Human bodies can do impressive things.
That’s a commercial to sell perfume. I’ve already forgotten what brand, though, and if I did it would be only to avoid it — it seems to have spectacular neurological side effects.
I like this dance better.
However, that ballerina does not have enough legs. Maybe we need to start tinkering with genomes to figure out how to create 6 or 8 legged dancers?
In yet another misstep by a Trump proxy, Marco Gutierrez from Latinos for Trump made the announcement that will annihilate the Trump campaign. Or, at least, give everyone on the internet a field day.
We must defeat Trump. For great justice, and now for tacos for everyone!
Via Joe.My.God, we get An Accurate History of the Alt-Right
, as told by Andrew Anglin at The Daily Stormer (no, I’m not linking to those assholes). It’s remarkable. Anglin lists the elements that combined to create the Alt-Right, and they are:
Internet troll culture
Conspiracy theorism
Libertarianism/Paleoconservatism
The Manosphere
#GamerGate
The Old White Nationalist Movement
Identitarian Movements (which he can’t distinguish from white nationalism)
I feel like mentioning to him that those are all bad things. Why are you listing all the worst elements of human behavior as if they were something of which they should be proud? “I have made this delicious casserole out of the most pungent, disgusting things I could fish out of a sewer. Are you not proud of me?”
He also lists the Alt-Right’s “values”, which include anti-semitism, “scientific” racism, and opposition to feminism. Again, these are not virtues.
As for “normie”, he also defines a bunch of jargon used by the Alt-Right.
“Normie” is a term used to refer to individuals who have not yet joined the Alt-Right, remaining trapped in the mental-prison of the Jewish system. These people are viewed as being incapable of objectively processing information, and will instead revert to programmed slogans whenever they are presented with ideas that conflict with their synthetic value system.
Says the guy who reflexively responds to dismissals of his hate with cries of “cuck!”
Amy Schumer had a guy kicked out of one of her shows just for being a man’s man! All he was doing was shouting manly things at her and wearing a manly t-shirt!
Censorship! Oppression! Free speech! Bi…aaaargh! I’m being silenced! <falls to floor writhing, foaming at the mouth>
We can all console ourselves with the high likelihood that he retired to a bar afterwards, where his fellow bros all congratulated him and pounded his back and bought him beer.
Here’s a series of illustrations of funny mistakes by scientists.
Jim Jourdane
They all seem to be about awkward things that occurred while doing field work, and I’m feeling left out. I sit in a lab with air conditioning and fluorescent lights, staring into a microscope. Nothing amusing ever happens to me.
Maybe I need to bring in a few crocodiles or let a troop of monkeys loose.
Anjuli makes a good point, one that resonates with what I’ve been saying for years. Atheism is not a loss of something; it’s not about simple disbelief. It is about acquiring a more thorough and accurate and liberating understanding of the nature of the universe.
My atheism is not a loss of any kind and even when I embraced it (at the age of twenty-two), it was most certainly a gain. I conceived of it as gaining control over my own mind, and gaining the freedom to use it as I thought best. I also saw it as an escape from a particularly damaging form of social control. It was significant to me, as a twenty-two year old still settling into my identity, that I no longer had my life parameters set by people I regarded as cruel, stupid and ignorant (though I’ve mellowed somewhat on that front).
I have heard these sentiments so many times from so many people over the years, that accepting atheism was like crawling out of a straitjacket to finally be free, and to see the world with new eyes. And then there are others who shrug and just say that it was nothing, they just stopped believing in a god…and the whole damn culture that propagates god-belief and reality-ignorance at its core? An absence of oppression is not simply something that is, it’s something you have to struggle for. And free thought is more than just the absence of something, it’s a positive in its own right.
But even the dudebros can occasionally see the light. This thread about a guy who wants to host a stripper party for his business is an amazing example of obviousness. His new business did better than expected, so he asks if there are any legal problems if he brings in some strippers, right into the place where they work, to have a celebratory party.
Right away, people start ringing the alarm bells of “hostile work environment”, but he has an answer to that. No problem! He doesn’t hire women!
Female candidates are usually less qualified for technology and don’t come from strong cs backgrounds as often as their male counterparts. That combined with California’s ridiculous maternity leave laws make female applicants quite undesirable.
As of now we have 16 people, excluding myself.
Officially: I hire the best candidate for the job.
Unofficially: unfortunately California is one of the only states that requires paid maternity leave for female employees, making female employees quite a risk for smaller businesses.
Wow. Good thing he’s using a pseudonym, because that comment could otherwise come back to bite him on the ass. He’s outright admitting that he discriminates against women, because they are women.
At least the commenters there are slamming him hard, which is interesting, given the kinds of things Reddit users usually downvote.
SpaceX blew up on the launch pad this morning. There were no casualties, at least, and we do get a spectacular explosion video out of it, but this is an unfortunate setback.
Human beings sometimes sit on top of those kinds of infernal devices? I don’t think I could do that.
Mondays are just fine. I’ve had a weekend to prepare, I’m rested, all I’ve got on my plate is one lecture. The other days of the week…labs, labs, labs, lectures, etc. By Thursday, I’m dragging and worn out, and my schedule is such that it’s a relatively light day, but because it’s light, everyone crams all their meetings into it. So I’m worn thin and I get a lot of administrative work thrown at me (I’d rather teach, really).
So now Thursday will be my official Worst Day of the Week. Especially Thursdays on which an administrative meeting is scheduled for 7-8:30pm. That’s just uncivilized.
I should take a nap, but I can’t, because I’ve got a meeting scheduled.
David Brin reviews some recent books on the future of artificial intelligence. He’s more optimistic than I am. For one, I think most of the AI pundits are little better than glib con men, so any survey of the literature should consist mostly of culling all the garbage. No, really, please don’t bring up Kurzweil again. Also, any obscenely rich Silicon Valley pundit who predicts a glorious future of infinite wealth because technology can just fuck right off.
But there’s also some stuff I agree with. People who authoritatively declare that this is how the future will be, and that is how people will respond to it, are not actually being authoritative, because they won’t be there, but are being authoritarian. We set the wheel rolling, and we hope that we aren’t setting it on a path to future destruction, but we don’t get to dictate to future generations how they should deal with it. To announce that we’ve created a disaster and that our grandchildren will react by creating a dystopian nightmare world sells them short, and pretending that they’ll use the tools we have generously given them to create a glorious bright utopia is stealing all the credit. People will be people. Finger-wagging from the distant past will have zero or negative influence.
Across all of those harsh millennia, people could sense that something was wrong. Cruelty and savagery, tyranny and unfairness vastly amplified the already unsupportable misery of disease and grinding poverty. Hence, well-meaning men and women donned priestly robes and… preached!
They lectured and chided. They threatened damnation and offered heavenly rewards. Their intellectual cream concocted incantations of either faith or reason, or moral suasion. From Hindu and Buddhist sutras to polytheistic pantheons to Judeao-Christian-Muslim laws and rituals, we have been urged to behave better by sincere finger-waggers since time immemorial. Until finally, a couple of hundred years ago, some bright guys turned to all the priests and prescribers and asked a simple question:
“How’s that working out for you?”
In fact, while moralistic lecturing might sway normal people a bit toward better behavior, it never affects the worst human predators, parasites and abusers –– just as it won’t divert the most malignant machines. Indeed, moralizing often empowers them, offering ways to rationalize exploiting others.
Beyond artificial intelligence, a better example might be climate change — that’s one monstrous juggernaut we’ve set rolling into the future. The very worst thing we can do is start lecturing posterity about how they should deal with it, since we don’t really know all the consequences that are going to arise, and it’s rather presumptuous for us to create the problem, and then tell our grandchildren how they should fix it. It’s better that we set an example and address the problems that emerge now, do our best to minimize foreseeable consequences, and trust the competence of future generations to cope with their situations, as driven by necessities we have created.
They’re probably not going to thank us for any advice, no matter how well-meaning, and are more likely to curse us for our neglect and laziness and exploitation of the environment. If you really care about the welfare of future generations, you’ll do what you can now, not tell them how they’re supposed to be.
The AI literature comes across as extremely silly, too.
What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: “Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century.”
Jesus. We don’t have these “intelligent machines” yet, and may not — I think AI researchers always exaggerate the imminence of their breakthroughs, and the simplicity of intelligence. So this guy is declaring that the big concern of this century, which is already 1/6th over, is an ethical crisis in dealing with non-existent entities? The comparison with religious authorities is even more apt.
I tell you what. Once we figure out how to coexist safely and ethically with our fellow human beings, then you can pontificate on how to coexist safely and ethically with imaginary androids.
