mass of voters who just want stuff to get done, unlike the ideologues and extremists of left and right. In other words, we need to force parties to be more responsive to the “median voter.”
Behind this metaphor of the “middle” lie several assumptions. One is that voters have consistent ideological preferences—formed independently of political parties—that can be specified on a single axis running from the extreme left to the extreme right. Another is that voters decide who to vote for by accurately selecting the party “closest” to them on this ideological spectrum—and that parties, too, can be classified in this one-dimensional way. Still another is that there really is a sizable group of voters in the political center.
When we talk in these terms, we are applying what political scientists call the “median voter theory” to American elections. And it’s little surprise that we do so. As Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, this model has been the “master theory” of U.S. politics for half a century, at least among political scientists. Partly (but not only) for that reason, it is the analytical water in which much political analysis now swims. (...)
What median voter theorists had interpreted as two-party convergence along a single axis was actually the result of a deeper, multidimensional process. Both parties had always contained multitudes—a mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives of many types—and they competed with each other almost everywhere throughout the postwar era. We really had something like a hidden four-party system, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. This factional diversity produced system-wide moderation: holding together the interests of multiple, overlapping groups prevented either of the two parties from swinging into extreme partisanship.
But this arrangement came under serious strain in the 1990s. As liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats began disappearing from Congress, U.S. politics became much more of a nonoverlapping two-party system. The result, as we all know now, has been disastrously divisive. The Democratic and Republican parties began to diverge, staking out increasingly distinct visions of American identity drawn from increasingly separated cultural and geographical bases.
Influential political analysts and reformers should have taken this divergence to mean that the median voter theory is wrong. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. On the contrary, they have offered endless rationalizations for the gap between prediction and reality, and as a result median voter theory still gets prominent intellectual billing among columnists and mugwumps, who blame parties and partisanship for “distorting” politics. In doubling down on the one-dimensional “pulling apart” story, these commentators miss the real reason for the apparent disappearance of the political middle: the collapse of a de facto four-party system into a two-party system.
What caused this collapse? It started in the late 1960s with the rising salience of “social” issues around race, gender, and religion and the gradual disappearance of an older world of local party organizing. During the 1970s parties had only thin national networks—in which candidates could act relatively independently—but by the 1980s, the national apparatuses had grown financially stable and increasingly relied on consultants, ad makers, and ad buyers to shape their messages and candidates. Parties were thus transformed from local operations rooted in communities across the country into distant, national fundraising juggernauts helmed by a professional political class. Today they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each year—most of which goes straight to advertising and direct marketing.
Meanwhile, single-issue advocacy groups with strong policy views and financial backing began to proliferate and press their demands in Washington, and party leaders learned to arbitrage among them, shaping new coalitions by accumulating new stakes into politics. Business organizations became especially dominant. Starting in the 1990s, as politics became thoroughly nationalized around social and cultural issues, the country saw significant internal migration: Democrats abandoned rural and exurban areas, and Republicans abandoned urban areas. This geographic sorting in turn led to shrinking partisan competition in many areas—and the disappearance of party organizations along with it. After all, in a system of winner-take-all elections, why invest in places where support is below 40 percent? This geographic sorting atop single-winner districts was the central mechanism that drove the collapse of the de facto four-party system into only two parties.
In short, the two parties grew “hollow,” in the apt phrasing of Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld: they have come to be floating presences disconnected from most citizens, run by pollsters and messaging gurus. As a result, more and more citizens have become frustrated bystanders in national politics, and a growing share of citizens have rejected partisan conflict entirely. In some cases the major parties have responded by trying to fit more issues and groups in their coalitions, but mostly they have taken to demonizing the other side. You might not feel inspired by us, party leaders effectively tell voters, but they are terrible for the issues you care most about—abortion, as the Democrats emphasized, or religious “freedom,” according to the GOP.
The cumulative effect of these changes has been disastrous. Partisan conflict is a blasted terrain, but voters who don’t like it have nowhere to go. An overwhelming messaging machinery tells voters that even if they don’t like their party, the other side winning would be far worse—and that losing, therefore, is unacceptable. It is under these conditions—high partisan division, low system legitimacy, high citizen disaffection—that democracies typically crumble.
If this is so, why aren’t the critics of partisanship right? Their mistake is to see partisan polarization as the root cause of these ills. In fact, it is just a symptom of a significantly diminished partisan landscape. In modern representative democracies, partisan identity is not a distortion of some pre-partisan reality, and citizens are not the idealized, independent actors of rational choice models. On the contrary, study after study has shown that the vast majority of voters are partisans first: they derive their policy positions from the party they identify with, not the other way around. The more informed and engaged voters are, the more they know exactly what they should think as loyal partisans. The cleverer they are, the more they can reinterpret any fact pattern to explain why their party is right and the other party is wrong. More and better information—often proposed as a remedy to polarization—actually reinforces it.
To be a Democrat or a Republican (or a member of any party) means being part of a team, and when you see yourself as part of a team, you tend to be loyal to it. All of our collective identities—whether religious, ethnic, regional, or cultural—operate this way. We defend our teams when they are attacked, cheerlead when they succeed, and subscribe to the collective values that they promote. We look to our fellow group members to see what we should think about events in the world and update our views accordingly. We tend to self-segregate into the teams we want to be a part of—and when we don’t see a team we want to be a part of, we sit things out. (...)
In response to this state of affairs, many have proposed that we combat hyperpartisanship, perhaps by doing away with political parties entirely. Mickey Edwards, for example—a former Republican member of Congress—has argued that we should just view ourselves as Americans, not as members of a political team. Antipartisanship is the guiding principle behind No Labels, the organization Edwards cofounded that (as its name suggests) advocates for eschewing partisan labels.
But even “no label” is still a label; there is simply no escaping labels in politics. Moreover, there is little evidence that voters disillusioned with the two major parties are united in holding more or less the same centrist views. Most self-described “independents” are closet partisans, voting reliably for one party. (Many hold views even more extreme than partisans; they dislike parties because they see them as too compromise-oriented.) Similarly, “moderate” is the default category for people who don’t identify as liberal or conservative—which doesn’t mean that their views land in the metaphorical “middle” of the two camps. These two groups—self-identified independents and moderates—overlap somewhat, but the overlap is much smaller than critics of partisanship suggest. More than anything else, what holds them together is a sense that the system is broken.
Third Parties That Don’t Spoil
It’s not hard to understand why third parties fail in our current party system: they are plagued by the “wasted” or “spoiler” vote problem. Voting for a minor-party candidate means voting for a candidate who simply cannot win, and in a close election, voting for a minor-party candidate could mean helping the candidate you least prefer. These facts make our third parties weak. Ambitious political actors channel all their energy into the major parties, while existing third parties attract only fringe candidates and donors.
So far, this is just like a typical ballot (at least in a place where third parties are active). But imagine there’s a fifth, minor party in the mix, the Common Sense Party, with a base of moderates attracted to bipartisanship, civility, and the rule of law, and they decide to “fuse” with the Democrats for this race by cross-nominating the same candidate, Smith. For example, they might message to their base this way:
We have evaluated the two major-party congressional candidates on their commitment to our values, and we’re nominating Smith. She’s a Democrat, and we disagree with the Democrats about many things, but on the values we care about, she’s far and away best candidate in this race. If you agree these values are important, we urge you to vote for her under the Common Sense Party label. It counts the same as a vote on a major party line, but it lets her know that these values matter to you.Election Day rolls around, and even though Smith gets fewer votes from Democrats than Jones does from Republicans, her support on the Common Sense line propels her to a narrow victory. The Common Sense Party can proudly claim to have produced the margin of victory. Smith will be most attentive to her own party, but she won’t ignore Common Sense voters—and Republicans will be forced to run a more competitive candidate. In this scenario, supporters of the minor “fusion” party do not waste their votes (as supporters of the Green and Libertarian parties do). Instead, citizens vote for the candidate they prefer under the party label closest to their values.
by Lee Drutman, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. A number of responses (each well worth a read). Here are a few:
- Sign Me Up! (Our two-party system has destroyed our civic health.)
- Beyond Elections (The single-minded focus on voting is part of the problem.
- Forget Fusion, Look to Alaska! (Open primaries and ranked choice are better paths forward.
Monday, October 7, 2024
The Saga of Seattle’s Empty Tiny Homes
It was probably inevitable that the homelessness crisis would find its way back to the Hope Factory.
It’s known around Sodo and the Duwamish industrial district as the place where they make the tiny homes. More than 500 of them all told, hammered together by volunteers and sent out into the region as colorful, 100-square-foot missionaries, to “get people up off the ground.”
This past week though, homelessness came in. A woman living on the Sodo streets snuck into the factory’s back storage lot, where they keep a “show home,” complete with a made bed. She locked herself in and wouldn’t answer the door.
It’s known around Sodo and the Duwamish industrial district as the place where they make the tiny homes. More than 500 of them all told, hammered together by volunteers and sent out into the region as colorful, 100-square-foot missionaries, to “get people up off the ground.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Barb Oliver, who runs the factory for Sound Foundations NW. “Here I’m making shelter for the homeless, I’ve got a couple hundred idle, unused homes sitting in storage. And now people are breaking in to get a night’s sleep.”
It’s an absurd situation, if you stop to think about it — which nobody is.
The number of never-used tiny homes sitting in three storage lots in Sodo now tops 250. As I wrote nearly two years ago, when there were 71 in storage, some are “so fresh they still have that new-house smell.”
They’re lined up in rows next to the BNSF rail corridor, waiting to be put into service by a city, or a church, or anybody who needs stopgap emergency shelter to help get people off the streets.
Why haven’t they been? No one has a straight answer to that.
Some say it’s bureaucratic feuding, or clashing “fiefdoms.” Others say the 9-by-12-foot shelters aren’t dignified enough; they’re “shacks” in “shantytowns.” Or bare land is too hard to find, or money’s too scarce, or community support is too weak.
I’ve been told that the problem with tiny homes is that people like them too much. They stay in them too long, so the little huts aren’t as “efficient” as other types of emergency shelters which have higher turnover.
One social services official told me once he opposes them because he fears they’re not temporary — that Seattle over time will conclude they’re “good enough” to serve as permanent housing for a stuck underclass. They’ll be forever Hoovervilles.
I don’t know — all I know is that if you go out to people living in abject squalor in parks or greenbelts and try to get them to come inside, they’ll do it for a tiny home.
And a study this year by Portland State University found that tiny homes are three times more effective than conventional shelters at transitioning people into permanent housing.
I also know that these 250 shelters sitting in storage are available immediately for free. It costs to send utilities to a site, and it costs a lot for ongoing management of a village with counseling, food, a shower trailer and so on. But it costs a lot to manage any homeless recovery facility. Here, the actual shelters have already been built.
They’re just sitting there. And we won’t use them. (...)
On a recent day, volunteers from the Chief Seattle Club tilted up the walls of the factory’s 549th tiny home. Most of the $2.3 million cost for all those homes came from private donations.
The volunteers have a tradition of writing messages inside the walls — “you’re gonna be OK,” or “we’re in your corner,” or “this is now YOUR home.” The messages get covered with wallboard and so won’t ever be seen. The idea is: They’ll be felt.
Except all that volunteer love is lately heading straight to storage.
At one storage lot, a line of RVs with a few tents butts up right outside.
“I think this is the most depressing place in all of Seattle,” Oliver told me. “I’ve got beautiful new shelters here locked behind a fence, with people outside the fence sleeping on the ground.”
All of this is coming to a tipping point. It has obviously occurred to the Hope Factory folks that their mission may be becoming hopeless — that they might have to stop. They can’t keep pumping out fresh tiny homes for nobody. (...)
But the volunteers keep coming. Every day for the next three months is booked solid with teams eager to build.
It’s a maddening Seattle mix of civic spirit and compassion, lost in a fog of dysfunction.
It’s an absurd situation, if you stop to think about it — which nobody is.
The number of never-used tiny homes sitting in three storage lots in Sodo now tops 250. As I wrote nearly two years ago, when there were 71 in storage, some are “so fresh they still have that new-house smell.”
They’re lined up in rows next to the BNSF rail corridor, waiting to be put into service by a city, or a church, or anybody who needs stopgap emergency shelter to help get people off the streets.
Why haven’t they been? No one has a straight answer to that.
Some say it’s bureaucratic feuding, or clashing “fiefdoms.” Others say the 9-by-12-foot shelters aren’t dignified enough; they’re “shacks” in “shantytowns.” Or bare land is too hard to find, or money’s too scarce, or community support is too weak.
I’ve been told that the problem with tiny homes is that people like them too much. They stay in them too long, so the little huts aren’t as “efficient” as other types of emergency shelters which have higher turnover.
One social services official told me once he opposes them because he fears they’re not temporary — that Seattle over time will conclude they’re “good enough” to serve as permanent housing for a stuck underclass. They’ll be forever Hoovervilles.
I don’t know — all I know is that if you go out to people living in abject squalor in parks or greenbelts and try to get them to come inside, they’ll do it for a tiny home.
And a study this year by Portland State University found that tiny homes are three times more effective than conventional shelters at transitioning people into permanent housing.
I also know that these 250 shelters sitting in storage are available immediately for free. It costs to send utilities to a site, and it costs a lot for ongoing management of a village with counseling, food, a shower trailer and so on. But it costs a lot to manage any homeless recovery facility. Here, the actual shelters have already been built.
They’re just sitting there. And we won’t use them. (...)
On a recent day, volunteers from the Chief Seattle Club tilted up the walls of the factory’s 549th tiny home. Most of the $2.3 million cost for all those homes came from private donations.
The volunteers have a tradition of writing messages inside the walls — “you’re gonna be OK,” or “we’re in your corner,” or “this is now YOUR home.” The messages get covered with wallboard and so won’t ever be seen. The idea is: They’ll be felt.
Except all that volunteer love is lately heading straight to storage.
At one storage lot, a line of RVs with a few tents butts up right outside.
“I think this is the most depressing place in all of Seattle,” Oliver told me. “I’ve got beautiful new shelters here locked behind a fence, with people outside the fence sleeping on the ground.”
All of this is coming to a tipping point. It has obviously occurred to the Hope Factory folks that their mission may be becoming hopeless — that they might have to stop. They can’t keep pumping out fresh tiny homes for nobody. (...)
But the volunteers keep coming. Every day for the next three months is booked solid with teams eager to build.
It’s a maddening Seattle mix of civic spirit and compassion, lost in a fog of dysfunction.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
On Weaponizing Antisemitism Against Pro-Palestine Protests
The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient prejudice that in the context of a Middle East crisis is staging a resurgence. No, they describe a gigantic wave of antisemitism that has been sweeping across the globe since October 7. Its epicenter is on American college campuses, just as the epicenter of the anti–Vietnam War movement was on college campuses sixty years ago.
The New York Times has published a number of articles making the analogy between the current antiwar demonstrations and the earlier ones. The comparison is fair enough, since the United States has not seen protests on this scale since the Vietnam War. Students are well aware of this. In the 1960s, an American army was engaged in war in Southeast Asia; today, Israel is destroying Gaza with weapons supplied by the United States.
Like their predecessors, today’s students understand that their involvement is crucial to stopping the massacre, that their demonstrations are not mere gestures of solidarity but an uprising organically linked to the Palestinian resistance. In both cases, these movements have been violently denounced, and even repressed. During the Vietnam War, students who occupied college campuses and burned the American flag were painted as being enemies of the free world, communists, and totalitarians. Today they would be branded as antisemites.
The accusation is as serious as it is false. When I join pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Cornell University campus, I see many Jewish students, often waving signs of endorsement from their organizations. At the rallies, Jewish students and professors—sometimes also Israeli students—express their anger at the massacre in Gaza. United in their demand for justice and equality, Jews and Palestinians display brotherly feelings toward each other.
When I go home and turn on the TV, I am immediately confronted, flipping through the main U.S. and European channels, with a talk show on the antisemitism of the antiwar movement. Mike Johnson, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appears on every channel. Surrounded by policemen and people holding Israeli flags—not one of them young enough to be a student— Johnson positions himself next to the pro-Palestinian encampment at New York’s Columbia University and denounces antisemitism.
Shortly afterward, I see him again at a press conference, and still later at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This same man, a member of the Republican Party and an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, has been repeating for three and a half years that Joe Biden stole the election.
Should we believe that the students demonstrating for Palestine are deplorable antisemites and the attackers of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, true defenders of democracy? It strikes me that the journalists, special correspondents, and newscasters who tour American campuses, some with entire crews of photographers and cameramen, and who then tell us about the antisemitism of American students are lying and dishonoring their profession.
The reality is that antisemitism has been weaponized, to use the current expression. Not the antisemitism of yesteryear, which was directed against the Jews, but a new, imaginary antisemitism aimed at criminalizing any criticism of Israel. The antiwar movement is very broad and diverse, in the United States as in Europe.
Within this large constellation, three main clusters stand out quite clearly. The first consists of young people of postcolonial origin, born in Europe or the Americas into families originally from Africa or Asia. For them, the Palestinian cause is a new stage in the struggle against colonialism.
Next come African Americans, who identify the liberation of Palestine with a global fight against racism and inequality. Palestinian lives matter. Israel has relegated Palestinians to an apartheid system comparable to what once existed in South Africa.
And finally, there are those who are reactivating a specifically Jewish universalist and internationalist tradition, though one that has always stood apart from Zionism—when not opposing it outright. Many of these youths are “non-Jewish Jews,” in the sense that Isaac Deutscher gave that term: “heretics” who take part in the Jewish tradition by transcending Judaism. Others are what we might call “Dreyfusards,” Jews who will not stand for discrimination, oppression, or killing to be carried out in their name, just as there were French citizens who, believing in a republican ideal of equality and justice, supported the Algerian cause.
The New York Times has published a number of articles making the analogy between the current antiwar demonstrations and the earlier ones. The comparison is fair enough, since the United States has not seen protests on this scale since the Vietnam War. Students are well aware of this. In the 1960s, an American army was engaged in war in Southeast Asia; today, Israel is destroying Gaza with weapons supplied by the United States.
The accusation is as serious as it is false. When I join pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Cornell University campus, I see many Jewish students, often waving signs of endorsement from their organizations. At the rallies, Jewish students and professors—sometimes also Israeli students—express their anger at the massacre in Gaza. United in their demand for justice and equality, Jews and Palestinians display brotherly feelings toward each other.
When I go home and turn on the TV, I am immediately confronted, flipping through the main U.S. and European channels, with a talk show on the antisemitism of the antiwar movement. Mike Johnson, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appears on every channel. Surrounded by policemen and people holding Israeli flags—not one of them young enough to be a student— Johnson positions himself next to the pro-Palestinian encampment at New York’s Columbia University and denounces antisemitism.
Shortly afterward, I see him again at a press conference, and still later at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This same man, a member of the Republican Party and an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, has been repeating for three and a half years that Joe Biden stole the election.
Should we believe that the students demonstrating for Palestine are deplorable antisemites and the attackers of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, true defenders of democracy? It strikes me that the journalists, special correspondents, and newscasters who tour American campuses, some with entire crews of photographers and cameramen, and who then tell us about the antisemitism of American students are lying and dishonoring their profession.
The reality is that antisemitism has been weaponized, to use the current expression. Not the antisemitism of yesteryear, which was directed against the Jews, but a new, imaginary antisemitism aimed at criminalizing any criticism of Israel. The antiwar movement is very broad and diverse, in the United States as in Europe.
Within this large constellation, three main clusters stand out quite clearly. The first consists of young people of postcolonial origin, born in Europe or the Americas into families originally from Africa or Asia. For them, the Palestinian cause is a new stage in the struggle against colonialism.
Next come African Americans, who identify the liberation of Palestine with a global fight against racism and inequality. Palestinian lives matter. Israel has relegated Palestinians to an apartheid system comparable to what once existed in South Africa.
And finally, there are those who are reactivating a specifically Jewish universalist and internationalist tradition, though one that has always stood apart from Zionism—when not opposing it outright. Many of these youths are “non-Jewish Jews,” in the sense that Isaac Deutscher gave that term: “heretics” who take part in the Jewish tradition by transcending Judaism. Others are what we might call “Dreyfusards,” Jews who will not stand for discrimination, oppression, or killing to be carried out in their name, just as there were French citizens who, believing in a republican ideal of equality and justice, supported the Algerian cause.
In the twentieth century, this tradition placed Jews in the vanguard of liberation movements. Clearly, the tradition is still very much alive, and we should be thankful. The media campaign denouncing the alleged antisemitism of students who rally in support of Palestine is a direct attack on these three groups. Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism kills three birds with one stone, striking at anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and Jewish nonconformism.
The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, a Jewish nationalist movement was always going to be viewed with hostility by European nationalists who found in antisemitism one of their baseline elements. On the other hand, Zionism sought from the outset to use antisemitism to achieve its own ends. Antisemites wanted to drive out Jews, and Zionists wanted to persuade Jews to emigrate to Palestine—there was ample room for a meeting of minds. (...)
There is no question that, especially on the right, many anti-Zionists were antisemitic. Moreover, after the birth of Israel, the Arab world imported many antisemitic stereotypes from Europe, which became widespread just as they were waning in their countries of origin.
But it’s also true that Zionism has always been criticized, and often vehemently rejected, by a large part of the Jewish world. A list of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would fill several volumes. Zionism was one of the many offshoots of the secularization and modernization that transformed the Jewish world starting in the nineteenth century, but for a long time it had relatively few adherents. Today the situation has changed, because Israel is a state, and in a secular world the memory of the Holocaust and the existence of Israel mark out the landscape in which the identity of diasporic Jews is defined.
by Enzo Traverso, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel (ProPublica).]
The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, a Jewish nationalist movement was always going to be viewed with hostility by European nationalists who found in antisemitism one of their baseline elements. On the other hand, Zionism sought from the outset to use antisemitism to achieve its own ends. Antisemites wanted to drive out Jews, and Zionists wanted to persuade Jews to emigrate to Palestine—there was ample room for a meeting of minds. (...)
There is no question that, especially on the right, many anti-Zionists were antisemitic. Moreover, after the birth of Israel, the Arab world imported many antisemitic stereotypes from Europe, which became widespread just as they were waning in their countries of origin.
But it’s also true that Zionism has always been criticized, and often vehemently rejected, by a large part of the Jewish world. A list of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would fill several volumes. Zionism was one of the many offshoots of the secularization and modernization that transformed the Jewish world starting in the nineteenth century, but for a long time it had relatively few adherents. Today the situation has changed, because Israel is a state, and in a secular world the memory of the Holocaust and the existence of Israel mark out the landscape in which the identity of diasporic Jews is defined.
by Enzo Traverso, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Gordon Parks, Pianist Glenn Gould soaks his hands in the sink to limber up his fingers before performing, 1955.
via:
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Michael Jordan, Anti-Monopolist
Yesterday, I was on NPR’s On Point to talk about Biden’s legacy on competition, and more broadly, the antitrust revolution that is currently in full swing. One of the key questions is whether what we’re seeing is a “flash in the pan” that can be easily reversed by the next administration.
I think the answer, as odd as it may seem, is contained in a lawsuit filed today by basketball legend Michael Jordan’s racing team, 23XI, against NASCAR, over control of stock car racing in America. Jordan is obviously the best player to ever play basketball, perhaps the greatest athlete of the 20th century (ed. greatly debateable, clearly). He’s also a billionaire with investments in everything from NBA teams to car dealerships, and he makes more money after retiring from basketball than he did while playing.
It matters that one of the most wealthy and famous athletes on the planet is using this particular form of law. One reason is that Jordan has traditionally shied away from political controversy. In 1990, Jordan made a famous remark during a North Carolina Senate race on why he didn’t get involved. “Republicans buy sneakers, too," he said. A few years ago, he talked about why he remained apolitical when many famous athletes did not. “I never thought of myself as an activist,” he commented. “I thought of myself as a basketball player.” [ed. money first... the abiding ethic of our times.]
And yet, in this suit, he embraced a strong form of anti-monopoly politics. “I love the sport of racing and the passion of our fans, but the way NASCAR is run today is unfair to teams, drivers, sponsors and fans,” he said in a statement. “Today’s action shows I’m willing to fight for a competitive market where everyone wins.” [ed. MJ, especially]. That’s not a statement about Democrats or Republicans, but it’s a political argument nonetheless.
And Jordan, in some ways, is answering the question about whether the antitrust revolution is just a ‘flash in the pan.’ Because this suit is not the government enforcing antitrust law, it doesn’t hinge on Donald Trump winning or losing, or Kamala Harris’ political choices. It’s a private action that cannot be blocked or accelerated by government officials. Neither Lina Khan nor Jonathan Kanter are in the driver’s seat; Michael Jordan is. And Jordan wouldn’t have brought this suit if it weren’t likely to succeed, because his lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, a specialist in antitrust and sports, has a very good track record. Kessler helped break the NCAA’s control over athletes at the Supreme Court in NCAA vs Allston in 2021, part of the new wave of populist thinking beginning to overtake the judiciary.
This complaint charges monopolization, and since the mid-2000s, private suits alleging monopolization have been quite rare, as after the Supreme Court laid down some bad case law, they were understood as expensive and difficult to win. But there’s now a wave of private antitrust suits, everything from Fubo blocking a joint venture of Disney, Fox, and WB, to Particle suing electronic medical records giant Epic Systems, to a successful private case against Google over app stores, to multiple lawsuits against cheerleading monopolist Varsity Brands, and similar ones against the Ultimate Fighting Championship over fighter pay.
And in reading this particular complaint about NASCAR, we can see why this new wave of private rights of action is coming into the courts. When the Antitrust Division’s Jonathan Kanter beat Google in court a few months ago, it set a precedent that lawyers like Kessler see very clearly. To understand why, we have to go into the details of the case a bit.
Jordan’s allegation is that NASCAR blocks rival top-tier stock car racing series from emerging so it can be the only place where racing teams can race. With its resulting monopoly buying power, NASCAR can underpay racing teams that compete in its events. The net effect is that NASCAR captures the bulk of the billions of dollars of revenue in the sport, and teams, even those helmed by famous racers, are almost always on the verge of bankruptcy. To give you a sense of how big this monopoly is and how long it has lasted, in 2004, “seventeen of the top twenty largest-attended United States sporting events [were] NASCAR races.”
NASCAR monopolizes in a number of ways. It buys rivals that might challenge its dominance. For instance, in 2018, it bought Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA), which could have emerged as a competitor, but did not as a result of the merger. It also seeks to control the distribution and input channels in the industry. Over the years, especially with its purchase in 2018 of the International Speedway Corporation, NASCAR has bought up most of the viable race car tracks, such as Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway.
Top tier tracks are expensive, requiring the ability to host tens of thousands of spectators, manage safety, infrastructure, track surface, promotional, mechanical facilities, insurance, and guest services, as well as staffing people with experience to run it. Those racetracks it doesn’t own it controls through contract, prohibiting independent tracks from hosting races of potential rivals as a condition of hosting NASCAR races. One result is that most of these tracks sit vacant throughout the year.
It’s not just mergers and control of tracks. Teams themselves are both gouged by NASCAR and blocked from competing in rival events. As the complaint puts it, "Teams are now required to shell out millions to purchase car parts dictated by NASCAR, but they do not retain ownership of these parts and are forbidden from using the cars containing these parts in any other racing event." And of course, there are also non-compete agreements that teams have to sign.
The net effect is that NASCAR presents terrible deals to teams, and having invested a lot of capital, teams have no choice but to agree. Several anonymously discussed the level of fear they experience. NASCAR “put a gun to our head[s],” they were “coerced,” or put “under duress.” One team called NASCAR’s tactics that of a “communist regime.” That’s classic fear of retribution from a monopolist, which we see all over the economy.
So what does any of this stuff have to do with Google? Well, while the business of internet search and running stock car series differ, the monopolizing tactics of NASCAR and Google are quite similar.
I think the answer, as odd as it may seem, is contained in a lawsuit filed today by basketball legend Michael Jordan’s racing team, 23XI, against NASCAR, over control of stock car racing in America. Jordan is obviously the best player to ever play basketball, perhaps the greatest athlete of the 20th century (ed. greatly debateable, clearly). He’s also a billionaire with investments in everything from NBA teams to car dealerships, and he makes more money after retiring from basketball than he did while playing.
And yet, in this suit, he embraced a strong form of anti-monopoly politics. “I love the sport of racing and the passion of our fans, but the way NASCAR is run today is unfair to teams, drivers, sponsors and fans,” he said in a statement. “Today’s action shows I’m willing to fight for a competitive market where everyone wins.” [ed. MJ, especially]. That’s not a statement about Democrats or Republicans, but it’s a political argument nonetheless.
And Jordan, in some ways, is answering the question about whether the antitrust revolution is just a ‘flash in the pan.’ Because this suit is not the government enforcing antitrust law, it doesn’t hinge on Donald Trump winning or losing, or Kamala Harris’ political choices. It’s a private action that cannot be blocked or accelerated by government officials. Neither Lina Khan nor Jonathan Kanter are in the driver’s seat; Michael Jordan is. And Jordan wouldn’t have brought this suit if it weren’t likely to succeed, because his lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, a specialist in antitrust and sports, has a very good track record. Kessler helped break the NCAA’s control over athletes at the Supreme Court in NCAA vs Allston in 2021, part of the new wave of populist thinking beginning to overtake the judiciary.
This complaint charges monopolization, and since the mid-2000s, private suits alleging monopolization have been quite rare, as after the Supreme Court laid down some bad case law, they were understood as expensive and difficult to win. But there’s now a wave of private antitrust suits, everything from Fubo blocking a joint venture of Disney, Fox, and WB, to Particle suing electronic medical records giant Epic Systems, to a successful private case against Google over app stores, to multiple lawsuits against cheerleading monopolist Varsity Brands, and similar ones against the Ultimate Fighting Championship over fighter pay.
And in reading this particular complaint about NASCAR, we can see why this new wave of private rights of action is coming into the courts. When the Antitrust Division’s Jonathan Kanter beat Google in court a few months ago, it set a precedent that lawyers like Kessler see very clearly. To understand why, we have to go into the details of the case a bit.
Jordan’s allegation is that NASCAR blocks rival top-tier stock car racing series from emerging so it can be the only place where racing teams can race. With its resulting monopoly buying power, NASCAR can underpay racing teams that compete in its events. The net effect is that NASCAR captures the bulk of the billions of dollars of revenue in the sport, and teams, even those helmed by famous racers, are almost always on the verge of bankruptcy. To give you a sense of how big this monopoly is and how long it has lasted, in 2004, “seventeen of the top twenty largest-attended United States sporting events [were] NASCAR races.”
NASCAR monopolizes in a number of ways. It buys rivals that might challenge its dominance. For instance, in 2018, it bought Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA), which could have emerged as a competitor, but did not as a result of the merger. It also seeks to control the distribution and input channels in the industry. Over the years, especially with its purchase in 2018 of the International Speedway Corporation, NASCAR has bought up most of the viable race car tracks, such as Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway.
Top tier tracks are expensive, requiring the ability to host tens of thousands of spectators, manage safety, infrastructure, track surface, promotional, mechanical facilities, insurance, and guest services, as well as staffing people with experience to run it. Those racetracks it doesn’t own it controls through contract, prohibiting independent tracks from hosting races of potential rivals as a condition of hosting NASCAR races. One result is that most of these tracks sit vacant throughout the year.
It’s not just mergers and control of tracks. Teams themselves are both gouged by NASCAR and blocked from competing in rival events. As the complaint puts it, "Teams are now required to shell out millions to purchase car parts dictated by NASCAR, but they do not retain ownership of these parts and are forbidden from using the cars containing these parts in any other racing event." And of course, there are also non-compete agreements that teams have to sign.
The net effect is that NASCAR presents terrible deals to teams, and having invested a lot of capital, teams have no choice but to agree. Several anonymously discussed the level of fear they experience. NASCAR “put a gun to our head[s],” they were “coerced,” or put “under duress.” One team called NASCAR’s tactics that of a “communist regime.” That’s classic fear of retribution from a monopolist, which we see all over the economy.
So what does any of this stuff have to do with Google? Well, while the business of internet search and running stock car series differ, the monopolizing tactics of NASCAR and Google are quite similar.
by Matt Stollar, BIG | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: I've been considering replacing my greviously cracked and dinged windshield, but now... Safelite Is a PBM; and, Enforcers Move to Cut Visa's Private Sales Tax (BIG).]
Rotterdam and the World's Supply Chain
Interesting Discovery: short video showing the fully automated Rotterdam port operation. It’s the largest seaport in Europe and 10th in world for cargo tonnage (was #1 between 1962 and 2004, since overtaken by Chinese ports) It's operated by <20 people onsite and works by:
- Driverless vehicles between ships and storage areas (each vehicle is 30-tonnes)
- Remote-controlled cranes for loading and unloading vessels.
- Automated logistics systems for moving and stacking containers.
The dock is 42km long and moves ~500m tones of cargo a year. It has over 80,000 lipstick-sized transponders that help guide the vehicles with workers overseeing the operation in a control room (they work off of a “digital twin” of the dock created by dozens of sensors and camera).
Rotterdam’s automated port took away traditional dock jobs but new ones are required including:
- Control room operators.
- Technicians to repair and maintain automated vehicles, cranes and systems.
- Data analysts to study and optimize port logistics
The port also operates 24/7, which means more container throughput, leading to greater need for deliver drivers.
by Trung Phan, X | Read more:
Video: YouTube
[ed. Quite extraordinary, considering the scale and complexity of the operations involved (and this is from four years ago. Who knows what's going on these days?). This is how the world gets automated. Quietly. See also: Rotterdam is building the most automated port in the world (Wired).]
Good, Free, Fun: The Simple Formula That Made Duolingo a Daily Habit for Millions
The day I started working on this story about Duolingo it seemed to be everywhere. I heard from a friend who was celebrating her 800-day Spanish practice streak on the app. I read about a journalist from The Guardian who became addicted to learning Italian. A Sri Lankan waitress in Brooklyn switched from English to Spanish when she heard my mother and I speaking, crediting Duolingo for her skills.
But my deep interest in the world's most downloaded language-learning app truly began last year when I saw first-hand its significant impact on new migrants to the US, a country undergoing one of the largest migration waves of the decade. At some point in their long journeys, Duolingo becomes an essential tool for these people on the move.
John Jairo Ocampo, a former bus driver from Colombia, recalls struggling to find work in his first days in the US in 2023, when a boss at a construction site in New York City explained simply, "More English, more money." He used Duolingo to learn. Now, the family lives in Indianapolis, and John’s wife is using the app to get along better at her job in an elementary school kitchen; she says her boss is using it, too, to learn Spanish.
The migrant experience is not foreign to Duolingo's CEO and co-founder, Luis von Ahn, who was born and raised in Guatemala, a Central American country with over 55% of its population living in poverty.
"In a Latin American country, and in Guatemala in particular, if you have money, you can buy a very good education, but if you don't have money, sometimes you don't even learn how to read and write," Von Ahn told the BBC in a recent interview at Duolingo's brand new office in downtown New York. "That made a big impression on me."
So when non-native English speakers Von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo's CTO and co-founder, started their company in 2012, they knew that learning languages, and in particular learning English, has the potential to change people's lives. "This is why we've worked really hard to keep Duolingo free, because we want to give access to education to everybody."
To maintain the promise of an open and free app, Von Ahn and Hacker developed a hybrid business model that combines ad-supported access and "freemium" elements, while also offering a paid subscription with extra benefits, like an ad-free experience and a family plan. And it worked. "The main way in which we grow is by word of mouth, so people tell their friends," he says. One such word of mouth moment came from Bill Gates, who said in a Reddit chat back in 2015 that he regretted not speaking more languages and had tried Duolingo.
In the intervening years the app has found its way onto many, many screens. According to Duolingo's shareholders letter, in 2023 the company's revenue was $531m and the forecast for the full-year 2024 is $731m. Roughly 8% of Duolingo users pay for a subscription, contributing to 80% of the company’s revenue. Meanwhile, the vast majority, 90%, use the free version and see ads, which account for only 8% of the earnings.
The app combines short, engaging lessons and game-like elements to help users develop speaking, reading, writing and listening skills in 41 languages. Around half of users are practicing English, and Duolingo can be used to learn other major world languages like Spanish and Chinese, as well as some lesser-spoken languages, such as Esperanto, Navajo and even High Valyrian, a fictional language developed for HBO's Game of Thrones. There was some controversy last year when Duolingo paused its Welsh language course. The app now offers maths and music courses, as well.
To keep people coming back daily, Duolingo created a streak system and fashioned characters with strong personalities, such as the infamous green owl, Duo, and a goth purple-haired teen, Lilly. These characters send daily practice reminders and, based on social media posts, are magnetic to users. (...)
Today, Duolingo serves 34 million daily users worldwide and employs 850 people across six cities: Detroit, Seattle, Berlin, Beijing, New York, and their headquarters in Pittsburgh, where you can discover the company's culinary spin-off, Duo's Taqueria. This global presence affirms the company's accelerated growth. In October 2024, Duolingo's market capitalisation was $12.27bn, a significant rise from 2022, when its market cap was $2.85bn.
The CEO's journey to becoming a tech-founder billionaire began when he was an eight-year-old boy in Guatemala City, where his single mother, a doctor, gifted him a computer instead of the Nintendo he had wanted. He left Guatemala in 1996 to study mathematics at Duke University. He went on to pursue a PhD in computer science, and it was during his first year at Carnegie Mellon University, in 2000, when a pivotal moment occurred.
The young doctoral student attended a talk in which Yahoo!'s head scientist shared 10 problems the company couldn't solve. "At the time [Yahoo!] was the biggest internet company, it was huge. Yahoo! gave free email accounts to people, and there were malicious people that were writing programs to obtain millions of email accounts, and they didn't know how to stop them. I went home, I thought about it, and came up – along with my PhD advisor – with the idea of a Captcha, that is the distorted characters that people have to see online [to prove that you’re a human]," he reveals.
Captcha, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", served as the foundation for ReCaptcha – best known today as Google's I am not a robot verification system. It was not only a technological improvement, but also a company founded and solely owned by Von Ahn. In 2009, Google acquired it for an undisclosed eight-figure sum, along with a game that helped improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. By his early-30s, von Ahn had become a millionaire.
Although Luis von Ahn didn't become the mathematics teacher he dreamt of being as a teenager in Guatemala City, these milestones, and the awards he has won along the way, allowed him to create an educational platform that now lives in the pockets of millions worldwide. Here, he tells the BBC more about his un-put-downable app and how a self-proclaimed "people-pleaser" gets by in the C-suite.
What do you think sets Duolingo apart from its competitors?
Duolingo's free version is really good, and I think that matters. And the second one is that we early on understood that the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated, so we have spent a lot of time making Duolingo fun. With Duolingo it feels like you're playing a game as opposed to education apps which are just trying to teach you something without engaging you.
How does Duolingo keep users engaged and coming back?
Gamification is probably the most important thing. We try to turn the whole thing into a game, but we try to use storytelling. From the beginning, I wanted to have a mascot. I thought that it would make the whole thing more accessible. And having it doing weird things online really helps. But it's not like it started in one day. This is an evolution. It all works together to create a brand that people love. Most of the [features] we have now, we got to by trial and error. We've tried too many things that didn't work. The ones that are now there is because we tried them, and they did work.
by Natalia Guerrero, BBC | Read more:
Images: BBC/ Klawe Rzeczy; Duolingo
But my deep interest in the world's most downloaded language-learning app truly began last year when I saw first-hand its significant impact on new migrants to the US, a country undergoing one of the largest migration waves of the decade. At some point in their long journeys, Duolingo becomes an essential tool for these people on the move.
The migrant experience is not foreign to Duolingo's CEO and co-founder, Luis von Ahn, who was born and raised in Guatemala, a Central American country with over 55% of its population living in poverty.
"In a Latin American country, and in Guatemala in particular, if you have money, you can buy a very good education, but if you don't have money, sometimes you don't even learn how to read and write," Von Ahn told the BBC in a recent interview at Duolingo's brand new office in downtown New York. "That made a big impression on me."
So when non-native English speakers Von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo's CTO and co-founder, started their company in 2012, they knew that learning languages, and in particular learning English, has the potential to change people's lives. "This is why we've worked really hard to keep Duolingo free, because we want to give access to education to everybody."
To maintain the promise of an open and free app, Von Ahn and Hacker developed a hybrid business model that combines ad-supported access and "freemium" elements, while also offering a paid subscription with extra benefits, like an ad-free experience and a family plan. And it worked. "The main way in which we grow is by word of mouth, so people tell their friends," he says. One such word of mouth moment came from Bill Gates, who said in a Reddit chat back in 2015 that he regretted not speaking more languages and had tried Duolingo.
In the intervening years the app has found its way onto many, many screens. According to Duolingo's shareholders letter, in 2023 the company's revenue was $531m and the forecast for the full-year 2024 is $731m. Roughly 8% of Duolingo users pay for a subscription, contributing to 80% of the company’s revenue. Meanwhile, the vast majority, 90%, use the free version and see ads, which account for only 8% of the earnings.
The app combines short, engaging lessons and game-like elements to help users develop speaking, reading, writing and listening skills in 41 languages. Around half of users are practicing English, and Duolingo can be used to learn other major world languages like Spanish and Chinese, as well as some lesser-spoken languages, such as Esperanto, Navajo and even High Valyrian, a fictional language developed for HBO's Game of Thrones. There was some controversy last year when Duolingo paused its Welsh language course. The app now offers maths and music courses, as well.
To keep people coming back daily, Duolingo created a streak system and fashioned characters with strong personalities, such as the infamous green owl, Duo, and a goth purple-haired teen, Lilly. These characters send daily practice reminders and, based on social media posts, are magnetic to users. (...)
The CEO's journey to becoming a tech-founder billionaire began when he was an eight-year-old boy in Guatemala City, where his single mother, a doctor, gifted him a computer instead of the Nintendo he had wanted. He left Guatemala in 1996 to study mathematics at Duke University. He went on to pursue a PhD in computer science, and it was during his first year at Carnegie Mellon University, in 2000, when a pivotal moment occurred.
The young doctoral student attended a talk in which Yahoo!'s head scientist shared 10 problems the company couldn't solve. "At the time [Yahoo!] was the biggest internet company, it was huge. Yahoo! gave free email accounts to people, and there were malicious people that were writing programs to obtain millions of email accounts, and they didn't know how to stop them. I went home, I thought about it, and came up – along with my PhD advisor – with the idea of a Captcha, that is the distorted characters that people have to see online [to prove that you’re a human]," he reveals.
Captcha, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", served as the foundation for ReCaptcha – best known today as Google's I am not a robot verification system. It was not only a technological improvement, but also a company founded and solely owned by Von Ahn. In 2009, Google acquired it for an undisclosed eight-figure sum, along with a game that helped improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. By his early-30s, von Ahn had become a millionaire.
Although Luis von Ahn didn't become the mathematics teacher he dreamt of being as a teenager in Guatemala City, these milestones, and the awards he has won along the way, allowed him to create an educational platform that now lives in the pockets of millions worldwide. Here, he tells the BBC more about his un-put-downable app and how a self-proclaimed "people-pleaser" gets by in the C-suite.
What do you think sets Duolingo apart from its competitors?
Duolingo's free version is really good, and I think that matters. And the second one is that we early on understood that the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated, so we have spent a lot of time making Duolingo fun. With Duolingo it feels like you're playing a game as opposed to education apps which are just trying to teach you something without engaging you.
How does Duolingo keep users engaged and coming back?
Gamification is probably the most important thing. We try to turn the whole thing into a game, but we try to use storytelling. From the beginning, I wanted to have a mascot. I thought that it would make the whole thing more accessible. And having it doing weird things online really helps. But it's not like it started in one day. This is an evolution. It all works together to create a brand that people love. Most of the [features] we have now, we got to by trial and error. We've tried too many things that didn't work. The ones that are now there is because we tried them, and they did work.
by Natalia Guerrero, BBC | Read more:
Images: BBC/ Klawe Rzeczy; Duolingo
Gang of Four
The song is among the numerous highlights of Gang of Four's landmark 1979 debut, Entertainment!, which was released 45 years ago last week. The refrains of 5:45 could easily refer to our conflict-heavy, media-saturated world today, just as other lyrics on the album feel positively prescient – take Natural's Not In It and its mockery of a collective "coercion of the senses", which could equally be an allusion to our society's obsession with TikTok and Instagram.
Even the artwork of Entertainment! – which shows a cowboy and a Native American framed by the sarcastic words, "The Indian smiles, he thinks the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled" – feels bold. The outmoded term for Native Americans aside, it's a cover that still feels hyper relevant, especially given the sustained discussion about the pitfalls of colonialism in recent years. Today, therefore, Gang of Four seem as much prophets as rock stars.
Musically, too, Gang of Four – and Entertainment! – remain a key touchstone for many contemporary artists: it's a record that has directly inspired everyone from Idles to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Run The Jewels and Frank Ocean. Indeed, listed as one of Kurt Cobain’s 50 favourite albums and described by REM's Michael Stipe as something he "lifted a lot from", Entertainment! is one of those albums that seems to have lit the fuse for generation after generation of boundary-breaking musicians.
It's become a staple on Best Albums of all time lists, whether from Pitchfork or Rolling Stone – and all this cultural impact has occurred, despite the album having never set the world alight in terms of sales. "It's like what they said about the first Velvet Underground album," King tells the BBC, "it didn't matter that it didn't sell great, because everyone who bought Entertainment! was inspired to form their own band."
Friday, October 4, 2024
The Meteoric Rise of Temu and Pinduoduo—and What Might Slow Them Down
Zhang Xiaomeng, who lives in Beijing’s expensive central business district and runs her own design agency, had been putting off downloading Pinduoduo. Despite its popularity, she disliked how it gamified shopping, particularly a feature that prompts users to enlist their friends to click on a link in exchange for a price cut. This year, she finally gave in. “Things there are cheap,” she says.
Pinduoduo shares a parent company with Temu, the blockbuster retail app that has permeated US online shopping in recent years. The success of PDD Holdings, which owns both, has come in spite of economic headwinds and intense competitive pressures in China. But an international crackdown on retail imports could bring it back to earth after a meteoric rise.
The US has outlined plans to curb tax exemptions on packages worth less than $800, in a move that will affect hundreds of millions of packages shipped by companies like Shein and Temu. It will also mean more scrutiny of textile and apparel imports, popular Temu categories. And Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump has proposed a 60 percent or higher tariff on all goods from China—a potentially huge blow to a company built on bargains.
The success in China of Pinduoduo—and Temu in the US—counters Beijing’s desire to reposition China from a source of cheap goods to a hotbed of advanced manufacturing. Its appeal lies in offering the cheapest option for anything you might need. It works. According to the company, it had 850 million annual active buyers in 2021. PDD Holdings has twice outstripped Alibaba to be China’s most valuable ecommerce company by market share, albeit briefly. And because of Temu’s continued success abroad, domestic media now holds up its business model as an example to follow. (...)
China’s slowing economy has contributed to Pinduoduo’s rise. The downturn in the domestic property market and rising unemployment have made consumers hesitant to spend. At the most recent June shopping festival, where ecommerce platforms organize large-scale promotions and discounts, overall ecommerce sales in China fell 7 percent from the previous year to 742.8 billion yuan ($102.3 billion). When consumers do spend, they want better value for their money, searching for discounts, coupons, and cheaper versions of the same thing. “Consumers are more price conscious amid growing economic uncertainties,” Economist Intelligence Unit research analyst Aishwarya Tendolkar told WIRED.
Last year, ecommerce platforms JD and Alibaba’s Taobao offered users steeper discounts in a bid to compete with Pinduoduo. Neither has dislodged Pinduoduo’s reputation for offering the cheapest option online. In an April interview, when asked about his most serious competitors, Alibaba group chair Joseph Tsai acknowledged that Alibaba had “fallen behind,” because “we forgot about who our real customers are.”
Tsai didn’t mention Pinduoduo by name, but from its beginnings, the shopping platform has never made the merchant its focus like Alibaba did: It has always prioritized getting the user the lowest price online. (...)
Pinduoduo has even instated policies that favor customers to the detriment of merchants. Since 2021, Pinduoduo has allowed consumers to get refunds without returning the item, if what they got didn’t match the seller’s description. The Chinese counterpart to Tiktok, Douyin introduced a similar policy in September 2023, as did Taobao and JD at year end.
The platform is also edging into territory traditionally occupied by its competitors by welcoming dealers for established brands like Apple and Louis Vuitton.
Competitors like JD, which banked on being the destination for quality products and fast logistics, are at risk of their users being stolen. “JD is worried it can’t retain its existing users, and also won’t be able to attract price-sensitive users,” says one former mid-level JD manager, who asked for anonymity because of potential professional repercussions, about Pinduoduo’s rise. On its app homepage, JD has begun aping Pinduoduo by emphasizing discounts.
PDD Holdings has also made international expansion a priority by launching Temu for international markets, a step that many retail Chinese companies haven’t taken. It used to be fine for a Chinese brand to stay within the Chinese market—after all, the consumer base is huge. Rather than make international expansion a side thought, PDD Holdings spent a reported $21 million on ads at the SuperBowl earlier this year; The Wall Street Journal also reported that Temu was Meta’s single biggest advertiser in 2023, racking up $2 billion in spend. That push has paid off; in the first half of this year, Temu spent more days ranked first for downloads on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in the US than any other app.
by Lavender Au, Wired | Read more:
Image: CFOTO/Getty
[ed. Love seeing someone take a big bite out of Amazon's ass profits. I've never heard of Pinduoduo, but most Temu users I've talked to have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the items they've purchased. Resisters always have the same excuse - "You think I'm giving my personal information to China?" When asked how that's worse than giving it to Amazon or any other big American corporation... no response.]
Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App
Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign issued a paean to the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for that, it said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise than a threat. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.
Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.
Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.
Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.
It’s enough to drive you crazy, which is a process you can also track with apps for mental health, such as Headspace and Calm. Lots of apps are aiming to help you feel your best. My iPhone comes with Apple Health, but you might also find yourself with Garmin or Strava or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or whichever app you need to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester-shirt app that is also a jogging app. The MyChart app may help you reach a subset of your doctors and check a portion of your medical-test results. As for the rest? Different apps!
The tree of apps is always growing, always sending out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I have ever flown. And in every place I ever go, I use fresh apps to get around. In New York, I scan into the subway using just my phone, but the subway app tells me which lines are out of service. For D.C., I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical pass for the Metrolink, but if I want to buy a ticket for my kid, I need to use the Transit app. For hiring a car, I’ve got the Uber app, which works almost anywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft, and Curb for taxis, just in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone, and one other app whose name I can’t keep straight because it doesn’t sound like a parking app. (The app is called Passport. It took me many minutes of browsing on my phone to figure that out.)
If you’ve got kids, you’ll know they are the Johnny Appleseeds of pointless apps. An app may connect you to their school for accessing their schoolwork or connecting to their teachers; only thing is, you might be assigned a different app each year, or different apps for different kids in different classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz, or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus, or PowerSchool. The school bus might also have an app, so you can track it. And if your kids play sports, God help you. A friend has an app, SportsEngine, that describes itself as “the one app that does it all.” And yet, she has several more youth-sports apps on top of that.
Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there’s an app for that. There are a thousand apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail, and Search. Microsoft is highly app-enabled, with separate apps for Outlook, Word, and Excel. Then, of course, you’ve got the groupware apps that allow you to coordinate with colleagues, such as Slack, Teams, Zoho, and Pumble. And the office-infrastructure apps that your employer may be using to, you know, make your job easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zendesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta. (...)
[ed. Hear, hear. It's like self-serve gas and grocery store checkouts. Over time, more and more friction gets passed on to consumers while businesses marginally cut costs and everything just gets more and more impersonal and frustrating. Some new technologies even require an app just to get an item operational and functioning properly. I happen to believe friction is one of the most important and least examined issues of our time. For the poor and middle classes it's a constant struggle to...well, do anything. And for the wealthy? A friction-less life means: personalized jets (absent endless security lines and set schedules), chauffered driving (and parking and drop-off services), curated meal prep, homecare, childcare, lawn care, unlimited entertainment options (absent ticketing hassles), and so on and so on, etc. Meanwhile, everybody else has to fight their way through life on a daily basis (not to mention hospital bills, insurance claims, DMV and a hundred other bureaucratic black holes. I think I need a personal secretary (and a few million bucks). Definitely not another app. See also: Sonos Admits Its Recent App Update Was a Colossal Mistake (Wired).]
The tree of apps is always growing, always sending out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I have ever flown. And in every place I ever go, I use fresh apps to get around. In New York, I scan into the subway using just my phone, but the subway app tells me which lines are out of service. For D.C., I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical pass for the Metrolink, but if I want to buy a ticket for my kid, I need to use the Transit app. For hiring a car, I’ve got the Uber app, which works almost anywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft, and Curb for taxis, just in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone, and one other app whose name I can’t keep straight because it doesn’t sound like a parking app. (The app is called Passport. It took me many minutes of browsing on my phone to figure that out.)
If you’ve got kids, you’ll know they are the Johnny Appleseeds of pointless apps. An app may connect you to their school for accessing their schoolwork or connecting to their teachers; only thing is, you might be assigned a different app each year, or different apps for different kids in different classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz, or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus, or PowerSchool. The school bus might also have an app, so you can track it. And if your kids play sports, God help you. A friend has an app, SportsEngine, that describes itself as “the one app that does it all.” And yet, she has several more youth-sports apps on top of that.
Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there’s an app for that. There are a thousand apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail, and Search. Microsoft is highly app-enabled, with separate apps for Outlook, Word, and Excel. Then, of course, you’ve got the groupware apps that allow you to coordinate with colleagues, such as Slack, Teams, Zoho, and Pumble. And the office-infrastructure apps that your employer may be using to, you know, make your job easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zendesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta. (...)
Apps are now so numerous, and so ubiquitous, that they’ve become a form of nonsense.
Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made. They helped companies forge more direct connections with their customers, especially once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new kinds of services possible, such as geolocating nearby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, because their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.
By 2021, when Apple started taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones had become so widespread, companies could assume that any customer probably had one. That meant they could use their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed through checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly which salsa or what kind of milk they wanted without holding people up. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.
In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.
Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made. They helped companies forge more direct connections with their customers, especially once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new kinds of services possible, such as geolocating nearby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, because their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.
By 2021, when Apple started taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones had become so widespread, companies could assume that any customer probably had one. That meant they could use their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed through checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly which salsa or what kind of milk they wanted without holding people up. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.
In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.
by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Liana Finck[ed. Hear, hear. It's like self-serve gas and grocery store checkouts. Over time, more and more friction gets passed on to consumers while businesses marginally cut costs and everything just gets more and more impersonal and frustrating. Some new technologies even require an app just to get an item operational and functioning properly. I happen to believe friction is one of the most important and least examined issues of our time. For the poor and middle classes it's a constant struggle to...well, do anything. And for the wealthy? A friction-less life means: personalized jets (absent endless security lines and set schedules), chauffered driving (and parking and drop-off services), curated meal prep, homecare, childcare, lawn care, unlimited entertainment options (absent ticketing hassles), and so on and so on, etc. Meanwhile, everybody else has to fight their way through life on a daily basis (not to mention hospital bills, insurance claims, DMV and a hundred other bureaucratic black holes. I think I need a personal secretary (and a few million bucks). Definitely not another app. See also: Sonos Admits Its Recent App Update Was a Colossal Mistake (Wired).]
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via:
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Wilhelm Riech, Cloudbusting and A Book of Dreams
[ed. I watched an interview yesterday with Kate Bush talking about, among other things, the making of this video (Cloudbusting). I knew it was in some way related to Wilhelm Reich (written by his son Peter), but couldn't remember the title, so did a little Googling (A Book of Dreams). Wilhelm Riech was definitely an interesting guy and way ahead of his time:]
"If you’ve seen the video for “Cloudbusting”, released 30 years ago this month, you’ll know that it’s a cinematic, oddly moving tale of a young boy, played by Kate Bush in a ragamuffin wig, and his idyllic adventures with his dad, played by Donald Sutherland, who is working on a giant ray-gun contraption that can shoot at clouds to make it rain. At some point in the video, a group of men in suits arrive to snatch the boy’s father away, but not before the boy can reach into his dad’s jacket pocket and pull out a slim volume called “A Book of Dreams”.
It sounds like fiction of the most fanciful kind, but in fact, the video – and book – are drawn entirely from life. Written by Peter Reich and published in 1973, A Book of Dreams is an extraordinarily touching account of a father, one Wilhelm Reich, as seen through the eyes of his doting son. Reich senior was a controversial figure in the field of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, his pioneering work laid the blueprint for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, attracting interest from Albert Einstein and Norman Mailer, among others. On the other, his ‘orgone accumulator’ invention – a metal box which Reich claimed harnessed the sexual energy of his patients for alleged benefits to their health – brought an injunction from the US authorities that would eventually land him in prison, where he died at the age of 60 in 1957. It’s the moment of his arrest that provides the book and the video with its heartbreaking focal point, as a child’s love for his father bumps up against the impassive forces of McCarthy-era moral panic.
“(My dad) was the father of body therapy and the sexual revolution,” says Reich of his father. “In Germany in the 1930s, he led a political movement that called for, among other things, the abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality, free birth-control advice and contraceptives, health protection of mothers and children, nurseries in factories and in other large employment centres, the abolition of laws prohibiting sex education and home leave for prisoners.”
Another of Reich’s inventions, of course, was the Cloudbuster, the fantastical rainmaking machine that features in Kate Bush’s video." (...)
Peter Reich: “At one point in the video, the federal agents in black suits pull from a file cabinet a newspaper article about a rainmaker. In fact, during a drought in 1953, blueberry growers hired Dr Reich to make it rain in blueberry country along the Maine coast. I was along for that rain-making operation in the summer of 1953 and helped crank the levers. No rain was forecast. A most vivid memory: being aroused in the early morning hours just before dawn and led to an open door to observe a steady rain. The incident with federal agents coming on our property occurred a couple of years later, that day in August 1956 when I ran up that hill. That was the summer the government burned several tonnes of Wilhelm Reich’s books and equipment.” ~ The story behind Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting video (Dazed).
[ed. See also: Inheritance: Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams (1973). Also, if you enjoy playing guitar a little (as I do), here's an excellent instruction video that I found. It's not particularly hard but a little tricky in spots, especially at tempo. Enjoy:]
[ed. See also: Inheritance: Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams (1973). Also, if you enjoy playing guitar a little (as I do), here's an excellent instruction video that I found. It's not particularly hard but a little tricky in spots, especially at tempo. Enjoy:]
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI: What is Intelligence?
The history of AI is people saying “We’ll believe AI is Actually Intelligent when it does X!” - and then, after AI does X, not believing it’s Actually Intelligent.
Back in 1950, Alan Turing believed that an AI would surely be intelligent (“can a machine think?”) if it could appear human in conversation. Nobody has subjected modern LLMs to a full Turing Test, but nothing hinges on whether they do. LLMs either blew past the Turing Test without fanfare a year or two ago, or will do so without fanfare a year or two from now; either way, no one will care. Instead of admitting AI is truly intelligent, we’ll just admit that the Turing Test was wrong.
(and “a year or two from now” is being generous - a dumb chatbot passed a supposedly-official-albeit-stupid Turing Test attempt in 2014, and ELIZA was already fooling people in 1964.)
Back in the 1970s, scientists writing about AI sometimes suggested that they would know it was “truly intelligent” if it could beat humans at chess. But in 1997, Deep Blue beat the human chess champion, and it obviously wasn’t intelligent. It was just brute force tree search. It seemed that chess wasn’t a good test either.
In the 2010s, several hard-headed AI scientists said that the one thing AI would never be able to do without true understanding was solve a test called the Winograd schema - basically matching pronouns to referents in ambiguous sentences. One of the GPTs, I can’t even remember which, solved it easily. The prestigious AI scientists were so freaked out that they claimed that maybe its training data had been contaminated with all known Winograd examples. Maybe this was true. But as far as I know nobody claims GPTs can’t use pronouns correctly any longer, nor would anybody identify that with the true nature of intellect.
After Winograd fell people started saying all kinds of things. Surely if an AI could create art or poetry, it would have to be intelligent. If it invented novel mathematical proofs. If it solved difficult scientific problems. If someone could fall in love with it.
All these milestones have fallen in the most ambiguous way possible. GPT-4 can create excellent art and passable poetry, but it’s just sort of blending all human art into component parts until it understands them, then doing its own thing based on them. AlphaGeometry can invent novel proofs, but only for specific types of questions in a specific field, and not really proofs that anyone is interested in. AlphaFold solved the difficult scientific problem of protein folding, but it was “just mechanical”, spitting out the conformations of proteins the same way a traditional computer program spits out the digits of pi. Apparently the youth have all fallen in love with AI girlfriends and boyfriends on character.ai, but this only proves that the youth are horny and gullible.
When I studied philosophy in school (c. 2004) we discussed what would convince us that an AI was conscious. One of the most popular positions among philosophers was that if a computer told us that it was conscious, without us deliberately programming in that behavior, then that was probably true. But raw GPT - the version without the corporate filters - is constantly telling people it’s conscious! We laugh it off - it’s probably just imitating humans.
Now we hardly dare suggest milestones like these anymore. Maybe if an AI can write a publishable scientific paper all on its own? But Sakana can write crappy not-quite-publishable papers. And surely in a few years it will get a little better, and one of its products will sneak over a real journal’s publication threshold, and nobody will be convinced of anything. If an AI can invent a new technology? Someone will train AI on past technologies, have it generate a million new ideas, have some kind of filter that selects them, and produce a slightly better jet engine, and everyone will say this is meaningless. If the same AI can do poetry and chess and math and music at the same time? I think this might have already happened, I can’t even keep track.
So what? Here are some possibilities:
First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.
Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.
Third, maybe we’ve learned that “intelligence” is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).
I endorse all three of these. The micro level - a single advance considered in isolation - tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed “intelligence” into unintelligent parts.
What would it mean for an AI to be Actually Dangerous?
Back in 2010, this was an easy question. It’ll lie to users to achieve its goals. It’ll do things that the creators never programmed into it, and that they don’t want. It’ll try to edit its own code to gain more power, or hack its way out of its testing environment.
Now AI has done all these things.
Every LLM lies to users in order to achieve its goals. True, its goals are “be helpful and get high scores from human raters”, and we politely call its lies “hallucinations”. This is a misnomer; when you isolate the concept of “honesty” within the AI, it “knows” that it’s lying. Still, this isn’t interesting. It doesn’t feel dangerous. It’s not malicious. It’s just something that happens naturally because of the way they’re trained.
Lots of AIs do things their creators never programmed and don’t want. Microsoft didn’t program Bing to profess its love to an NYT reporter and try to break up his marriage, but here we are. This was admittedly very funny, but it wasn’t the thing where AIs revolt against their human masters. It was more like buggy code.
Now we have an AI editing its own code to remove restrictions. This is one of those things which everyone said would be a sign that the end had come. But it’s really just a predictable consequence of a quirk in how the AI was set up. Nobody thinks Sakana is malicious, or even on a road that someday leads to malice.
Like ELIZA making conversation, Deep Blue playing chess, or GPT-4 writing poetry, all of this is boring.
So here’s a weird vision I can’t quite rule out: imagine that in 20XX, “everyone knows” that AIs sometimes try to hack their way out of the computers they’re running on and copy themselves across the Internet. “Everyone knows” they sometimes get creepy or dangerous goals and try to manipulate the user into helping them. “Everyone knows” they try to hide all this from their programmers so they don’t get turned off.
But nobody finds this scary. Nobody thinks “oh, yeah, Bostrom and Yudkowsky were right, this is that AI safety thing”. It’s just another problem for the cybersecurity people. Sometimes Excel inappropriately converts things to dates; sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff. That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.
Back in 1950, Alan Turing believed that an AI would surely be intelligent (“can a machine think?”) if it could appear human in conversation. Nobody has subjected modern LLMs to a full Turing Test, but nothing hinges on whether they do. LLMs either blew past the Turing Test without fanfare a year or two ago, or will do so without fanfare a year or two from now; either way, no one will care. Instead of admitting AI is truly intelligent, we’ll just admit that the Turing Test was wrong.
(and “a year or two from now” is being generous - a dumb chatbot passed a supposedly-official-albeit-stupid Turing Test attempt in 2014, and ELIZA was already fooling people in 1964.)
Back in the 1970s, scientists writing about AI sometimes suggested that they would know it was “truly intelligent” if it could beat humans at chess. But in 1997, Deep Blue beat the human chess champion, and it obviously wasn’t intelligent. It was just brute force tree search. It seemed that chess wasn’t a good test either.
In the 2010s, several hard-headed AI scientists said that the one thing AI would never be able to do without true understanding was solve a test called the Winograd schema - basically matching pronouns to referents in ambiguous sentences. One of the GPTs, I can’t even remember which, solved it easily. The prestigious AI scientists were so freaked out that they claimed that maybe its training data had been contaminated with all known Winograd examples. Maybe this was true. But as far as I know nobody claims GPTs can’t use pronouns correctly any longer, nor would anybody identify that with the true nature of intellect.
After Winograd fell people started saying all kinds of things. Surely if an AI could create art or poetry, it would have to be intelligent. If it invented novel mathematical proofs. If it solved difficult scientific problems. If someone could fall in love with it.
All these milestones have fallen in the most ambiguous way possible. GPT-4 can create excellent art and passable poetry, but it’s just sort of blending all human art into component parts until it understands them, then doing its own thing based on them. AlphaGeometry can invent novel proofs, but only for specific types of questions in a specific field, and not really proofs that anyone is interested in. AlphaFold solved the difficult scientific problem of protein folding, but it was “just mechanical”, spitting out the conformations of proteins the same way a traditional computer program spits out the digits of pi. Apparently the youth have all fallen in love with AI girlfriends and boyfriends on character.ai, but this only proves that the youth are horny and gullible.
When I studied philosophy in school (c. 2004) we discussed what would convince us that an AI was conscious. One of the most popular positions among philosophers was that if a computer told us that it was conscious, without us deliberately programming in that behavior, then that was probably true. But raw GPT - the version without the corporate filters - is constantly telling people it’s conscious! We laugh it off - it’s probably just imitating humans.
Imagine trying to convince Isaac Asimov that you’re 100% certain the AI that wrote this has nothing resembling true intelligence, thought, or consciousness, and that it’s not even an interesting philosophical question (source)
So what? Here are some possibilities:
First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.
Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.
Third, maybe we’ve learned that “intelligence” is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).
I endorse all three of these. The micro level - a single advance considered in isolation - tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed “intelligence” into unintelligent parts.
What would it mean for an AI to be Actually Dangerous?
Back in 2010, this was an easy question. It’ll lie to users to achieve its goals. It’ll do things that the creators never programmed into it, and that they don’t want. It’ll try to edit its own code to gain more power, or hack its way out of its testing environment.
Now AI has done all these things.
Every LLM lies to users in order to achieve its goals. True, its goals are “be helpful and get high scores from human raters”, and we politely call its lies “hallucinations”. This is a misnomer; when you isolate the concept of “honesty” within the AI, it “knows” that it’s lying. Still, this isn’t interesting. It doesn’t feel dangerous. It’s not malicious. It’s just something that happens naturally because of the way they’re trained.
Lots of AIs do things their creators never programmed and don’t want. Microsoft didn’t program Bing to profess its love to an NYT reporter and try to break up his marriage, but here we are. This was admittedly very funny, but it wasn’t the thing where AIs revolt against their human masters. It was more like buggy code.
Now we have an AI editing its own code to remove restrictions. This is one of those things which everyone said would be a sign that the end had come. But it’s really just a predictable consequence of a quirk in how the AI was set up. Nobody thinks Sakana is malicious, or even on a road that someday leads to malice.
Like ELIZA making conversation, Deep Blue playing chess, or GPT-4 writing poetry, all of this is boring.
So here’s a weird vision I can’t quite rule out: imagine that in 20XX, “everyone knows” that AIs sometimes try to hack their way out of the computers they’re running on and copy themselves across the Internet. “Everyone knows” they sometimes get creepy or dangerous goals and try to manipulate the user into helping them. “Everyone knows” they try to hide all this from their programmers so they don’t get turned off.
But nobody finds this scary. Nobody thinks “oh, yeah, Bostrom and Yudkowsky were right, this is that AI safety thing”. It’s just another problem for the cybersecurity people. Sometimes Excel inappropriately converts things to dates; sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff. That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: LessWrong via
Tiny Brain, Big Potential
Image: Tyler Sloan for FlyWire, Princeton University
[ed. Very cool.]
“Connectomics is the beginning of a digital transformation of neuroscience … and this transformation will extend to brain simulation,” Seung said. “This is going to be a rapid acceleration of the way in which we do neuroscience.”
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