2020 California election positions

As I have done in previous elections, I’m going through my ballot, doing a little research, and making endorsements. My primary goal is to normalize the practice of informed voting, not just on the well-known issues, but on the entire ballot.

President

Biden.

People complain about having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but abstention is just the middle of three evils. Trump may very well lead to the collapse of the US, or the collapse of US democracy, or my personal death.

Researching an entire ballot is frankly a slog, and I’m in favor of spending less energy on obvious decisions, even if those are the ones I feel most strongly about. To express the intensity of my preference, I’ve committed to voting against all Republicans in all elections throughout the ballot for the next 10 years, which incidentally frees up more time to research other parts of the ballot. The Republican party has become the fascist party, and their candidates do not even deserve my research. I have also made the maximum donation to the Biden campaign.

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Link Roundup: October 2020

School of Life: A Very Bad YouTube Channel | Big Joel (video, 25 min) – Just a funny take down of a ridiculous self-help channel.  I was surprised to learn that School of Life is made by Alain De Botton, who I mostly remember from his 2012 TED talk about “Atheism 2.0”.  At the time, his talk certainly struck a chord with a lot of atheists who were unhappy with the state of the atheist movement.  But whenever I heard details about his specific suggestions, they were completely full of shit.  He just had no idea what he was talking about, and worse, he erased the efforts of other atheists who had similar criticisms and who were actually involved in the communities they wanted to change.  I hated this guy, and now I feel vindicated.

The Dunning-Kruger effect: Misunderstood, misrepresented, overused, and… nonexistent? | Skepchick – Ever since researching and writing about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I’ve been convinced that it’s not very good psychology, and even worse as pop psychology.  So I’m glad to see this independent (and more thorough) review.

While on this subject, I was reminded of my research into perceptions of penis size, where I learned that (non-Asian) men systematically overestimate their penis size (“penis Lake Wobegon” I called it).  Following Dunning-Kruger logic, we must conclude that having a smaller penis deprives one of the ability to accurately self-assess one’s penis size.

Science & Religion Aren’t Compatible (But only in America) | Skepchick – Rebecca Watson discusses a study demonstrating the point in the title.  If anyone has paper access I’m curious what it says about the UK and Canada.

In Search of a Flat Earth | Folding Ideas (video, 76 min) – I see that video essays are quickly approaching movie length.  Dan Olson disproves a conspiracy theory with some beautiful footage, not that it matters to the doomsday cult.

I read popular physics: Interstellar Interlopers

This is an entry in my series where I read physics articles in Scientific American, and get annoyed that the only good ones are about astronomy.

I skipped a month, because the September issue was a special 175-year anniversary edition. I actually liked that one, but the physics article was a review of how cosmology had changed in the past 175 years, and I don’t have much to say about that. I learned that Scientific American basically predates the scientific establishment as we know it, and it started out as a thing for like, inventors and hobbyists.

The October issue has a presidential endorsement, the first endorsement that the magazine has ever made in its long history. No points for guessing who they endorsed.

Anyway, the physics article for this month is “Interstellar Interlopers” (no paywall this time), about the first two interstellar objects ever observed in the Solar System. I had never heard of these before, but I guess they made news a while back, as reporters breathlessly speculated about aliens.

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Wildfire pollution: a personal account

2020 is California’s worst fire season on historical record. Here in Berkeley, California, we were fortunate enough to never have evacuation warnings. What we got instead were unhealthy levels of pollution for a straight month. This happened all across the west coast.

There was one day–September 9th to be exact–when the sky turned a bright orange that people were comparing to Blade Runner 2049. Everyone and their mother took pictures of the sky that day–us included–and I imagine that these will be plastered everywhere as symbols of climate change for years to come.

The inside story is that September 9th was actually a brief reprieve, the pollution equivalent of the eye of the storm. I don’t understand the meteorology of it, but newspapers said that the sky was orange because the pollution was up there rather than down on the ground level. The worst was actually the next day, when the AQI reached the 300s.

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FtB fundraiser

You might have noticed the logo on the sidebar for FtB’s Carnival of Curiosity, a fundraising event.  (Some ad blockers may remove it.)  This is a livestream event to occur next weekend, from September 25-27.  FtB has been in debt for a while now because we owe legal fees for fighting off a SLAPP lawsuit–successfully, I might add.  Please consider contributing to keep this network running!

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to participate in the fundraiser, but I will make a contribution of my own.

A music theory analysis of SUNN O)))

I’ve complained before about music theory, and how it fails to actually address any of the music I actually like. One kind of music I have in mind is drone music. Consider, for instance, this reddit thread on the music theory of SUNN O)))

Honestly most drone is fifths and minor scales, it’s not really complicated.

The attitude being expressed is that drone music is too simple to require any music theory. This is a failure to engage with the music on its own terms. If that’s all there is, then what, pray tell, distinguishes different songs and artists? Are they just all interchangeable?

While it may be the case that drone music is particularly simple, I feel that this only makes the lack of a music theory all the more frustrating. Most music theory is frankly too complicated for me to understand, and it would actually be nice to have some simple music theory for once, if only music theorists didn’t think it was beneath them. In any case, I think the theory behind drone music is likely more complicated than they are making it out to be. Drone is highly preoccupied with texture (aka timbre)–a subject so difficult that music theory as a field has basically given up on it.

Anyway, in the spirit of being the change I want to see, I analyzed the spectrograms of a couple SUNN O))) songs.

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Link Roundup: September 2020

OpenAI’s latest breakthrough is astonishingly powerful, but still fighting its flaws | The Verge – GPT-3 is a new language AI with astounding power.  GPT-3 first grabbed my attention when I saw someone use it to produce a response to philosophers talking about GPT-3.  Sure, some cherry-picking is involved, but the result is more cogent than the average internet commenter.  To temper (or amplify) the hype, I suggest looking at this massive compilation of GPT-3 results, including experiments that failed.  Among other things, GPT-3 is apparently terrible at making cat puns.

Although not created by GPT-3, I also thought these image completions were incredible.

Beethoven Sucks At Music | 12tone (Video, 14 min)
Music Theory and White Supremacy | Adam Neely (Video, 44 min) – Now this is the music youtube content that I am here for.  12tone explains some of the history that led Beethoven and other classical composers to be canonized.  Adam Neely discusses how “music theory” as it is commonly understood, is really the theory of 18th century European music.  The framing of 18th century European music as the objective measure by which all music must be judged is structural white supremacy.  I have a passing interest in music theory, and it’s difficult to learn in the best of times, but I find it doubly frustrating because it fails to describe any of the music I listen to.  I feel like these videos have named the problem.

If you liked these videos, you might also appreciate the paper that Neely’s video is based on: “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame“.

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