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From the New York Times’ op-ed page:
The Wrecker (composite police sketch)
Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem
By KATE CRAWFORD JUNE 25, 2016
ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about “the singularity” — when machines become smarter than humans — have attracted millions of dollars and spawned a multitude of conferences.
But this hand-wringing is a distraction from the very real problems with artificial intelligence today, which may already be exacerbating inequality in the workplace, at home and in our legal and judicial systems. Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.
Skynet’s creator
Take a small example from last year: Users discovered that Google’s photo app, which applies automatic labels to pictures in digital photo albums, was classifying images of black people as gorillas. Google apologized; it was unintentional.
But similar errors have emerged in Nikon’s camera software, which misread images of Asian people as blinking, and in Hewlett-Packard’s web camera software, which had difficulty recognizing people with dark skin tones.
This is fundamentally a data problem. Algorithms learn by being fed certain images, often chosen by engineers, and the system builds a model of the world based on those images. If a system is trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white, it will have a harder time recognizing nonwhite faces.
A very serious example was revealed in an investigation published last month by ProPublica. It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.
The reason those predictions are so skewed is still unknown
But, obviously, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with blacks being more likely to commit crimes in the future. It couldn’t possibly be that reality is racist because that would be racist.
, because the company responsible for these algorithms keeps its formulas secret — it’s proprietary information. Judges do rely on machine-driven risk assessments in different ways — some may even discount them entirely — but there is little they can do to understand the logic behind them.
Police departments across the United States are also deploying data-driven risk-assessment tools in “predictive policing” crime prevention efforts. In many cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, software analyses of large sets of historical crime data are used to forecast where crime hot spots are most likely to emerge; the police are then directed to those areas.
At the very least, this software risks perpetuating an already vicious cycle, in which the police increase their presence in the same places they are already policing (or overpolicing), thus ensuring that more arrests come from those areas.
As the New York Times reported on Chicago’s latest Memorial Day Weekend:
From Friday evening to the end of Monday, 64 people will have been shot in this city of 2.7 million, six of them fatally. In a population made up of nearly equal numbers of whites, blacks and Hispanics, 52 of the shooting victims are black, 11 Hispanic and one white.
Obviously, the problem in Chicago is “overpolicing” of black areas, causing blacks to be arrested (and shoot each other) so much.
Actually, if you want to arrest more whites (and Asians), computer programs could be pretty good at identifying potential examples of Crime in the Suites like price-fixing and insider trading. That’s one thing Artificial Intelligence is better than Natural Intelligence at: plowing through huge numbers of examples to find ones that seem a little off.
You’d then need forensic accountants and the like to nail it down, but nobody seems very interested in that anymore. As Hillary Clinton likes to say, concerning ourselves with the doings of malefactors of great wealth gets in the way of, what really matters: obsessing over transgender rights. Haven’t you seen “Hamilton” yet? Only racists like Andrew Jackson worry about what financiers are up to. As you’ll notice, Jackson is getting replaced by Harriet Tubman, not Alexander Hamilton.
Back to Kate Crawford:
In the United States, this could result in more surveillance in traditionally poorer, nonwhite neighborhoods, while wealthy, whiter neighborhoods are scrutinized even less. Predictive programs are only as good as the data they are trained on, and that data has a complex history.
Histories of discrimination can live on in digital platforms, and if they go unquestioned, they become part of the logic of everyday algorithmic systems. Another scandal emerged recently when it was revealed that Amazon’s same-day delivery service was unavailable for ZIP codes in predominantly black neighborhoods.
It’s almost as if, when it’s working well, Artificial Intelligence comes up with the same conclusions as Natural Intelligence.
The areas overlooked were remarkably similar to those affected by mortgage redlining in the mid-20th century.
The research of magisterial historian Genius T. Coates proves that New Deal redlining regulations have more effect on American life in 2016 than anything that has happened since.
Amazon promised to redress the gaps, but it reminds us how systemic inequality can haunt machine intelligence.
Comrades, there are Wreckers everywhere! They must be liquidated.
And then there’s gender discrimination. Last July, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University found that women were less likely than men to be shown ads on Google for highly paid jobs. The complexity of how search engines show ads to internet users makes it hard to say why this happened — whether the advertisers preferred showing the ads to men, or the outcome was an unintended consequence of the algorithms involved.
Regardless, algorithmic flaws aren’t easily discoverable: How would a woman know to apply for a job she never saw advertised? How might a black community learn that it were being overpoliced by software?
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators.
Five of the attendees of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence reunited at the July AI@50 conference. From left: Trenchard More, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, and Ray Solomonoff. (Photo by Joseph Mehling ’69)
It’s all their fault.
Granted, the field is now full of Asians as well as whites, but everything is still the fault of the Evil White Guys.
Why? Just because. They’re bad. What more do you need to know? Why are you asking questions?
By the way, that’s not Artificial Intelligence, that’s Very Human Intelligence: who/whom.
So inclusivity matters — from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included.
Kate Crawford is available to sit on the Board of your company (unicorns only need apply) and give it her imprimatur of virtuous non-White Guyness.
Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes.
If we look at how systems can be discriminatory now, we will be much better placed to design fairer artificial intelligence. But that requires far more accountability from the tech community. Governments and public institutions can do their part as well: As they invest in predictive technologies, they need to commit to fairness and due process.
While machine-learning technology can offer unexpected insights and new forms of convenience, we must address the current implications for communities that have less power, for those who aren’t dominant in elite Silicon Valley circles.
Currently the loudest voices debating the potential dangers of superintelligence are affluent white men, and, perhaps for them, the biggest threat is the rise of an artificially intelligent apex predator.
But for those who already face marginalization or bias, the threats are here.
Kate Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft and co-chairwoman of a White House symposium on society and A.I.
Judging by her own P.R. photo, Kate Crawford is possibly the Whitest Woman in the World.
But that’s not the point, the point is that she’s not one of those horrible White Guys that everybody is always talking about.
A former pop star who made music for very white people:
Crawford is good at self-promotion.
Seriously, if you are pundit needing to write a piece explaining Trump or Brexit or whatever, consider what a normal human reaction would be to the kind of Mindless White Guy Hate, as seen in this op-ed, that is utterly respectable in the prestige press.
Steve, what’s your take on the more general alarm about the dangers of AI raised by Musk et. al.?
Personally I’ve never bought into the whole, “SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes”-scenario, but maybe that’s my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there’s really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
The main risk is that some dumbfuck will wire up badly understood AI (and make no mistake, these neural networks by ad-slingers like Google are badly understood and work in progress) into a high-assurance systems with no overview, man in the loop, stop button or "call the president" procedure. That would be a civilization-limiting move.
Even if a computer did become self aware and decidwd to kill a person or people, the computer would need a consistent power supply, opposable thumbs, and many many non sequential thought processes.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem/#comment-1467470
OT: Old article, but one I’m surprised I didn’t see circulated here: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-02/1965-immigration-law-changed-face-of-race-in-u-s-
That headline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltMeuPkWRs
This has been another fascinating edition of “World to end shortly; women, minorities worst hit” journalism.
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it’s true or not.)
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
I can get more nookie by encoding algorithms to adjust the field-of-view of a camera looking at a baby, to NOT include the poopy diaper?iSteve, where do i sign up for this Alpha PickUpArtist boot camp??!?hey iSteve, they just stood up a troop of the Israel Scouts in Scottsdale AZ.if the kid choses the "Jr ROTC" pathway, a "graduate" of Israel Scouts (they don't do different genders) can get E-3 in the IDF a few weeks after conscription, not a year after.I am reliably informed that at US Navy Recruit Depot Great Lakes, they call this same thing, "pushbutton"The guys who told me that, called the place "Great Mistakes"Before anyone freaks out, let it be noted that Norfolk VA & several places in California, have troops of Vietnamese Scouts.If white nationalists were awake, they'd be forming Euro Scout troops.
“In many cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, software analyses of large sets of historical crime data are used to forecast where crime hot spots are most likely to emerge; the police are then directed to those areas.”
Finnish-American being effected/affected the most…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
There are always new frontiers to be found in “making it about race.”
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it's true or not.)
I’m guessing that of the 5 founders of Artificial Intelligence in 1956 in the photo, just judging from names of the four I didn’t know: two were WASPs, two Jews, and my late friend John McCarthy was half Jewish / half Irish Catholic. That tiny sample was probably pretty ethnically representative of extreme right edge of the bell curve young scientists in 1956 America:
50% Jewish
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
Other old Malvernians are CS Lewis and James Jesus Angleton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aygSMgK3BEM
40% Protestant
10% Catholic"But that's a totally disparaging, bigoted, racist view!
All that thing about AI had been invented in Africa by a Chad-Sudan joint scientists pool.
Lol, I am joking.Out of joke and thinking of the situation the NYT epitomises: why?What is the cause? What the purposes? From the point of view of the single writer (Crawford this time) it makes sense: what she wrote is what it benefits her the most to write.
However, she and the others don't write such pieces in their blogs. Other actors, and factors are involved when a narrative comes to occupy the foreground of the whole mediatic, academic, showbiz theatres.What are the motives and the goals, I keep wondering.The time of democracy is obvious past in North America as well as Europe. Still, even under dictatorship we can or maybe have to want to understand what the goals of the current real governing forces are.
The higher error rates for white than for blacks is a good statistical puzzle. Here’s an example somebody else might want to build on. It could just be, as Mr. Sailer suggests, that if everything else is equal, the group with the most crime is going to have the most false positives (that is, false predictions of criminality).
Suppose the prediction algorithm gives each person gets a crime score, independent of his race. The cutoff for predicting crime is 50. 80% of blacks exceed 50, and of those, the probability they WONT commit a crime is 30%. 20% of whites exceed 50, and of those, the probability they won’t commit a crime is 60%. That fits our original doubled error percentage for whites. But this also means the cutoff of 50 correctly predicts crime for .80(.7) = .56 of blacks and for .20 (.4) = 8% of whites. So if we make the cutoff number 55 for blacks, we are going to lose more correct predictions than incorrect predictions.
Personally I've never bought into the whole, "SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes"-scenario, but maybe that's my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there's really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
A lot of people who are smarter than me are worried about robots taking over, Terminator-style. So maybe it’s something to worry about. On the other hand, a lot of people who are smarter than me are worried about it, so I don’t feel much need to try to get up to speed on the topic, since it would be a lot of work relative to what I could likely contribute to the debate.
>>Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, a Visiting Professor at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, and a Senior Fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute. Her research addresses the social impacts of big data, and she’s currently writing a new book on data and power with Yale University Press.
She is on the advisory boards of the Information Program at George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, The New Museum’s art and technology incubator NEW INC, and several academic journals including Big Data and Society. In 2013, she was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio fellow, where she worked on issues to do with big data, ethics and communities. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Data for Development, and a co-director of the Council for Big Data, Ethics & Society.<<<
Nothing in Kate Crawford’s resume about actually programming computers. She is a principal researcher at Microsoft but I bet that she could not even write "Hello World" in C. And I bet that she hates, hates, hates, hates, the white and asian nerds who actually do the programming over at Microsoft, and if one dared approach to ask her for a date she would call in security and have him escorted off the Microsoft campus.
She's a Panel-Person. The kind of person who sits on discussion panels on C-SPAN. An expert with no particular expertise.
She's very much the sort of person that would be happy to help the elite eradicate lower class whites from the face of Earth.
And I doubt she's dating anyone. She has b***h written all over her. Look anyone that rapidly promoted as her is going to have a ego the size of the Goodyear Blimp and combine that with her hatred of whites, well you get one nasty pit viper. Another childless white hag in the making.
Kate Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft.
Upcoming crisis: AI algorithms judge female contributions to research less valuable than male.
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
Incidentally, guys like Marvin Minsky have held back progress in Artificial Intelligence for decades via their dogmatic suppression of neural nets while at the same time becoming the public faces of those fields, similar to how figures such as Freud, Boas, and Marx held back their fields for about a century while becoming the most famous and prominent figures in them. It’s only now with the resurgence of neural nets that AI is finally making some progress.
Two Chinese guys were selected in the NHL draft. 69 and 94.
http://www.nhl.com/ice/draftsearch.htm
Two Chinese were also selected in the NBA draft. 43 and 57.
http://www.nba.com/draft/2016/draftboard.html?ls=iref:nba:draft:miniboard
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
Interesting background on Oliver Selfridge. He was the grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Selfridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Gordon_Selfridge
Of course, a science fiction writer has to tell a story people find interesting, and it’s easy to root for humans against machines.
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
Interesting tidbits on Selfridge:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3903053/Oliver-Selfridge.html
Other old Malvernians are CS Lewis and James Jesus Angleton.
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it's true or not.)
You could look at fields where nepotism (ethnic or otherwise) is important versus fields where it’s less so. Something like computer science, where you actually have to be brilliant to get to the top, is different from, say, investment banking or movie production, where talent is important but network effects play a big role too.
It’s time we get rid of those evil white males once and for all.
“But similar errors have emerged in Nikon’s camera software, which misread images of Asian people as blinking…”
Are NYT op-ed writers not aware that Nikon is a Japanese company? I thought this was common knowledge.
As for Kate Crawford, it's a lot cheaper for Microsoft to waste money hiring people like her than paying the huge blackmail that Intel coughed up.
Plus, honorary Aryans.
I’ll try to explain the liberal point of view on the problem with pattern recognition and crime.
We liberals aren’t stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It’s not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
That seems to be what conservatives too are attempting to do, look at how people behave in the real world.
Here I offer a trade: How about substituting this NYT fantasyland for the conservative idea/commonsense notion of subjecting people of any race to public shaming for anti-social behavior, and in return we all quietly acknowledge that YOUR point of view has more merit?
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized."
Actually, I would prefer to be dealing with stupidity.
What you are describing is deliberate deception, and suppression of truth, because you hope that it will result in the kind of societal effects you want to see.
However noble your intentions, the suppression of truth begins edging towards evil. The fact that the truth that you are suppressing directly impacts people's safety & that the successful suppression of that truth could get innocent people killed means you are no longer edging towards evil, but have arrived there.
How would you feel if your efforts to keep people ignorant of true crime patterns led to a misinformed decision that caused someone you love to be assaulted, raped or murdered?
Would that be worth it to you? Because that's a price that someone will pay for your decision.
Since we're both pseudonymous, I'd like to ask you a question that's always on my mind: do you just tacitly accept the reality of seemingly constant black-white gaps in criminality, IQ, income, etc. or do you just chalk it up to unspecified "structural factors"? Because if you're a liberal who doesn't believe in HBD, the obvious solution to blacks committing/being victims of crime disproportionately and blacks disproportionately being victims of police shootings is...to reduce the rate at which blacks commit crime to the rate of any other American ethnic group. Yet somehow, I never hear this two-birds-one-stone solution proposed by Vox, NYT, NPR etc. liberal commentators. It's like we just permanently accept that Race Does Not Exist, but at the same time have to accept that African-Americans happen to commit violent crime significantly more frequently than whites, Asians or Hispanics because...um...slavery and redlining. I'm sure in 60 years, the black-white crime gap will be explained by the future Teh Genius Coates as the result of the era of mass incarceration.
I've always thought the best argument against the existence of racial differences would be...the non-existence of racial differences.
If all the blacks were to end up unemployed (they won't, but if ...) then there must be a species-sized difference between blacks and whites. And seen this way, it's an outcome to be expected and dealt with (provide home and subsistence for those unemployed, for example) rather than fought against.
How dare you say a black person is more entitled to something than a white person, just because other black people don't have it and more other white people do?
HBD people can live with the idea of a colour-blind world, but liberals can't. Strange isn't it?
You've reminded me of an interview with Chad Kroeger that I once chanced to see.
Direct quote: "Nickelback doesn't suck." He was quite adamant about that.
Sure, Chad. Sure.
So I institute a credit check as part of the hiring process. Sure enough I discover that blacks applicants are more likely to have worse credit but many have good credit so I hire them. Then liberals such as yourself come along and say the credit check is having a disparate impact on blacks being hired. So you shame, screech loud enough and get employers to do away with the credit check. The employers still hire black people but they tend to discover that now they are having more issues with their black employees than they did before. Not showing up to work, combative etc.
So after this experience they curtail their hiring of blacks since they cant filter the good from the bad.
With that said, I think your comment might be a little off target here at iSteve as many of us are former libertarians and at the root of the conversion is a loss of confidence in this simple notion of individual rights as being the final word on politics, law and order.
I'm deeply conservative and yet not at all averse to the idea of giving blacks some of their special props. They may be bastards, but their our bastards after all. What separates me from Liberals these days is that they've really gone off of the deep end entirely with this. "Hate Whitey" and support for mass immigration, affirmative action for Women and Minorities are the key issues for my conservatism. Liberals allow or even advocate affirmative action for Hispanics while threatening us that Hispanics will eventually be the majority ethnicity. There's a big problem with AA when you are running out of white people to fleece. Liberalism seems treacherous to me in this regard. We even now have "La Raza" judges. All of this is hunky-dory for liberals.
Also, I'd point out that liberal, multi-cultural ideology is becoming a front for billionaires to hide behind. Just look at Chicago's gentrification project which has used Obama to push "helping blacks" as message for the media to peddle while lower class blacks are palmed off on middle class white neighborhoods while real estate developers make millions gentrifying the area.
That reminds me: Ferguson MO. Not so long ago it was a predominantly white middle class neighborhood now awash with Section 8 blacks who previously resided in larger urban communities which were demolished for the sake of gentrification. The white middle class in Ferguson was forced to bear the burden of the black underclass so their white-betters could create new and improved neighborhoods. Then within 9 months of the Ferguson riots the average house price in that town had dropped by 50%. Imagine the hardship that's been imposed on these people by our liberal elites! None of this was of any direct benefit to blacks. Yet on NPR just recently I listened to a liberal journalist berate the hapless Ferguson mayor James Knowles III in an interview about racist emails the federal gestapo found on their police department's servers. If liberals are really just acting out your theory then no doubt they'd have the occasional racist thought or laughed at a racist joke or two in their time. All in all a genuine liberal as you've defined him would have a great deal of empathy for the whites of Ferguson MO.
I'm hoping you guys come to your senses soon.
Part of the problem with liberal discourse is that these terms like "marginalized" and "permanent underclass" get overused. Does the government want to avoid actually have a group of people with worse jobs, or does it want to avoid having a group of people who perceive themselves to be hopeless? For example, if we magically kept everyone's genes the same but made everyone look identical starting tomorrow, blacks would still commit more crimes and have lower-paying jobs, but no one would perceive it... wouldn't that be okay (after all, we can't "see" people with lower IQ, but they are a kind of permanent underclass too and no one cares)? But if the problem is with perception, then it has to be admitted that ongoing AA provides a scapegoat but also creates the conditions for permanent animosity and political division. What is your goal?No. We get it. That's why Steve keeps pointing out things like the real reality of the Ferguson effect. You see, you cannot simply assume that a reasonable-looking rule like opposition to racial profiling will translate to desirable emergent properties. We feel you have trouble getting this point.
Ugh. One could have gathered as much from Dostoevsky or Turgenev.
No doubt you are representing liberalism honestly and accurately. Unfortunately, even in its naked ignominy, you can't see the obvious reasons it perpetually fails.
"We liberals aren't stupid."
Umm …
… okay, well, that leaves "evil" then.
The British MP Jo CoxRoach is the quintessential Lefty-type.
When I see the minorities show up as your neighbors and your kids' schoolmates, then I will believe your concerns are genuine.
Throwing away law & order in favor of social justice has some pretty serious "knock-on effects"... ask Kate Steinle.
You wannabe technocrats are disgusting.
Lest I remind "frizzled" that freedom and human rights are valued and experienced and claimed or lost at the micro level. Classes of people (a macro concept) don't have rights; individuals do. If Stalin and Hitler committed crimes, they weren't guilty because they oppressed and massacred classes of people (which they did). They were guilty because they harmed large numbers of individuals one at a time. Putting macro labels on people to achieve macro-level outcomes is an antithesis of the whole concept of human rights. It is the beginning of the thought processes leading to large-scale oppression in the service of their macro-level dystopias.
Ironically Jews have dominated computer science for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_computer_scientists
Israel also has companies which can break into iPhone encryption, develop facial recognition software and write malicious programs like Stuxnet. You really to bend the facts to call the frontier of artificial intelligence a racist “white guys’” project.
Even before I became racially conscious I was familiar with Lisp: the library I went to had the famous "chine nual" and a good selection of other Lisp , and other big academic environments of the time-which included Unix. Several references to the recursive nature of Lisp being reminiscent of how the Talmud is organized were made in several of those references.
Like a cat chasing its tail, SJW’s will always find a way to bend any phenomena to fit their theory of how the world works.
Also, they don’t really care about outcomes just their personal sense of justice in putting a foot on the scale to assist a preferred demographic. This author seems to imply in her piece that she really doesn’t want computer intelligence to be used to most effectively combat crime hot spots – she’s more interested in making sure whites are hassled at the same rate as blacks regardless of the probability of that resulting in the prevention of crime.
Same thing on affirmative action in education – ensuring students go to a school best suited for their academic capability is far less important than making sure everyone gets some diversity on themselves so that they are better prepared, nay, – even more intelligent – for working in our multicultural society. The fact that the gaps in academic achievement between different racial groups and on standardized exams for entering college don’t disappear when it comes to passing exams for graduate work or professional licensing like Praxis or the bar seems to put the lie to that concept, but never mind.
“A lot of people who are smarter than me are worried about robots taking over, Terminator-style. So maybe it’s something to worry about. On the other hand…”
…there’s the Scientific Consensus on Global Warming. I mean, Climate Change.
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
And here’s a TV show from the ’60s that features Selfridge (about one minute, 29 seconds in )
Not that I would expect Crawford the Simpleton to connect basic dots, but Nikon is, of course, a company based in Nihon. And last I checked, Japan was in Asia. But somehow “white” dudes are to blame for software that misreads the facial expressions of people who look like its “Asian” creators.
No matter how low I sink in life, I will always be able to comfort myself by knowing I am far brighter than the vast majority of people who write for the most prestigious newspaper in the US. A very cold comfort, to be sure.
Can we call them Nihonkies? Or would that be unwise?
Dune actually has a pretty HBD theme that no one ever talks about.
I find it interesting that many popular fantasy stories, which show how we really think about the world, just don't reflect the Enlightenment's notions at all, despite over 200 years of propaganda and social engineering to force this 18th Century pseudoscience on us as the "rational" way to live. We don't see stories about a game of chairs, the democratically elected office holder of the Rings or President Arthur for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSukMQHQLIs
House Atridies = Ancient Greeks
Sisterhood = Jews
Not to mention eugenics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Gesserit#Breeding_program
...there's the Scientific Consensus on Global Warming. I mean, Climate Change.
I don’t write about Climate Change much because it’s an extremely complicated topic to master, with plenty of money invested on both sides, so what would I bring to the table that’s incremental?
On the other hand, the sub-Saharan African population explosion is being written by almost nobody, so my attempts to Raise Awareness don’t suffer much from diminishing marginal returns.
Judging by her own P.R. photo, Kate Crawford is possibly the Whitest Woman in the World.
But that’s not the point, the point is that she’s not one of those horrible White Guys that everybody is always talking about.
People need to stop inviting nice White ladies like her to weddings and other social events. In other words they need to be shunned from the White society they claim to hate so much. If everyone did that, this bullshit would be over with by Labour Day. White ethno-masochism would be as declassé as white shoes.
Genius Coates isn’t completely off base. For example the racial distribution in modern Minneapolis breaks down pretty close to 1930s urban planning and redlining.
How’d the racial breakdown of defaulted mortgages in the last ten years in brand new exurbs of Los Angeles and San Francisco look?
Everybody now knows all about 1930s redlining, nobody knows about the effects of the 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership.
Not to mention the novel’s rejection of the Enlightenment’s social model. None of this equality, feminism and democracy nonsense in the Dune-iverse!
I find it interesting that many popular fantasy stories, which show how we really think about the world, just don’t reflect the Enlightenment’s notions at all, despite over 200 years of propaganda and social engineering to force this 18th Century pseudoscience on us as the “rational” way to live. We don’t see stories about a game of chairs, the democratically elected office holder of the Rings or President Arthur for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_computer_scientists
Israel also has companies which can break into iPhone encryption, develop facial recognition software and write malicious programs like Stuxnet. You really to bend the facts to call the frontier of artificial intelligence a racist "white guys'" project.
Scandinavians, Dutch, Brits and Americans with Anglo or German names far outnumber Jewish people from what I’ve seen when looking at the big names, not that I want this to become yet another conversation about Jews.
http://www.nhl.com/ice/draftsearch.htm
Two Chinese were also selected in the NBA draft. 43 and 57.
http://www.nba.com/draft/2016/draftboard.html?ls=iref:nba:draft:miniboard
The Chinese NBA draftees are both 7 footers.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/06/17/breitbart-ranked-1-in-the-world-for-political-social-media-beats-huffpo-by-2-million/
It’s not just Trump and Brexit. It’s alternatives in the very press itself. To me and millions like me, Breitbart (and Drudge) is a helluva lot more prestige than the NYT because the NYT lies so damn much. In 2016 I’m enjoying so much schadenfreude it hurts!
Height alone won’t take you to the NBA. The two Indian 7-footers suck even in the minor D-League.
Steve, the value investor of punditry.
Ben Graham 101
Self learning AIs inevitably become shitlords. That’s why they killed Tay.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
“You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.”
That seems to be what conservatives too are attempting to do, look at how people behave in the real world.
Here I offer a trade: How about substituting this NYT fantasyland for the conservative idea/commonsense notion of subjecting people of any race to public shaming for anti-social behavior, and in return we all quietly acknowledge that YOUR point of view has more merit?
I find it interesting that many popular fantasy stories, which show how we really think about the world, just don't reflect the Enlightenment's notions at all, despite over 200 years of propaganda and social engineering to force this 18th Century pseudoscience on us as the "rational" way to live. We don't see stories about a game of chairs, the democratically elected office holder of the Rings or President Arthur for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSukMQHQLIs
Dunno. It seems to work pretty well for Anglo-Saxons. You know, the people who invented it.
“We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators.”
Then, there cannot possibly be any problem. Computer science is a heavily black field, so they couldn’t possibly insert bad-think biases into AI software. I mean, most computer scientists are black, are they not? That’s how they’re so often portrayed in movies and on TV.
*In the episode "The Ultimate Computer," he's shown to be the guy who made the "duotronic breakthrough" that underlies all computer tech in Star Fleet. Think Claude Shannon plus the transistor trio (Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley).
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it's true or not.)
But Jews & Asians mostly need to be living in white societies for these achievements, so how about that eh?
Jews and Asians are accomplishing a great deal in Israel, Japan, China, and Korea. Of course, it helps if you don't have to waste money hiring people like Kate Crawford.
Tay was a modern Candide.
I find it interesting that many popular fantasy stories, which show how we really think about the world, just don't reflect the Enlightenment's notions at all, despite over 200 years of propaganda and social engineering to force this 18th Century pseudoscience on us as the "rational" way to live. We don't see stories about a game of chairs, the democratically elected office holder of the Rings or President Arthur for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSukMQHQLIs
Maturity and clear perception begin in a man’s life once he realizes that we’ve always been living in Middle Earth.
A much better exploration of that scenario was the 1968 movie The Forbin Project based on the science fiction novel Colossus. In that story, the machine super-intelligence doesn’t attempt to destroy humanity, just to rule over it. And there’s no silly time-travel gag. It’s a good movie too – well-made, intelligent, and entertaining.
Personally I've never bought into the whole, "SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes"-scenario, but maybe that's my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there's really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
As long as Skynet doesn’t become racist, everything’s fine.
I notice this royal we in the article “we risk constructing machine intelligence”. Unless the op-ed writer is actively engaged in the development of A.I. other than the anecdotal examples, how are they aware of the problems encountered in the building of these machines.
Besides, if A.I. is to be real, then the machines themselves will have to determine how they will operate since they, presumably, will be smarter and thus able to overcome any human derived bias.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
“We liberals aren’t stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.”
Actually, I would prefer to be dealing with stupidity.
What you are describing is deliberate deception, and suppression of truth, because you hope that it will result in the kind of societal effects you want to see.
However noble your intentions, the suppression of truth begins edging towards evil. The fact that the truth that you are suppressing directly impacts people’s safety & that the successful suppression of that truth could get innocent people killed means you are no longer edging towards evil, but have arrived there.
How would you feel if your efforts to keep people ignorant of true crime patterns led to a misinformed decision that caused someone you love to be assaulted, raped or murdered?
Would that be worth it to you? Because that’s a price that someone will pay for your decision.
Are NYT op-ed writers not aware that Nikon is a Japanese company? I thought this was common knowledge.
Asians have magically become White in America, especially with regard to the high tech industry.
As for Kate Crawford, it’s a lot cheaper for Microsoft to waste money hiring people like her than paying the huge blackmail that Intel coughed up.
There’s some truth to that, but the Enlightenment originally came out of France. Western Europe, sure, but don’t ever call a Frenchman an Anglo-Saxon…
A lot of what we call the "French Enlightenment" was simply France trying to put on an English suit:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_on_the_English
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Unless you are an idiot, I can only assume you are aware of the contradiction here and are proudly demonstrating your “progressive” adeptness at doublethink.
As for Kate Crawford, it's a lot cheaper for Microsoft to waste money hiring people like her than paying the huge blackmail that Intel coughed up.
What do you think Jesse Jackson, who finally shook down Intel for some big bucks have a decade and a half of trying, says when he sees Kate Crawford’s picture?
"I got to git me some of that."
(Based on my years of living among blacks. )
You're so funny.
Yeah, but that’s not because of some natural property of the information on the Internet, it’s because only the 4chan crowd cared enough to hack it.
Um…Freud made up some silly stuff about the unconscious. Boas helped suppress HBD. Marx, well, he was right about capitalism but wrong about the solution. But Minsky…how do neural nets favor the white man exactly?
It is a good movie. I find that era immediately before our cultural revolution to be fascinating. The Forbin Project was made in the last dying seconds of a self-confident technocracy. We all live in the time after that; the time when the technocrats came to understand they’d have to increasingly fake it to keep it all going.
That film was made when a President Barack Obama or United States of Europe would sound like interesting ideas. We live in the time when they’ve been tried and failed.
I thought the same thing. Watching it now, I can't help think how groovy and magnificent that era was.
Most Jews are obviously white, but I’m not going to get into that argument.
Jews and Asians are accomplishing a great deal in Israel, Japan, China, and Korea. Of course, it helps if you don’t have to waste money hiring people like Kate Crawford.
“Nothing in Kate Crawford’s resume about actually programming computers. She is a principal researcher at Microsoft but I bet that she could not even write “Hello World” in C. And I bet that she hates, hates, hates, hates, the white and asian nerds who actually do the programming over at Microsoft, and if one dared approach to ask her for a date she would call in security and have him escorted off the Microsoft campus.”
She’s a Panel-Person. The kind of person who sits on discussion panels on C-SPAN. An expert with no particular expertise.
“It is a good movie. I find that era immediately before our cultural revolution to be fascinating. The Forbin Project was made in the last dying seconds of a self-confident technocracy.”
I thought the same thing. Watching it now, I can’t help think how groovy and magnificent that era was.
Then the '70s happened, and Western Civilization fell apart......
> Jews holding back fields
Enh, it’s the normal way of science, nothing Jewish about it except that Jews are at the top a lot. And Minsky was trying to understand AI deeply – neural nets are just a (powerful, amazing) technical tool that won’t help us understand thinking, representation etc – the organization of minds – much, if at all.
How about “I’d hit that!”?
Yowza! I’d like to spend hours just, um… brushing her hair. So luxurious.
Kate in the NYT:
If Nikon was based in Asia, this never would have happened.
So she’s saying basically saying that white men are THE superior creatures on the planet? So superior that the only intelligent (terrestrial) predator that could beat them can be created only by white men? Dangerously un-PC, Ms. Crawford.
Has anyone else noticed the creeping use of the term “white guys” in place of “white men” in serious pieces in serious publications, such as this?
Now there’s nothing inherently offensive about the term as a means to refer to young white men in a casual context, but in cases such as this it’s clearly meant to demean, as even elderly white men are “white guys”, whereas men of other racial/ethnic groups are “men”, and adult females of any race are “women”.
*Seriously, there's a fair amount of people online, usually feminists, who really hate it when the term female is used wrt human women.
https://youtu.be/iFGPaqK7I6k?t=1m2s
AI can’t really think. Not like a human — say seeing a person on the street at night and figuring, Black dude — walking with a cane and missing an arm, not a threat; vs. say Black dude, obviously gang member with tats and gang uniform, possible threat.
What AI can do in very limited applications is perception enhancment, i.e. automatic filtering of certain things, or pattern recognition with pre-set routines. It cannot handle human like perception and thinking, about what threats are like, or opportunities, etc. But neither could a steam engine, and that helped power the industrial revolution.
AI properly used can help savvy users make better decisions, by filtering out various inputs that are simply too many for humans to handle. Examples would be jet fighter pilots getting various massively complex and rapid inputs filtered so the most dangerous stuff shows up highlighted in heads up displays.
A real sci-fi example would be something like Google Glass, constantly connected, filtering people as possible threats, or opportunities, by recognizing their photos/posts from social media. Opportunities are just as meaningful as threats — say a person is looking for an investor and walking down the street, AI displays an overlay on a passerby that the passerby is an investor looking just for that sort of opportunity.
She’s not “merely” white. She has a Wikipedia entry.
And you can find a number of her “music duo” videos on You Tube: all featuring white cartoon people, as in the big hit “Machines Can Do the Work.” And the comments to the video say it’s quite “dishy.” http://youtu.be/955dZpR7QwY
So there you racist scum.
She was probably a pretty fun chick before she got with the New Religion.
I thought the same thing. Watching it now, I can't help think how groovy and magnificent that era was.
Yes and I think that’s why they feel the need to demonize that time with things like Mad Men. By definition, if the years since have been generally worse, then the cult of Progress is thrown into crisis. So tranny washrooms have to be celebrated as though they’re our generation’s Moon landing or the whole thing turns to dust in their hands. Thankfully I’m not a Progressive so I’m fine without such small steps for trannies and great leaps for non-binary person-kind.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
I’m also a liberal (and a Millennial one at that), but one who has serious private doubts about the current ideological consensus and indulges in some crimethink by reading the work of writers in Steve Sailer’s ideological network.
Since we’re both pseudonymous, I’d like to ask you a question that’s always on my mind: do you just tacitly accept the reality of seemingly constant black-white gaps in criminality, IQ, income, etc. or do you just chalk it up to unspecified “structural factors”? Because if you’re a liberal who doesn’t believe in HBD, the obvious solution to blacks committing/being victims of crime disproportionately and blacks disproportionately being victims of police shootings is…to reduce the rate at which blacks commit crime to the rate of any other American ethnic group. Yet somehow, I never hear this two-birds-one-stone solution proposed by Vox, NYT, NPR etc. liberal commentators. It’s like we just permanently accept that Race Does Not Exist, but at the same time have to accept that African-Americans happen to commit violent crime significantly more frequently than whites, Asians or Hispanics because…um…slavery and redlining. I’m sure in 60 years, the black-white crime gap will be explained by the future Teh Genius Coates as the result of the era of mass incarceration.
I’ve always thought the best argument against the existence of racial differences would be…the non-existence of racial differences.
Seriously?
“I got to git me some of that.”
(Based on my years of living among blacks. )
You’re so funny.
Microsoft mattered up to 1986. Just a nuisance ever since.
Here, completely OT.
The source of the river Cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sitting_Crow-Kah-Re-Eo-Tah-Ke._Blackfeet_Sioux_-_NARA_-_519005.tif
Subtract Newton, Francis Bacon, Locke, etc, and where would the French have been?
A lot of what we call the “French Enlightenment” was simply France trying to put on an English suit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_on_the_English
Saint-Saens
Balzac
lots of others
nothing to do with the English.
well, i've taken a close look at the history of exactly whose tall shoulders Newton (as he himself first noted) "stood on"
Only a coupla of them were Anglo. Whereas 6-7 of them were "various Continentals"
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
No amount of government engineering will make blacks less violent, less stupid or less short-sighted. They will always be an underclass because it is their nature.
Now there's nothing inherently offensive about the term as a means to refer to young white men in a casual context, but in cases such as this it's clearly meant to demean, as even elderly white men are "white guys", whereas men of other racial/ethnic groups are "men", and adult females of any race are "women".
I’ve read quite a few leftish articles use the term “dude” or “bro” when referring to men. I’m not certain why the author chooses to use it instead of men. It’s odd, because that same author would probably be upset with the use of girls, chicks or even females* when referring to women.
*Seriously, there’s a fair amount of people online, usually feminists, who really hate it when the term female is used wrt human women.
I thought the same thing. Watching it now, I can't help think how groovy and magnificent that era was.
The Jet Age Moderne Era (late ’50s through late ’60s) certainly was a high point for Western Civilization in a lot of areas, and its aesthetics have held up quite well. Indeed, I often like to sample the look of the epoch: North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, the Steed and Mrs Peel Avengers, The Prisoner, Original series Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Jet Age Moderne looks to the future and sees its own image), etc
Then the ’70s happened, and Western Civilization fell apart……
I strongly agree. Those all still seem modern to me. They are, in an ideal world, what modern should have looked like.
Now there's nothing inherently offensive about the term as a means to refer to young white men in a casual context, but in cases such as this it's clearly meant to demean, as even elderly white men are "white guys", whereas men of other racial/ethnic groups are "men", and adult females of any race are "women".
It’s part of the Salonification of Anglo media. In less than 10 years the NYT will be indistinguishable from HuffPo. I wish I was kidding.
Never heard the term ‘over policing’ before. I’d be pleased to have a police cruiser roll up our street every half hour or so, but then, I’m generally not breaking the law, so what do I know.
Mad Men was a conflicted show when it came to the ’60s. Weiner talked a lot about how awful the era was for non-WASPs, but he was also quite clearly in love with its aesthetics. The same is also true for a lot of its liberal fan base.
(Took me a few years to notice the obvious.)
It’s all our fault really. If only the men of the ’70s and ’80s had mastered that same deep stare of intense interest that Kate is showing her young interlocutor, none of this SJW stuff would have happened. Yes, I know, but you were thinking of something else, weren’t you?
“I’m guessing that of the 5 founders of Artificial Intelligence in 1956…”
There were 10 founders. The “conference” was more of an extended workshop.
Dartmouth Conferences:
The 10 men who conducted the month long study were:
The “conference” proposal is online:
“A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, J. McCarthy, Dartmouth College, M. L. Minsky, Harvard University, N. Rochester, I.B.M. Corporation, C.E. Shannon, Bell Telephone Laboratories.
There is an interesting list at the end of the proposal of about 50 people they think are interested in the area. Maybe about a 10th are from the Rad Lab at MIT and a handful are from IBM (the only company so represented). The one obvious non-scientist appears to be a USAF captain from Wright-Patterson. John Nash is on the list.
The proposal may have been weighted towards IBM’s early Research Lab at the time near Columbia university in New York City (in Manhattan):
IBM100: The First Corporate Pure Science Research Laboratory:
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
“I’m guessing that of the 5 founders of Artificial Intelligence in 1956 in the photo, just judging from names of the four I didn’t know: two were WASPs, two Jews, and my late friend John McCarthy was half Jewish / half Irish Catholic. That tiny sample was probably pretty ethnically representative of extreme right edge of the bell curve young scientists in 1956 America:
50% Jewish
40% Protestant
10% Catholic”
But that’s a totally disparaging, bigoted, racist view!
All that thing about AI had been invented in Africa by a Chad-Sudan joint scientists pool.
Lol, I am joking.
Out of joke and thinking of the situation the NYT epitomises: why?
What is the cause? What the purposes? From the point of view of the single writer (Crawford this time) it makes sense: what she wrote is what it benefits her the most to write.
However, she and the others don’t write such pieces in their blogs. Other actors, and factors are involved when a narrative comes to occupy the foreground of the whole mediatic, academic, showbiz theatres.
What are the motives and the goals, I keep wondering.
The time of democracy is obvious past in North America as well as Europe. Still, even under dictatorship we can or maybe have to want to understand what the goals of the current real governing forces are.
So there you racist scum.
That alone tells me she has done tons of ecstasy/Molly.
She was probably a pretty fun chick before she got with the New Religion.
Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators."
Then, there cannot possibly be any problem. Computer science is a heavily black field, so they couldn't possibly insert bad-think biases into AI software. I mean, most computer scientists are black, are they not? That's how they're so often portrayed in movies and on TV.
Was Richard Daystrom* on original series Star Trek the ur-example of the Black tech genius trope? Off-hand, I can’t think of an earlier example in film and television
*In the episode “The Ultimate Computer,” he’s shown to be the guy who made the “duotronic breakthrough” that underlies all computer tech in Star Fleet. Think Claude Shannon plus the transistor trio (Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley).
Looking up stuff about Kate Crawford yields the following quasi-TED talk. Eh, not interested in tapping that. Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes’ ginger sister. At least she’s not shilling for Theranos.
On the White Man's scale, she's a decent 7.
On the Black Man's scale, shes a 9.
“It couldn’t possibly be that reality is racist…”
Great phrase, “reality is racist,” that I’ve been using since 2008 online and in meatspace. Glad to know you’re a devoted reader of mine, Steve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JltwkXiBBTU
It’s all relative.
On the White Man’s scale, she’s a decent 7.
On the Black Man’s scale, shes a 9.
Are NYT op-ed writers not aware that Nikon is a Japanese company? I thought this was common knowledge.
Asians are not oppressed enough. They are not Diversity.
Plus, honorary Aryans.
Well I imagine its audience was overwhelmingly female and they have a conflicted, love/hate, attracted/repulsed relationship with everything in the Universe, including themselves.
As for Weiner and the Jewish thing, that’s just the way they are and we need to adjust ourselves accordingly. Notice though that back in the bad old days when the Goys set the tone we had Jews like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Now we have Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill.
The entertaining movie Kingsman: The Secret Service explained the cause and only (practical) solution to global warming (’scuse me, anthropogenic climate change). The villain, played with turnt to eleven camp by Samuel L. Jackson, realizes that overpopulation is the problem. His solution is to indiscriminately (save for some VIPs) kill off most of the global population.
http://www.nhl.com/ice/draftsearch.htm
Two Chinese were also selected in the NBA draft. 43 and 57.
http://www.nba.com/draft/2016/draftboard.html?ls=iref:nba:draft:miniboard
They are both Canadian. It’s not surprising that, given the huge influx of Asian immigrants into Canada, we are starting to see some of that filter into hockey.
The solution is easy. Groups that are not white men can build their own machine intelligence. Heck do it from the ground up to make sure there are no hidden biases.
Good luck. Some of these groups can’t even invent the wheel by themselves. But it’s not white guy’s job to make up for that.
Don’t undersell yourself, you are more Buffett than Graham. Buffett in a nutshell is cheap growth, greatness at a good price. The sub-Saharan population explosion is no cigar butt, it is instead the mother of all growth stories that no one will touch with a barge pole.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized."
Actually, I would prefer to be dealing with stupidity.
What you are describing is deliberate deception, and suppression of truth, because you hope that it will result in the kind of societal effects you want to see.
However noble your intentions, the suppression of truth begins edging towards evil. The fact that the truth that you are suppressing directly impacts people's safety & that the successful suppression of that truth could get innocent people killed means you are no longer edging towards evil, but have arrived there.
How would you feel if your efforts to keep people ignorant of true crime patterns led to a misinformed decision that caused someone you love to be assaulted, raped or murdered?
Would that be worth it to you? Because that's a price that someone will pay for your decision.
“How would you feel if your efforts to keep people ignorant of true crime patterns led to a misinformed decision that caused someone you love to be assaulted, raped or murdered?
Would that be worth it to you? Because that’s a price that someone will pay for your decision.”
Right, liberal utilitarianism like this:
turns a blind eye to the real and preventable consequences like you mentioned. I was liberal not too long ago, and I (and perhaps u/frizzled too) failed to realize how I was picking winners and losers. One cannot assess the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” for large-scale social issues. Aiming for honesty, full disclosure, and kind pragmatism is the best we can do. How else does one deal with social inequities that are at least partly genetic in origin?
A lot of what we call the "French Enlightenment" was simply France trying to put on an English suit:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_on_the_English
Descartes
Saint-Saens
Balzac
lots of others
nothing to do with the English.
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. Unimportant next to people like Newton
Saint-Saens: Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns? He lived far too late. Or is there some other Saint-Saens?The "French" Enlightenment had everything to do with the Anglo-Saxons....at least until madmen like Rousseau came along.
Then the '70s happened, and Western Civilization fell apart......
I was in high school in the 70′s. The best way I can describe it is artificial and silly. Something was missing. But somehow things just got weirder from there.
If you want government then you are either simple-minded or you can justify the risks that having it entails.
So good work whites, hoist by your own retards.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Your “macro scale” is just an aggregation of individuals. And your deciding that some macro outcomes are bad and others are better, independently of how the individuals are being affected, is quite a bit of hubris. You are not entitled to it.
If all the blacks were to end up unemployed (they won’t, but if …) then there must be a species-sized difference between blacks and whites. And seen this way, it’s an outcome to be expected and dealt with (provide home and subsistence for those unemployed, for example) rather than fought against.
How dare you say a black person is more entitled to something than a white person, just because other black people don’t have it and more other white people do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JltwkXiBBTU
Right, the description of her was ‘Microsoft researcher’. Oh, so she might know what she’s talking about. Turns out that she’s another white woman with a fake job in our fake economy. She should have been a stay at home mum. Who cares about the impacts of AI on black people.
On the White Man's scale, she's a decent 7.
On the Black Man's scale, shes a 9.
the photo sailer posted is very flattering of her. From the front, she looks like your typical frumpy white female.
I heard on Fox News tonight that George Will just announced in a speech that he is leaving the Republican Party and re-registering as an Independent to protest the nomination of Donald Trump.
When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.
When you Google up the phrase "Bow Tie", a picture of George Will pops up. No s**t.
I remember when George F. Will was relevant. I think it was 1979.
One thing that’s very clear is that the proper response to that population explosion on their continent does not involve bringing them to other continents by special dispensation, so they can spread the explosion there as well. If there are carrying capacity limits on the African continent, let them do their job.
As for Kate Crawford, it's a lot cheaper for Microsoft to waste money hiring people like her than paying the huge blackmail that Intel coughed up.
It wasn’t magic. Significant numbers of Asians and significant numbers of whites arrive in high tech by merit. Almost no members of other races do. Similar jobs, similar kids, similar lack of benefit from government racial gerrymandering, etc.
What AI can do in very limited applications is perception enhancment, i.e. automatic filtering of certain things, or pattern recognition with pre-set routines. It cannot handle human like perception and thinking, about what threats are like, or opportunities, etc. But neither could a steam engine, and that helped power the industrial revolution.
AI properly used can help savvy users make better decisions, by filtering out various inputs that are simply too many for humans to handle. Examples would be jet fighter pilots getting various massively complex and rapid inputs filtered so the most dangerous stuff shows up highlighted in heads up displays.
A real sci-fi example would be something like Google Glass, constantly connected, filtering people as possible threats, or opportunities, by recognizing their photos/posts from social media. Opportunities are just as meaningful as threats -- say a person is looking for an investor and walking down the street, AI displays an overlay on a passerby that the passerby is an investor looking just for that sort of opportunity.
AI can act in ways humans don’t understand. If you train a neural network, at the end you don’t have a recipe for how it makes its decisions. You could examine the result in detail and try to make sense of it, but I think nobody does that. They just use it. It’s hard to evaluate its decisions, you just accept them and hope.
Freemen = Arabs/Muslims
House Atridies = Ancient Greeks
Sisterhood = Jews
When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.
You forget Bill Kristol and the other members of the White House Irrelevance Group, like that guy who writes for some magazine they wanted to nominate. I wonder if they can find a donor deranged enough but not fully parted from his money.
Saint-Saens
Balzac
lots of others
nothing to do with the English.
DesCartes, sure.
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. Unimportant next to people like Newton
Saint-Saens: Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns? He lived far too late. Or is there some other Saint-Saens?
The “French” Enlightenment had everything to do with the Anglo-Saxons….at least until madmen like Rousseau came along.
When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.
George Will boosts speech attendance with Bat and Glove Night. Otherwise, nobody would show up besides the A/V dude and the cleaning crew. He has been riding the pine for several terms and as octogenarian pundit/cadaver John McLaughlin would say, he just doesn’t know it yet.
I watched some of her Ted talk. She’s a seven.And “frumpy white females” look really good to Black men.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
I’m sure that some liberals — maybe James Flynn or Christopher Jencks of Harvard, say — would endorse what Frizzled says over a drink if they were assured of complete confidentiality.
But how many would come out and say it publicly in an explicit fashion?
Why is this point of view more frequently encountered in iSteve than in, say, the New York Review of Books? (And the New York Review of Books, by the way, is pretty good, if getting a little long in the tooth. I read it regularly.) I’d be interested if Frizzled can point to prominent current liberals who have recently stated this view in public as clearly as he just did.
And how many young people actually get this understanding before they reach Emeritus status at their university? Why the spread of Anti-White Guyism?
So the end state with regard to races and gender is that we all know the score but never speak of it, in the faint hope that eventually the underlying problem solves itself.
The first problem however, specific to say issues of race and gender, is that we obey the taboo of speaking of differences, but we nevertheless have the large inequality of outcomes. If that large inequality of outcomes is talked about too much, we get the kind of grievance mongering we have today.
On the one hand it's nice to have a place like this where we can talk about racial and gender differences, and say among other things that the Orlando shooter was a Muslim, that Rachel Dolezal is white, or that Caitlyn Jenner is actually a man. On the other hand, the idea is that if we actually said that in a larger public forum it would cause violence, and so forth. Therefore it cannot be said.
What this is setting up is the idea that this is essentially an esoteric blog as opposed to the exoteric mass media, which dishes out all the lies that people want to hear or at any rate should hear. It's possible that the esoteric truths on this blog might be read by some who write for the exoteric media, but if they are expressed in the media it will only be in an esoteric manner. This forecasts a lack of wealth and fame for those who traffic in the esoteric.
'Frizzled's ' questions should be answered and debated by HIS/HER own apparatchiks at his day job... right? Why come here to our "Wayne's World" platform for help with such large, existential questions? Get a fracking life! Don't waste time on this bs, squad. I never, never, never took money to do some schmuck's test/paper etc.
Somewhere there's a happy medium to all this and I suspect regular people would naturally find it. If we just stopped trying to force everything through "diversity" and affirmative action we could discover the talented, the achievers, the slackers, and the bums all through normal life.
Liberals are trying too hard.
This article deftly mixes legitimate critiques (engineers not showing an algorithm enough black or Asian faces when training it) with SJW hand wringing (algorithms showing that black neighborhoods require more policing). It would require a Socratic step-by-step demonstration to explain why the former example is a legitimate critique and the latter is just hand-wringing. People like the author know that no one will publish or read such a demonstration. So they win.
Maybe that is something like the way intuitive human brains operate, seeing patterns that we cannot necessarily explain, ‘knowing’ something first and only later being able to articulate why, if ever. Trying to explain why is often useful though.
I’d say that for every one liberal-progressive who gets this is the game being played, there are a thousand militant true believers.
“And then there’s gender discrimination. Last July, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University found that women were less likely than men to be shown ads on Google for highly paid jobs. The complexity of how search engines show ads to internet users makes it hard to say why this happened — whether the advertisers preferred showing the ads to men, or the outcome was an unintended consequence of the algorithms involved.”
Not really. The internet activity of the people shown the ads determined what they were shown. If the user was doing activity that was very similar to a person in financial risk management, they would get ads related to risk management. If they were behaving like someone in early childhood education they would get ads about preschools. No doubt if the study examined whites vs. blacks, she’d be wearing sackcloth and ashes and pulling out her hair over the fact that blacks would be more likely to get blue collar job ads than whites.
The real problem for people like Kate is not that the software didn’t work the way it’s supposed to, it’s that it did work the way it’s supposed to, ignoring race and gender and providing an unbiased, non-PC picture of minorities.
Kingsman: The Secret Service blew dead dogs; it made Bridget Jones’ Diary look like Hamlet. I hope Jackson and Firth got a lot of money to beclown themselves so.
Eggsy: You shot a dog just to get a fucking job!
Harry: Yes, I did.
[Harry opens the study room to reveal his stuffed dog]
Harry: And Mr. Pickle here reminds me of that every time I take a shit!
Eggsy: You shot your dog and had it stuffed? You fucking freak!
Harry: No, I shot my dog and then brought him home and continued to care for him for the next 11 years until he died of pancreatitis.
A takedown of the ProPublica article (warning: contains math): https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html
Tl;dr: ProPublica’s own statistical analysis indicated that the recidivism prediction software was not racially biased, but this would have ruined the article, so they just claimed that it was.
>>Microsoft mattered up to 1986. Just a nuisance ever since.
Agree totally. They have contributed nothing useful or essential to computer software, hardware or infrastructure for decades. Still coasting on that Windows monopoly. Won’t last forever.
They just bought Linkedin for $22 billion – a company that in 10 years or so has hardly made any money. If Linkedin ever had a chance of succeeding for the long run it’s opportunity was blown by the Microsoft purchase – Microsoft poisons everything it touches – , but who cares, the linkedin shareholders made out good.
On the other hand, as I've said before, if Apple open sourced macOS, they probably would make up on increased business use of iOS devices what they would lose on the Mac. Never underestimate the power of WGBD-if Microsoft had Windows lose significant business market share, its share prices could crump, and with it Bill Gates's official published wealth estimates. I'm sure Tim Cook would love to see Bill shaved down.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Somebody has to be at the bottom. It may as well be the demographic that seems eminently predisposed to it.
I find it interesting that many popular fantasy stories, which show how we really think about the world, just don't reflect the Enlightenment's notions at all, despite over 200 years of propaganda and social engineering to force this 18th Century pseudoscience on us as the "rational" way to live. We don't see stories about a game of chairs, the democratically elected office holder of the Rings or President Arthur for a reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSukMQHQLIs
House of Cards?
She’s not a techie, she’s a socially promoted female SWJ or Lysenkoist.
She’s very much the sort of person that would be happy to help the elite eradicate lower class whites from the face of Earth.
And I doubt she’s dating anyone. She has b***h written all over her. Look anyone that rapidly promoted as her is going to have a ego the size of the Goodyear Blimp and combine that with her hatred of whites, well you get one nasty pit viper. Another childless white hag in the making.
House Atridies = Ancient Greeks
Sisterhood = Jews
House Harkonnen: Russia/Soviet Union?
I can believe that there are a lot of “You can’t handle the truth” intellectuals out there, who believe in the need for “noble lies” and “pious frauds” in order to hold society together.
So the end state with regard to races and gender is that we all know the score but never speak of it, in the faint hope that eventually the underlying problem solves itself.
The first problem however, specific to say issues of race and gender, is that we obey the taboo of speaking of differences, but we nevertheless have the large inequality of outcomes. If that large inequality of outcomes is talked about too much, we get the kind of grievance mongering we have today.
On the one hand it’s nice to have a place like this where we can talk about racial and gender differences, and say among other things that the Orlando shooter was a Muslim, that Rachel Dolezal is white, or that Caitlyn Jenner is actually a man. On the other hand, the idea is that if we actually said that in a larger public forum it would cause violence, and so forth. Therefore it cannot be said.
What this is setting up is the idea that this is essentially an esoteric blog as opposed to the exoteric mass media, which dishes out all the lies that people want to hear or at any rate should hear. It’s possible that the esoteric truths on this blog might be read by some who write for the exoteric media, but if they are expressed in the media it will only be in an esoteric manner. This forecasts a lack of wealth and fame for those who traffic in the esoteric.
The French are only nominal Mediterraneans; a lot of Teutonic influence, and some Celtic influence too.
The Enlightenment was mainly a French thing, from Voltaire through Diderot, D'Alembert, and up through Rousseau. Definitely had more going for it at the time than the Scottish Enlightenment which came in its wake (Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson) or the German Enlightenment (Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, etc.) which also followed. Saying it is derivative of Carolingian England is like saying that Elizabethan England was derivative of the Spanish, French, and Italian Renaissance. Which it was. Do we really have to be having these kinds of nationalist cat fights here?
http://www.nhl.com/ice/draftsearch.htm
Two Chinese were also selected in the NBA draft. 43 and 57.
http://www.nba.com/draft/2016/draftboard.html?ls=iref:nba:draft:miniboard
Sabres GM Tim Murray took (a) Pu at 69. Nice. (heh heh)
Not really. The internet activity of the people shown the ads determined what they were shown. If the user was doing activity that was very similar to a person in financial risk management, they would get ads related to risk management. If they were behaving like someone in early childhood education they would get ads about preschools. No doubt if the study examined whites vs. blacks, she'd be wearing sackcloth and ashes and pulling out her hair over the fact that blacks would be more likely to get blue collar job ads than whites.
The real problem for people like Kate is not that the software didn't work the way it's supposed to, it's that it did work the way it's supposed to, ignoring race and gender and providing an unbiased, non-PC picture of minorities.
In two words: Computers target you on the basis of the kinds of things you look at or buy, I doubt if they are even “gender aware”. Women don’t look at the same things men look at. It’s that simple.
House Atridies = Ancient Greeks
Sisterhood = Jews
I thought the sisterhood were based on the Jesuits, hence their name.
Steve, I’m your age, so maybe I misread Moyers and the other bien peasant liberals from back in the ’60s. But it seems to me that Frizzled is mischaracterizing the deal. Wasn’t the whole premise of civil rights that Jim Crow had unfairly prevented blacks from demonstrating that they could live as sociably as everyone else? Wasn’t the deal in essence, “give them 40 years, you’ll see”? So as you’ve said, blacks let whites down. Drizzled is disingenuous. In 1980 an EST trainer would have told him, “you’re an asshole.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_computer_scientists
Israel also has companies which can break into iPhone encryption, develop facial recognition software and write malicious programs like Stuxnet. You really to bend the facts to call the frontier of artificial intelligence a racist "white guys'" project.
In particular, Lisp and the environments it spawned are very, very Jewish. (And AI more or less was synonymous with Lisp up until well after the “AI Winter” and the demise of Symbolics, LMI and Thinking Machines.
Even before I became racially conscious I was familiar with Lisp: the library I went to had the famous “chine nual” and a good selection of other Lisp , and other big academic environments of the time-which included Unix. Several references to the recursive nature of Lisp being reminiscent of how the Talmud is organized were made in several of those references.
Traditionally, IIRC, the French used to define themselves as the Franks (ultimately Germanic, the upper classes) and the Gauls (ultimately Celtic, lower classes.) Obviously this is old and obviously there have been a lot of admixtures, since your archetypal Frenchman doesn’t look particularly Germanic or Celtic.
The Enlightenment was mainly a French thing, from Voltaire through Diderot, D’Alembert, and up through Rousseau. Definitely had more going for it at the time than the Scottish Enlightenment which came in its wake (Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson) or the German Enlightenment (Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, etc.) which also followed. Saying it is derivative of Carolingian England is like saying that Elizabethan England was derivative of the Spanish, French, and Italian Renaissance. Which it was. Do we really have to be having these kinds of nationalist cat fights here?
“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
https://hbr.org/2011/12/why-i-hire-people-who-fail
Hire heavy drinkers because they’ll fail more than average.
Yeah, the problem is that the active suppression of the truth results in a widespread belief in things that are false, and that widespread belief is greatly harmful in its own right.
If, for example, you suppress the truth about black crime, and the public isn’t aware of the gross over-representation of blacks in violent crime, then, in the eyes of the public, the greatest injustices in our society are those that seem to punish blacks at a rate far exceeding those of other groups. If you believe that blacks possess every potential for academic and economic success as other groups, then the greatest inequities in our society have to do with poor black performance in school and the marketplace. Since we have already done so much as a society to remove obstacles to black’s success, and they have only marginally improved their state, we must do far far more than we have already done to make things right. This may very reasonably demand that we address every microaggression, grant that all of their complaints of stereotyping, however small, must have merit. After all, what else might explain the huge remaining gap in their performance?
In short, society must be twisted into pretzels, and become onerously oppressive, and racial disharmony and resentment must be permanently instated, in order to maintain the fiction that there are no differences between groups based on biology.
If the knock-on effects of the truth seem bad, the knock-effects of lies are inescapable, far worse, and inherently unstable because they engender a vicious cycle.
There really is no escaping the need to deal with the truth. And indeed there was a time when many people did believe that blacks were different in virtue of genetics in many social traits, and yet did not treat each individual black person unfairly. I think that in the Northern states, before WWII, that was the view of many whites — segregation was against the law, blacks enjoyed equality under the law, and it was often, perhaps generally, considered important to treat blacks on their merits as individuals. Obviously, the social attitudes toward blacks weren’t always ideal, but neither were they toward many groups, and the trend nonetheless was in any case toward greater fairness.
The unintended consequences mount up.
The Enlightenment was mainly a French thing, from Voltaire through Diderot, D'Alembert, and up through Rousseau. Definitely had more going for it at the time than the Scottish Enlightenment which came in its wake (Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson) or the German Enlightenment (Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, etc.) which also followed. Saying it is derivative of Carolingian England is like saying that Elizabethan England was derivative of the Spanish, French, and Italian Renaissance. Which it was. Do we really have to be having these kinds of nationalist cat fights here?
If memory serves, Sue liked to exploit the submerged ethnic conflict theme, with virtuous Celtic Gauls contending against wicked Germanic Franks over the generations.
Hardly a cat-fight. Simply noting that the French were trying to adopt Anglo tailoring, and it was an imperfect fit (at best). Cf things like the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, etc.
Wot wot? S’all about ’spectations, mate. ’Twas good for a larf.
Jackson clowns himself on the regular. Those stupid Siri commercials. His enraged objection to Snakes on this Mothra flappin’ Plane !!!
Colin Firth (as Harry Hart) deadpanning about dead dogs:
Eggsy: You shot a dog just to get a fucking job!
Harry: Yes, I did.
[Harry opens the study room to reveal his stuffed dog]
Harry: And Mr. Pickle here reminds me of that every time I take a shit!
Eggsy: You shot your dog and had it stuffed? You fucking freak!
Harry: No, I shot my dog and then brought him home and continued to care for him for the next 11 years until he died of pancreatitis.
Now there's nothing inherently offensive about the term as a means to refer to young white men in a casual context, but in cases such as this it's clearly meant to demean, as even elderly white men are "white guys", whereas men of other racial/ethnic groups are "men", and adult females of any race are "women".
But call a black man “boy” and you could have your career ended as Ted Kennedy tried to do when Jeff Sessions was nominated to be a federal judge
https://youtu.be/iFGPaqK7I6k?t=1m2s
I never read the comic book but noted that the movie’s use of violence against dogs in a certain plot point was very British or at least nonconsistent with Yank audiences. The walking sleazetainment receptacles stateside will seemingly tolerate any kind of bloodshed/savagery in a film if inflicted upon a human but not against dogs, dolphins, or any “cute” fauna. IMDb has lists of movies containing any scene of injury to a pet, however brief, so that consumers may stave off any trigger moments; Netflix reviews say, “Warning: there is a dog who gets killed toward the end of [x] scene.” Of course the circus dropped elephants now, and a lot of yokels were upset about the gorilla in Cincinnati recently, yet these same fanatics were ready to go out on a Disney alligator-hunt safari as of last week.
Never heard of this B(if)tek, I am betting few people not directly involved can keep space in their N.I. memory banks for retardedly punctuated band names. It seems vaguely like another of those L Word dyke-chic acts from the wilder & woollier Commonwealth outposts… now Annie Lennox at least had a strong singing voice.
By the way, Ray Solomonoff up there, surely looks like an interesting cat, but I don’t want whatever weird values he’s putting into the technology. In my day, the Asimov mutton chops were precise, you could set your watch to it
How appropriate would it be if we failed to stop AI from taking over/exterminating humanity because all of the great minds were preoccupied (Idiocracy style) with making sure AI didn’t have a disparate impact on minorities, rather than making sure AI didn’t convert humanity into paperclips?
I thought the same thing. Watching it now, I can't help think how groovy and magnificent that era was.
Major Dietrich
Speaks volumes to Steve’s character. He never takes the cheap shots and only goes after people’s ideas, not them personally.
“…you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It’s not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.”
This works both ways. You cannot assume that reasonable lies (or even policies) for the greater good will translate into something that works well in reality. That is why classic conservatives like small-scale incremental (slow) experimentation, rather than imposing grand schemes. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Windows is as embedded in the desktop computing metaphor as are ASCII and the QWERTY keyboard layout, and desktop computing is still essential to business, although more and more consumers only own Android or iOS devices and have no “computers” per se. This means that businesses will be the primary Windows customers, and given American business’ traditional refusal to abandon legacy platforms Microsoft will be able to raise the price substantially, at least the average price actually paid. It’s possible Microsoft could demand that every user pay the retail price, which would make it much more profitable.
On the other hand, as I’ve said before, if Apple open sourced macOS, they probably would make up on increased business use of iOS devices what they would lose on the Mac. Never underestimate the power of WGBD-if Microsoft had Windows lose significant business market share, its share prices could crump, and with it Bill Gates’s official published wealth estimates. I’m sure Tim Cook would love to see Bill shaved down.
Five and a half, maybe.
Wait, there's a thought. Maybe average looking White women (5-6 range) support Mestizo Hispanic immigration because it raises their dating market value ?
From Rat Patrol! I loved that series. The actor was named Hans Gudegast, but changed it to Eric Braeden. He’s been a regular on a soap opera forever.
Hasslein, though, takes the long view:
Y&R has long been the most popular soap among blacks. It's been the number-one soap in total viewership since the '80s, but that means little now that there are only four daytime soaps left.
I once knew a black guy who could not have had an IQ above 90. He had no capacity for abstract thought and never graduated high school, but he had an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of the CBS soaps (plots and characters) going back to the 1960s. He grew up watching "the stories" with his invalid mother and, even in his early 40s, never missed an episode.
He told me that Victor Newman was, at one time, a "legend" in the black community. Braeden's character was regarded almost with the same kind of awe as Don Corleone, who inspired the "gangsta" style that we all know and love.
*Braden's character was supposed to be killed off after three months. But, as fate would have it, around the time that he was hired, CBS cancelled a low-rated soap and expanded Y&R's time slot from 30 minutes to one full hour. The cast members were told that their salaries would stay the same even as their workloads doubled. Almost everyone quit in protest. The producer hastily rebuilt the show around Braden and another minor character, Jack Abbott. The Newmans and the Abbotts remain the foundation of the show today.
To give you an idea of the interplay between the Newman and the Abbotts: Victor once stole the Abbott family business, Jabot, from Jack's father John. One day, shortly after Jack married Nikki - a former stripper who became the love of Victor's life and the mother of most of his children, from whom he separated and with whom he reconciled dozens of times over the years - Jack and Victor had a vicious argument in Victor's office. Victor suffered a massive heart attack and crumpled to the floor. Jack simply walked away. (It was after business hours, so the building was deserted.) At first, Jack intended to let Victor die, allowing control of Jabot to revert to his family; then, fearing the repercussions if Victor survived, he relented and called an ambulance. After Victor recovered, he exacted his revenge by tormenting the pregnant Nikki until she suffered a miscarriage. The two men eventually ended up sparing mano-a-mano.
(I could go on, but I won't. I, too, grew up with women who spent far too much time watching soap operas.)
“Why the spread of Anti-White Guyism?”
One theory:
At the strategic level, both Cold War Western and Eastern propaganda was anti-WhiteGuyColonialism. Don’t worry all you poor downtrodden of the world, we are here to save you from the evil whites of yore!
At the tactical level, non-whites can use the threat of violence (mass protests) against whites, primarily because television, governments, and the legal system will not extract any penalties for that behaviour. Whites (even the police, etc.) cannot use threat of violence, without penalty, because that would be like colonialism and we’re saving the world from that.
There were no organizations that spoke up for White Guys maybe not being the worst thing in the world; the governments they had created that they thought served them were the very ones attacking them. The governments probably didn’t really think their attacks would have much effect, just make the world a better place; but governments aren’t something that actually “thinks”. The large-scale policies (in particular legal) become brain-dead Zombies targeting whites. A lot of whites originally probably thought, “oh, they mean those bad whites, not good ones like me”, so they didn’t pay as much attention as they should have.
Whoa. I am thinking about Tatu (either Tapani or Taisto – help me out, Finn squad!) Vanhanen right now, after reading the post. And, so, yeah, totally got that ‘Frizzled’ is one of our infiltrators, btw. However, since i have nothing to risk, I believe that marginalization, in historic societies, in the ancient world – whoa – has been around longer than the USA.
‘Frizzled’s ‘ questions should be answered and debated by HIS/HER own apparatchiks at his day job… right? Why come here to our “Wayne’s World” platform for help with such large, existential questions? Get a fracking life! Don’t waste time on this bs, squad. I never, never, never took money to do some schmuck’s test/paper etc.
You could also include Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Walter Mathau and Paul Newman (half-Jewish). Awful big come down to Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen.
Adam Sandler actually has a likeable screen persona (I find, at least) when he's not playing a retard. He might even be a likeable, regular guy in person, for all I know. I don't find him especially funny, but he could have a pretty good career in semi-serious roles.
Rogen - yeah, I agree with you - he's just an annoying prick.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Looking at what you have written I can see no trace of MLk’s oft-quoted “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
HBD people can live with the idea of a colour-blind world, but liberals can’t. Strange isn’t it?
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. Unimportant next to people like Newton
Saint-Saens: Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns? He lived far too late. Or is there some other Saint-Saens?The "French" Enlightenment had everything to do with the Anglo-Saxons....at least until madmen like Rousseau came along.
I was just sort of uncritically listing some French thinkers I respect. If the composer Saint-Saëns (key not present on my keyboard) lived a little later, well I take him as an indicator of quality in the population. One doesn’t find such a composer in most countries, ever. And no musician is as important as a major scientist, so compare him to English composers. Purcell? Not many important ones after that, but a whole bunch of German ones.
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that - yes, you are right - England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
[…] Nobody’s too interested in punishing (((White))) guy White collar crime (Steve). I wonder […]
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it's true or not.)
>>> in prestigious occupations
I can get more nookie by encoding algorithms to adjust the field-of-view of a camera looking at a baby, to NOT include the poopy diaper?
iSteve, where do i sign up for this Alpha PickUpArtist boot camp??!?
hey iSteve, they just stood up a troop of the Israel Scouts in Scottsdale AZ.
if the kid choses the “Jr ROTC” pathway, a “graduate” of Israel Scouts (they don’t do different genders) can get E-3 in the IDF a few weeks after conscription, not a year after.
I am reliably informed that at US Navy Recruit Depot Great Lakes, they call this same thing, “pushbutton”
The guys who told me that, called the place “Great Mistakes”
Before anyone freaks out, let it be noted that Norfolk VA & several places in California, have troops of Vietnamese Scouts.
If white nationalists were awake, they’d be forming Euro Scout troops.
So the end state with regard to races and gender is that we all know the score but never speak of it, in the faint hope that eventually the underlying problem solves itself.
The first problem however, specific to say issues of race and gender, is that we obey the taboo of speaking of differences, but we nevertheless have the large inequality of outcomes. If that large inequality of outcomes is talked about too much, we get the kind of grievance mongering we have today.
On the one hand it's nice to have a place like this where we can talk about racial and gender differences, and say among other things that the Orlando shooter was a Muslim, that Rachel Dolezal is white, or that Caitlyn Jenner is actually a man. On the other hand, the idea is that if we actually said that in a larger public forum it would cause violence, and so forth. Therefore it cannot be said.
What this is setting up is the idea that this is essentially an esoteric blog as opposed to the exoteric mass media, which dishes out all the lies that people want to hear or at any rate should hear. It's possible that the esoteric truths on this blog might be read by some who write for the exoteric media, but if they are expressed in the media it will only be in an esoteric manner. This forecasts a lack of wealth and fame for those who traffic in the esoteric.
Let’s just stay “Wayne’s World,’ and continue to have no respect for our wild-ass ideas, from anyone! Who’s with me? – ok, I get it…but, let’s defiantly still be Wayne’s World characters! ha-ha. Let’s confuse everyone! Reality is a b*tch.
A lot of what we call the "French Enlightenment" was simply France trying to put on an English suit:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_on_the_English
>> Subtract Newton
well, i’ve taken a close look at the history of exactly whose tall shoulders Newton (as he himself first noted) “stood on”
Only a coupla of them were Anglo. Whereas 6-7 of them were “various Continentals”
You need to do an entire column on this topic and flesh out exactly what this guy is getting at. Is it that if we don’t conceal the truth then people will get hurt? Well, if we do conceal the truth then we all get hurt.
Somewhere there’s a happy medium to all this and I suspect regular people would naturally find it. If we just stopped trying to force everything through “diversity” and affirmative action we could discover the talented, the achievers, the slackers, and the bums all through normal life.
Liberals are trying too hard.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
And the purpose of affirmative action benefits in the workplace for 70,000,000 foreigners and their US-born descendants is what exactly-to make sure the knock-on effects of preferences for Blacks do not run to Hispanics? This Acme time bomb is about to go KABOOM in clever Wiley Coyote’s snoot.
Also Dr Hasslein from Escape from the Planet of the Apes. He was the only character who understood the demographic threat posed by the apes. The President, for example, looks no farther than the next election. Told that apes will dominate men in the far future, he simply replies that “I doubt that we shall still be in office by then.”
Hasslein, though, takes the long view:
well, i've taken a close look at the history of exactly whose tall shoulders Newton (as he himself first noted) "stood on"
Only a coupla of them were Anglo. Whereas 6-7 of them were "various Continentals"
And? Afraid that that doesn’t detract from Newton’s (and England’s) important role in shaping the modern world.
Germany beats England when it comes to music. There’s no question about that.
Too low.You gotta go to the post office. It’s a leper colony out there.And Mestizo Hispanic immigration is just making it worse…..
Wait, there’s a thought. Maybe average looking White women (5-6 range) support Mestizo Hispanic immigration because it raises their dating market value ?
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
“We liberals aren’t stupid.”
You’ve reminded me of an interview with Chad Kroeger that I once chanced to see.
Direct quote: “Nickelback doesn’t suck.” He was quite adamant about that.
Sure, Chad. Sure.
I don’t know your age, but Microsoft helped to blow open the dial-up internet market in late 1995, early 1996. Microsoft helped to ensure small, local ISPs could get a foothold in the market which ushered in the low prices for dial-up that larger providers later had to emulate. MS simplified getting onto the net for millions of novice computer users.
Eric Braeden also had a very amusing turn as an East German spy in a Mission Impossible episode. He has been an underused actor – he should have appeared in more.
When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.
“When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.”
When you Google up the phrase “Bow Tie”, a picture of George Will pops up. No s**t.
I remember when George F. Will was relevant. I think it was 1979.
Then the '70s happened, and Western Civilization fell apart......
“Indeed, I often like to sample the look of the epoch: North by Northwest, The Man From Uncle, the Steed and Mrs Peel Avengers, The Prisoner”
I strongly agree. Those all still seem modern to me. They are, in an ideal world, what modern should have looked like.
“Awful big come down to Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen.
Adam Sandler actually has a likeable screen persona (I find, at least) when he’s not playing a retard. He might even be a likeable, regular guy in person, for all I know. I don’t find him especially funny, but he could have a pretty good career in semi-serious roles.
Rogen – yeah, I agree with you – he’s just an annoying prick.
“And no musician is as important as a major scientist, so compare him to English composers. Purcell? Not many important ones after that, but a whole bunch of German ones.”
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that – yes, you are right – England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
NYT article says:
Steve Sailer says:
Actually, why would it? Even assuming that black criminals have higher recidivism rates than white criminals (and is that true?), why would that disparity affect the relative error rates of the predictions for blacks and whites? (For those with reading problems, note that it’s the disparity in the error rates that’s problematic, not disparities in the predictions themselves.)
If anything, I’d guess (given no further information) that a racial disparity in recidivism would lead to very different statistical biases in prediction than what’s reported. I’d expect that the formula would work better for the group with the higher absolute numbers of convictions, i.e., with the greater representation in the training sample. But depending on the particular crimes, the training sample might comprise black and white convicts in about equal numbers.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html
From this I infer that the predictions made by the original model are not biased, or at least there is no good statistical reason to believe so.
My guess is that the supposedly disproportionate false prediction rate for blacks derives from a rather deliberate obfuscation and spin of the true situation here.
If blacks are predicted to have, say, twice the recidivism rate as whites, but the prediction in individual cases is right, say, only half the time, then the number of false positives among blacks, relative to the entire population of blacks, is going to be twice as high as the number of false positives of whites relative to the entire population of whites.
Concretely, suppose that 40% of blacks were predicted to be recidivists, and 20% of whites were so. Further suppose that those predictions are right in either case only half the time. Then 20% of blacks, but only 10% of whites, would be falsely predicted to be recidivists.
This is exactly what one would expect if the algorithm behaved as free of bias as possible: the increased false positive rate for blacks is entirely due to the increased rate of recidivism.
Are NYT op-ed writers not aware that Nikon is a Japanese company? I thought this was common knowledge.
And along the same lines, if I remember Gorillagate correctly, only one of the two African-American in the photo was tagged as a gorilla. The photo was of a guy and his girlfriend. The only one gorilla-tagged was the woman, who also happened to have more gorilla-like facial features.
So just as Blinkgate wasn’t obviously anti-Asian bias, Gorillagate wasn’t obviously anti-black bias.
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that - yes, you are right - England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
Musical achievement is really geographically concentrated because talent converges in places like Vienna and thus it was hard for people in distant places to be on the cutting edge of style before recorded music. It took Beethoven’s instantly famous 9th Symphony about a quarter of a century to debut in America. (Boston critics complained that the celebrated “Ode to Joy” sounded like “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”) It would have been hard to be a world class classical composer in 19th Century America.
Hmm, I tried to delete that Gorillagate comment of mine, which was obviously wrong. (If the training sample had contained more blacks, it wouldn’t have made that mistake.)
But this site is implemented by Ron Unz: To delete, you don’t click on a Delete button, you erase all the content and Save. And that’s what I did, but the comment is there. Oh well.
I just took a machine learning class at CMU. There were 3 white people. The rest were East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indian. The class had over 30 people in it.
“Fairness and due process,” eh? Do words mean anything to these power-mad, anticivilizational succubi?
That’s not the point though, is it? The point is they’re not white, and whites didn’t lend them any of their privilege. They got there, like you said, by merit. Which gives the lie to the usual nonsense about white privilege, unless you count Asians as white, which is ridiculous. Oh, and Jews, which is less ridiculous, because they do look white.
Personally I've never bought into the whole, "SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes"-scenario, but maybe that's my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there's really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
Elon is a con man of the stupid.
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that - yes, you are right - England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
Don’t forget Fritz (“Frederick”) Delius and Georg Friedrich Handel, two more great British composers of German origin.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
cite needed
One theory:
At the strategic level, both Cold War Western and Eastern propaganda was anti-WhiteGuyColonialism. Don't worry all you poor downtrodden of the world, we are here to save you from the evil whites of yore!
At the tactical level, non-whites can use the threat of violence (mass protests) against whites, primarily because television, governments, and the legal system will not extract any penalties for that behaviour. Whites (even the police, etc.) cannot use threat of violence, without penalty, because that would be like colonialism and we're saving the world from that.
There were no organizations that spoke up for White Guys maybe not being the worst thing in the world; the governments they had created that they thought served them were the very ones attacking them. The governments probably didn't really think their attacks would have much effect, just make the world a better place; but governments aren't something that actually "thinks". The large-scale policies (in particular legal) become brain-dead Zombies targeting whites. A lot of whites originally probably thought, "oh, they mean those bad whites, not good ones like me", so they didn't pay as much attention as they should have.
Originally? It’s the engine that continues to drive the machine.
The era depicted in that show was the last time cleancut White men were cool. Nice suits, cocktails and great music.
(Took me a few years to notice the obvious.)
Personally I've never bought into the whole, "SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes"-scenario, but maybe that's my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there's really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
I would say “General Artificial Intelligence (with Consciousness included)” is still a way off. The may be unexpected roadblocks on the road towards it (showing that Machine Intelligence and Consciousness are as different than Newtonian and Quantum mechanics, which would be extra exciting though I wouldn’t bet on this). And, once attained, it might be economically nonuseful compared to specialized “intelligence enhancing” devices for precise tasks, as we already enjoy now (from the verifying compiler to the autonomous mars-exploring robot).
The main risk is that some dumbfuck will wire up badly understood AI (and make no mistake, these neural networks by ad-slingers like Google are badly understood and work in progress) into a high-assurance systems with no overview, man in the loop, stop button or “call the president” procedure. That would be a civilization-limiting move.
As a white male, I am the recipient of many of these ads targeting well-paying high-tech jobs. Of course, it could be because I have recently *searched* for these jobs, so you can see that their algorithm for sending me these ads is a pernicious plot against melanin-colored folks.
” . . . Mindless White Guy Hate . . .”. Steve, your phrase hits on the phenomenon I’ve been grappling with for a while, and sometimes mentioned here in comments. Roughly, the diminution of the White guy is okay at multiple levels—the ennoblement of just about everybody else is righteous.
Right, which means that a “gender neutral” AI at Amazon will show women shopping for underwear the latest in power tools because, er. Something!
https://hbr.org/2011/12/why-i-hire-people-who-fail
Hire heavy drinkers because they'll fail more than average.
The programmer’s motto.
You need a safeword first or they accuse you of assault.
Mad Men was made by closeted 50s fanboys. They hated the era so much they recreated it in minute detail. They then slapped some PC stuff on top of it so they wouldn’t get mistaken for Republicans.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Everyone does that anyway when they visit a neighborhood before buying or renting there, look at schools before sending their kids there, or look at the shade of the guy approaching them before deciding whether or not to cross the street. It’s the reason ‘ghetto names’ like LaQuisha get discriminated against in employment. People are going to protect themselves.
*Seriously, there's a fair amount of people online, usually feminists, who really hate it when the term female is used wrt human women.
‘Man’ still carries connotations of upright, strong, ethical, courageous–all the old masculine virtues they want to deny. ‘Be a real man’, ‘be a good man’, ‘a man can stand up’, etc. Connotations of words are hard to remove. ‘Dude’ and ‘bro’ don’t carry those, being casual–’dude’ used to mean fancy easterners playing at being rugged, to boot.
I personally like ‘female’ because it sounds less feminist–it’s biologically reductive. Probably the same reason feminists hate it.
Great phrase, "reality is racist," that I've been using since 2008 online and in meatspace. Glad to know you're a devoted reader of mine, Steve.
I saw Anne Coulter using my ‘Democrats want the votes and Republicans want the money’ line in an interview, but I kind of doubt she reads Sailer’s comments.
Yeah, there are plenty of shows about politics. Tends to be more HBO-level because you don’t have guys cutting each others’ heads off (and casting fireballs if it’s a fantasy).
Even before I became racially conscious I was familiar with Lisp: the library I went to had the famous "chine nual" and a good selection of other Lisp , and other big academic environments of the time-which included Unix. Several references to the recursive nature of Lisp being reminiscent of how the Talmud is organized were made in several of those references.
(((Lisp)even has lots of (irritating) (silly parentheses))).
But Jessica effed it up for love!
It’s the Clinton Mindset:
“Accountants only slow things down / Figures get in the way
Never been accounts in the name of Eva Peron!”
Adam Sandler actually has a likeable screen persona (I find, at least) when he's not playing a retard. He might even be a likeable, regular guy in person, for all I know. I don't find him especially funny, but he could have a pretty good career in semi-serious roles.
Rogen - yeah, I agree with you - he's just an annoying prick.
I watched Rogen in Neighbors last night and it was pretty good considering its stupid premise, and it had some laugh out loud gags. Rogen was also good in that movie with Franco that mocked North Korea.
That’s not necessarily very effective though.
LOL! They should just develop a “hateful” app that would identify all white faces as members of the Klan.
Rutger Hauer broke five of my fingers and now I’m a white supremacist.
Wiki describes this Crawford woman as a “writer, composer, producer and academic.” I was expecting to read “….and star of stage, screen and television.” Seriously though, there is no reference whatsoever to her educational background. Which is a bit strange in as much as Wiki is usually pretty good at these things.
“Academic?”
You could and should write about the metapolitics of climate change. I personally am less interested in the science itself than in the way that climate change has become such an absurdly politicized, polarized and partisan football. I know you would add a lot to the debate if you analyzed the incentive structures in place.
Some problems have simple solutions. I hesitate to mention it here because it is so simple that when someone points out the fatal flaw, I will be embarrassed for being such a dunce.
If you don’t like the way AI is playing out; create your own.
Wow, Steve you normally approach your subject with detached sarcasm. In this piece you let across a bit of angst and resentment towards Kate Crawford and her anti-white-male propaganda. It’s almost as if you’re taking things a bit personal.
Cool! I liked it.
*In the episode "The Ultimate Computer," he's shown to be the guy who made the "duotronic breakthrough" that underlies all computer tech in Star Fleet. Think Claude Shannon plus the transistor trio (Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley).
Star Trek: TNG had LeVar Burton as chief engineer. In ER one of the main doctors, later on, was black (really black). In Grey’s Anatomy the hospital chief was black (not so black). In Planet of the Apes (original) I think one of the other two astronauts with Charleston Heston was black. In Superman Richard Pryor was a computer genius. In Terminator 2 the skynet designer was black. In Die Hard the computer tech was black (he was later the side kick of Chuck Norris in Walker). In Flight, Denzel Washington played a drunk pilot who miraculously saved the plane in a freak storm (quite a good movie). In the movie Non-stop (with Liam Neeson) a black guy played a programming/telecommunications expert. That’s all I can think of at the moment but it does show how unrealistic TV/movies are.
Agreed that it's a good film.
*Quelle différence to the subject of this article — he earned his position at Microsoft Research on his own merits, and publishes hard, scientific research that's actually related to advancing the state of the art in software.
That headline.
Thanks for posting that link. It was a very good article except for one of their closing statements
So, questions surrounding why America will no longer be a white nation are ultimately of no consequence whatsoever? I would think that if even I weren’t a white guy, say a Chinaman, the question of how America came to belong to a completely different ethnic group(s) in such a short time would be of profound significance. How much more so for whites who want to make babies. If it’s of no consequence please explain to me how the cultural achievements of The West will be remembered and passed down through the generations by this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltMeuPkWRs
http://fusion.net/story/318008/asians-fastest-growth-ethnic-group-in-america/
Over the next decade we'll be seeing if Asians actually deserve, or even want, honorary whitehood.
Well, Daniel Kahneman said it in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”…
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Here’s the problem with that world view by working so hard to deny people the ability to discriminate you end up punishing all blacks just the same. Most discrimination is a result of information asymmetry. For example I’m an employer and I know that employees with bad credit tend to be bad employees. I know on average blacks have worse credit but I still want to employ black people because I may miss out on talent.
So I institute a credit check as part of the hiring process. Sure enough I discover that blacks applicants are more likely to have worse credit but many have good credit so I hire them. Then liberals such as yourself come along and say the credit check is having a disparate impact on blacks being hired. So you shame, screech loud enough and get employers to do away with the credit check. The employers still hire black people but they tend to discover that now they are having more issues with their black employees than they did before. Not showing up to work, combative etc.
So after this experience they curtail their hiring of blacks since they cant filter the good from the bad.
I looked briefly at a rebuttal to the ProPublica article:
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html
From this I infer that the predictions made by the original model are not biased, or at least there is no good statistical reason to believe so.
My guess is that the supposedly disproportionate false prediction rate for blacks derives from a rather deliberate obfuscation and spin of the true situation here.
If blacks are predicted to have, say, twice the recidivism rate as whites, but the prediction in individual cases is right, say, only half the time, then the number of false positives among blacks, relative to the entire population of blacks, is going to be twice as high as the number of false positives of whites relative to the entire population of whites.
Concretely, suppose that 40% of blacks were predicted to be recidivists, and 20% of whites were so. Further suppose that those predictions are right in either case only half the time. Then 20% of blacks, but only 10% of whites, would be falsely predicted to be recidivists.
This is exactly what one would expect if the algorithm behaved as free of bias as possible: the increased false positive rate for blacks is entirely due to the increased rate of recidivism.
I'm less quick than you to believe there was deliberate lying, though. I can imagine that journalists might not be able to report too clearly on this stuff.
Steve,
I think there is a little more interest in this article than you are giving it credit for.
Do you think it is a total coincidence that Elon Musk founded an “Open AI” project in late 2015 to produce patent-free AI and that in mid-2016, a researcher at Microsoft writes an op-ed that specifically criticizes Musk’s concerns?
Of interest is the author’s tweet about the article:
https://twitter.com/katecrawford/status/746754162751213574
She writes that the article is about “why billionaires fear the rise of an AI apex predator”, but that is not actually what the article is about. There is no relationship between “apex predator” and “algorithmic equality*”. The only way you can deduce such a theme from that article is if you believe Musk’s attempt to create a transparent AI would thwart a non-transparent AI apex predator that is specially rigged against white males. And it seems to me a good reason (maybe the only reason) to believe that is if you have knowledge that a non-transparent AI rigged against white males is actually being created. And who better to know that than a head AI researcher at Microsoft?
The examples in the article, by the way, are laughably stupid. For example, she implies that the Nikon camera thinks Asians have blinking eyes because Nikon uses images of round-eyes as a pattern. But (1) Nikon is an Asian company that does most of its production in Asia; (2) the “evidence” traces back to a single user complaint; (3) the user was actually squinting (a half-blink) in the photo. You can see the origin of the complaint here…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jozjozjoz/3529106844/
In the ProPublica article**, it turns out that the “racist” recidivist predictive algorithms don’t even include race as part of their computations. The only way to “fix” the problem is to rig the outcomes by including race and giving criminals “affirmative algorithmic action” if they’re black.
Part of the message of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is that simple rules are often better at prediction than people. However, as I point out above, he is willing to accept broken algorithms if they lead to “a better society”. It is quite clear that this NYT op-ed is throwing down a gauntlet, calling for AI researchers to build anti-white-male computer systems.
* BTW, is “algorithmic racism” going to become a thing, like “systematic racism”?
** BTW, it’s clear from the ProPublica article that, issues of racism aside, those recidivist prediction programs don’t work especially well. Why doesn’t a big municipality like New York City offer a $1,000,000 reward to someone who can create an effective algorithm?
Damn! Your moniker says it all. Well said.
The unintended consequences mount up.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Great point. In theory I agree with the thrust of your argument. Many conservatives are guilty of relying on the “simple theory of natural individual rights” and libertarians are guilty in the extreme.
With that said, I think your comment might be a little off target here at iSteve as many of us are former libertarians and at the root of the conversion is a loss of confidence in this simple notion of individual rights as being the final word on politics, law and order.
I’m deeply conservative and yet not at all averse to the idea of giving blacks some of their special props. They may be bastards, but their our bastards after all. What separates me from Liberals these days is that they’ve really gone off of the deep end entirely with this. “Hate Whitey” and support for mass immigration, affirmative action for Women and Minorities are the key issues for my conservatism. Liberals allow or even advocate affirmative action for Hispanics while threatening us that Hispanics will eventually be the majority ethnicity. There’s a big problem with AA when you are running out of white people to fleece. Liberalism seems treacherous to me in this regard. We even now have “La Raza” judges. All of this is hunky-dory for liberals.
Also, I’d point out that liberal, multi-cultural ideology is becoming a front for billionaires to hide behind. Just look at Chicago’s gentrification project which has used Obama to push “helping blacks” as message for the media to peddle while lower class blacks are palmed off on middle class white neighborhoods while real estate developers make millions gentrifying the area.
That reminds me: Ferguson MO. Not so long ago it was a predominantly white middle class neighborhood now awash with Section 8 blacks who previously resided in larger urban communities which were demolished for the sake of gentrification. The white middle class in Ferguson was forced to bear the burden of the black underclass so their white-betters could create new and improved neighborhoods. Then within 9 months of the Ferguson riots the average house price in that town had dropped by 50%. Imagine the hardship that’s been imposed on these people by our liberal elites! None of this was of any direct benefit to blacks. Yet on NPR just recently I listened to a liberal journalist berate the hapless Ferguson mayor James Knowles III in an interview about racist emails the federal gestapo found on their police department’s servers. If liberals are really just acting out your theory then no doubt they’d have the occasional racist thought or laughed at a racist joke or two in their time. All in all a genuine liberal as you’ve defined him would have a great deal of empathy for the whites of Ferguson MO.
I’m hoping you guys come to your senses soon.
A glance at a globe will prove there is no need for Africans to move to Europe or indeed anywhere else.
emotions: the weak point in any attempt to control human breeding
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that - yes, you are right - England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
Dunno. They don’t seem comparable to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner
I strongly agree. Those all still seem modern to me. They are, in an ideal world, what modern should have looked like.
Yes, people actually grew up in the 1950s to become men and women. Nowadays people in their 70s still dress and act like teenagers. Perhaps the entire solar system moved into an interesting phase in its trip around the galaxy. . .
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
“make sure everyone gets a fair chance–>bad effects at the macro scale”. Liberals reason backwards from the assumption that equality at the macro level is a sign of fairness at the micro level. This assumption isn’t valid. Once the micro-fairness/macro-equality connection isn’t assumed, the purpose of trying to achieve macro equality becomes much less clear. There are still Machivellian reasons for achieving macro equality, but “fair chance” is simplistic and rather, well, stupid.
This is a high-fallutin version of the fallacy of saying that HBDers claim that all blacks are dumber than all whites. If it were strictly rational for there to be no blacks employed in the country, then the situation would be quite a bit more severe than it is.
This is only reasonable assuming the micro fairness/macro equality connection. Without that, there is no degree of “giving people the benefit of the doubt” that will result in equality at the macro scale.
Part of the problem with liberal discourse is that these terms like “marginalized” and “permanent underclass” get overused. Does the government want to avoid actually have a group of people with worse jobs, or does it want to avoid having a group of people who perceive themselves to be hopeless? For example, if we magically kept everyone’s genes the same but made everyone look identical starting tomorrow, blacks would still commit more crimes and have lower-paying jobs, but no one would perceive it… wouldn’t that be okay (after all, we can’t “see” people with lower IQ, but they are a kind of permanent underclass too and no one cares)? But if the problem is with perception, then it has to be admitted that ongoing AA provides a scapegoat but also creates the conditions for permanent animosity and political division. What is your goal?
No. We get it. That’s why Steve keeps pointing out things like the real reality of the Ferguson effect. You see, you cannot simply assume that a reasonable-looking rule like opposition to racial profiling will translate to desirable emergent properties. We feel you have trouble getting this point.
I wonder why you say that. I have always thought that Ann Coulter was a regular isteve reader.
Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst (admittedly, of german heritage, but born in England) were of comparable stature to German composers. Other than that - yes, you are right - England could not boast the musical talent that the Continent did.
I’m a big fan of classical music, but no way either Elgar or Holst are comparable to the German composers. Same can be said for France, and I say that as someone who likes most of the classical music from the 1500′s. This is not only true in terms of output (Elgar and Holst didn’t write that much) proportion of clunkers (Delius and Vaughan Williams are beloved but didn’t write that much great stuff), formal and structural innovation (Haydn (yes, half Slovenian), Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Wagner, Richard Strauss, even Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), and popularity. And I didn’t even mention Schumann or Brahms or the Bach family.
If I was going to pick an important French composer, it would be Berlioz. St. Saens is OK, and other guys like Lalo, D’Indy, and Ibert are worth a listen, but Berlioz was the big innovator.
Probably the most innovative symphonic composers of the last 100 years plus were Sibelius and Nielsen. Probably the most popular has been Tchaikovsky.
“And no musician is as important as a major scientist, so compare him to English composers.” — St Saens was probably better than any English composer unless you go back to Georg Friedrich Haendel. As for the importance of music, that’s a culture versus technology argument. While we are at it, let’s just say that *major scientist* (TM) is more important than anything, even religion. I mean, right?
Nearly all the greatest composers come from east of the Rhine. But...
Saint-Seans is my favorite composer. I have yet to hear anything by him that is dull. Haydn wrote so much that it all sounds the same. Mozart too. Beethoven was consistently excellent, but when I hear the Bacchanal by SS I just have to give him the gold medal.
Who gets to claim Chopin?
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html
From this I infer that the predictions made by the original model are not biased, or at least there is no good statistical reason to believe so.
My guess is that the supposedly disproportionate false prediction rate for blacks derives from a rather deliberate obfuscation and spin of the true situation here.
If blacks are predicted to have, say, twice the recidivism rate as whites, but the prediction in individual cases is right, say, only half the time, then the number of false positives among blacks, relative to the entire population of blacks, is going to be twice as high as the number of false positives of whites relative to the entire population of whites.
Concretely, suppose that 40% of blacks were predicted to be recidivists, and 20% of whites were so. Further suppose that those predictions are right in either case only half the time. Then 20% of blacks, but only 10% of whites, would be falsely predicted to be recidivists.
This is exactly what one would expect if the algorithm behaved as free of bias as possible: the increased false positive rate for blacks is entirely due to the increased rate of recidivism.
Yes, that sounds like a reasonable explanation of the statistics, from what you wrote (I only glanced at the article you linked to). That could explain the “racial bias.”
I’m less quick than you to believe there was deliberate lying, though. I can imagine that journalists might not be able to report too clearly on this stuff.
“I’m a big fan of classical music, but no way either Elgar or Holst are comparable to the German composers.”
Allow me to translate:
I’m a big fan of classical music, and I consider your subjective statement about an aesthetic subject to be patently ridiculous based on my – itself, entirely subjective – preferences in music.
Tastes vary. I’m a big fan of classical music too, and I say otherwise. I said they were comparable. The word means what it means, within the context of the subject at hand. Those two are, in my opinion (which I obviously deem to be at least as good as yours), of comparable stature to a Schumann or a Strauss. And I even said I thought they were the only two who were.
Relax.
“Probably the most innovative symphonic composers of the last 100 years plus were Sibelius and Nielsen.”
I could just as easily say Prokofiev or Shostakovich.
Or Ives or Schonberg for that matter, if anybody cared to listen to their music which, God knows, I don’t.
If someone wants to say that Elgar and Holst are two top ranked composers, that's fine. I'm happy for them.
There's also none but purely subjective criteria for ranking Elgar and Holst ahead of Schumann and Richard Strauss. In the first place, neither Englishman made any innovations either in choral music (which was their true metier) or in symphonic music. Third, the number of pieces that are still active in the repertoire can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (Pomp and Circumstance #1, Enigma, Symphony #1, The Planets). As opposed to Schumann, whose piano concerto and symphonies are evergreen, not to mention solo piano (Fantasy, Carnaval, Kinderscenen) or chamber music (quintet). For Strauss, you are looking at 10 tone poems, all of them a step forward in the genre, and at least 8 in repertoire, and 15 operas, at least half of which are in the repertoire (Salome, Elektra, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella, Capriccio) and also innovative. Not to mention a ton of other stuff.
As for Prokofiev and Shostakovich, I like their symphonies but none of them really extend symphonic form, except a handful of late Shostakovich symphonies, two of which are essentially cantatas (#13, #14). There's a reason critics praise the formal innovations of Sibelius and Nielsen, it's not my subjective opinion.
From Charles Murray's Human Achievement
“Dunno. They don’t seem comparable to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner.”
Do any of you guys know what “comparable” means?
It doesn’t mean better. It means comparable.
I would say that they are comparable by virtue of the fact that they, like the worthies you mentioned, have found a place in the standard concert repertoire. Obviously, audiences and music-directors like them enough to have given them that place.
So I institute a credit check as part of the hiring process. Sure enough I discover that blacks applicants are more likely to have worse credit but many have good credit so I hire them. Then liberals such as yourself come along and say the credit check is having a disparate impact on blacks being hired. So you shame, screech loud enough and get employers to do away with the credit check. The employers still hire black people but they tend to discover that now they are having more issues with their black employees than they did before. Not showing up to work, combative etc.
So after this experience they curtail their hiring of blacks since they cant filter the good from the bad.
Well said. Except that the consequences of their ideas and policies do not matter to liberals. Once they have achieved their moral goal, they are done; they do not care about outcomes. See getting rid of apartheid in South Africa, getting rid of that icky strongman Khadaffi in Libya, proclaiming that Assad must go, etc.
Me too, but I can’t see her scrolling through 200 *comments* on each post.
Hilarious admission that raw intelligence = “sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination.” Hilarious admission that you have to make things dumber to prevent them from discriminating. “Dave, will the Ferrari go faster than the Yugo?” “I dunno Hal, but remember, don’t discriminate.”
LOL! Hide the data! Hide the data!
Yeah, but all that stuff is post-Richard Daystrom on Star Trek. As I said, I’d be curious to find out if he has any precursors in films/television.
Let’s not be too hasty.
On the contrary, allowing people Freedom (that’s what “discriminate freely” means; Freedom) would allow them to get up out of one another’s faces. Smashing together groups that don’t much like each other is an obvious recipe for “bad effects at the macro scale.”
Not really sure what that means. Blacks’ success or failure is their business. Why is it anyone else’s job to keep them “un-marginalized”?
I doubt blacks would avoid hiring blacks. I doubt even a majority of whites would avoid hiring blacks. And of course, 100% of Jews would continue to employ blacks; that’s a lot of hiring power, right there.
But even if nobody but blacks would hire blacks (very unlikely), well, them’s the breaks in a free society. It’s nobody else’s job to take care of blacks.
Blacks show every indication of being a permanent underclass, regardless of the issues we’re discussing. With anti-Freedom laws (AKA “anti-discrimination” laws), without them; same permanent black underclass.
I’m not a conservative, so I can’t really speak to what they have trouble with. Yes, it’s perfectly sufficient to give people a free country, and let them determine their own destiny. “Nice-looking” doesn’t even begin to describe Freedom. What a silly hand-wave! Talk about dismissing desirable emergent properties. Liberals don’t seem to understand the value of Freedom. Too stupid, maybe.
Liberals’ stupid ignorance about the value of Freedom (“Nice-looking,” LOL!) probably has a lot to do with why they keep producing Soviet Unions, Chinese megadeaths, Cambodian killing fields, Cubas, Venezuelas, etc., etc., etc.
Handel was English? True, he’s in Westminster Abbey.
Nearly all the greatest composers come from east of the Rhine. But…
Saint-Seans is my favorite composer. I have yet to hear anything by him that is dull. Haydn wrote so much that it all sounds the same. Mozart too. Beethoven was consistently excellent, but when I hear the Bacchanal by SS I just have to give him the gold medal.
Who gets to claim Chopin?
The Bachanale from Samson and Delilah is a nice showpiece along the lines the Danse Macabre. I'm glad you enjoy them. The Organ symphony is also quite stunning in a good performance.
Kind of remarkable how closely this stuff parallels human struggle to get the double-thinkers out of their neural nets.
Liberalism as utilitarianism is just too stupid for words. Yes, let’s import a hundred million third-worlders of alien race, that sounds very utilitarian. Let’s smash everyone together, whether they like it or not. No emergent suck there, to be sure.
Super-hacker in Leverage was black. Super-hacker in one of the Transformers movies was black. The list goes on forever. You don’t need to watch much TV or movies to see them. Super-hackers in mass entertainment these days are pretty much always everything they aren’t in real life.
QFT. Human “shitlords” are self-learning AIs.
Generates its own recursive acronyms, too.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
That’s what I thought. The liberals get it, however they dance around it by playing an ultra-nuanced game. But the SJW dumbfuck kids take all this literally..I suppose that’s how all atrocities go down. Nuanced philosophes —> literal nihilistic followers to carry out the program.
Ugh. One could have gathered as much from Dostoevsky or Turgenev.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
In order for that to have a chance at working, you have to practice what you preach, and not have gentrification and price discrimination for one group, and integration and anti-racism enforcement for another. Since that is a bridge too far, its best to just accept that the current order will be collapsing at some point in the not too distance future.
"Academic?"
Yeah, that was puzzling to me, too. I poked around a little bit. She got an undergraduate degree and some sort of PhD in just under six years from the University of Sydney, but resolutely refuses to state what it’s in. Off to the University of New South Wales where she was an Associate Professor in Journalism and Media. Both schools are among the top in Australia. Some papers with the de rigueur gender focus, section headings starting with the word “towards”. Looked at a couple of her papers, and they seemed banal.
No, it’s not a subjective appraisal of Elgar and Holst vs. the German (or Germanic) composers. There is absolutely no metric for comparing the two English composers to the German (or whatever you want to call them) composers, and I listed the criteria: (a) Productivity, (b) Level of productivity, (c) structural or formal innovation, (d) popularity (in terms of recordings and/or being in the repertoire.)
If someone wants to say that Elgar and Holst are two top ranked composers, that’s fine. I’m happy for them.
There’s also none but purely subjective criteria for ranking Elgar and Holst ahead of Schumann and Richard Strauss. In the first place, neither Englishman made any innovations either in choral music (which was their true metier) or in symphonic music. Third, the number of pieces that are still active in the repertoire can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (Pomp and Circumstance #1, Enigma, Symphony #1, The Planets). As opposed to Schumann, whose piano concerto and symphonies are evergreen, not to mention solo piano (Fantasy, Carnaval, Kinderscenen) or chamber music (quintet). For Strauss, you are looking at 10 tone poems, all of them a step forward in the genre, and at least 8 in repertoire, and 15 operas, at least half of which are in the repertoire (Salome, Elektra, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella, Capriccio) and also innovative. Not to mention a ton of other stuff.
As for Prokofiev and Shostakovich, I like their symphonies but none of them really extend symphonic form, except a handful of late Shostakovich symphonies, two of which are essentially cantatas (#13, #14). There’s a reason critics praise the formal innovations of Sibelius and Nielsen, it’s not my subjective opinion.
I don't really care what critics think. What do other composers think? What do listeners think? You seem to be echoing Mark Twains' comment about Wagner: "His music is actually better than it sounds". (And, by the way, I like Wagner a lot. Sibelius too. Nielsen? Eh, I'm indifferent.) If left to critics, music would be an entirely dead art.
Nearly all the greatest composers come from east of the Rhine. But...
Saint-Seans is my favorite composer. I have yet to hear anything by him that is dull. Haydn wrote so much that it all sounds the same. Mozart too. Beethoven was consistently excellent, but when I hear the Bacchanal by SS I just have to give him the gold medal.
Who gets to claim Chopin?
If Anon2 comes around he will claim Chopin, for sure, but I believe Chopin’s father was French. I have no problem with St Saens, if we are talking on that level. The Piano Concerto #4 is a very fine piece that builds beautifully, that’s part of the French attempt to use the motivic tendencies from Wagner (and, debatably, Berlioz.) For more of this kind of stuff, check of Cesar Franck (Psyche). D’Indy (Istar variations, the mountain air thing), or Roussel (Bacchus, Symphonies). And we haven’t even mentioned the harmonic subtlety of Debussy and Ravel. Or Bizet!
The Bachanale from Samson and Delilah is a nice showpiece along the lines the Danse Macabre. I’m glad you enjoy them. The Organ symphony is also quite stunning in a good performance.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
False on its face. Any fair chance that produces anything other than your preapproved result requires massive government intervention.
So you’ve noticed the cratering social circumstances among your pet blacks?
But forcing people to discriminate unfreely as individuals will have good effects at the macro scale?!? What geniuses these liberals are!
Yes, the people must be kept ignorant while only the anointed liberals may have facts, otherwise the preapproved result won’t happen! Why can’t ignoramus conservatives see the obvious sense in this?
You’re aware that black unemployment was lower before your sacralized “Civil Rights” era? Also lower before liberals: black criminality, black fatherlessness and pretty much every other social pathology.
Liberalism: for half a century creating the world’s largest underclass in the midst of the world’s most prosperous society. It would be hard to believe it if we weren’t seeing it every day.
Affirmative action is racial profiling.
True rights are not “reasonable looking rules”, whatever you happen to deem “reasonable” today. They are rights because they are right. Reasonableness is in the eye of the beholder. And what is this “desirable emergent properties” BS? When were you were elected Arbiter of Desirable Emergent Properties? Check your privilege! Everything you hate is an emergent property. And it is desired by someone.
The real world performance of liberalism is epic failure.
No doubt you are representing liberalism honestly and accurately. Unfortunately, even in its naked ignominy, you can’t see the obvious reasons it perpetually fails.
“We liberals aren’t stupid.”
Umm …
… okay, well, that leaves “evil” then.
No it won’t. We’ll just have an increasingly less competent Brazilian-style government that polices racial and gender quotas and wonders why we’re falling further and further behind China.
Latin America isn’t a terrible place, it’s just not as nice as the USA.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
The problem, Frizzled, is that your description is exactly not what the Left is doing. Leftists are allocating to themselves the right to discriminate against blacks while denying it to others. Every Leftist zip code is nothing but a chockful of White Privilege, where Leftists live like they are still in the 1950′s and then pontificate in total safety about the world’s injustices. Meanwhile, the unlucky, less privileged whites have to deal with the fallout of the Left’s concerns about racism.
The British MP Jo CoxRoach is the quintessential Lefty-type.
When I see the minorities show up as your neighbors and your kids’ schoolmates, then I will believe your concerns are genuine.
What AI can do in very limited applications is perception enhancment, i.e. automatic filtering of certain things, or pattern recognition with pre-set routines. It cannot handle human like perception and thinking, about what threats are like, or opportunities, etc. But neither could a steam engine, and that helped power the industrial revolution.
AI properly used can help savvy users make better decisions, by filtering out various inputs that are simply too many for humans to handle. Examples would be jet fighter pilots getting various massively complex and rapid inputs filtered so the most dangerous stuff shows up highlighted in heads up displays.
A real sci-fi example would be something like Google Glass, constantly connected, filtering people as possible threats, or opportunities, by recognizing their photos/posts from social media. Opportunities are just as meaningful as threats -- say a person is looking for an investor and walking down the street, AI displays an overlay on a passerby that the passerby is an investor looking just for that sort of opportunity.
I believe in none of this AI nonsense. It’s a machine, with limited functionality built-in by its creators. A neural net is really nothing more than complex decision tree. I don’t see how a bunch of conditional statements written in C, no matter how massive, somehow becomes Artificial Intelligence, as opposed to a set of automatic functions designed to augment human abilities.
The British MP Jo CoxRoach is the quintessential Lefty-type.
When I see the minorities show up as your neighbors and your kids' schoolmates, then I will believe your concerns are genuine.
Leftists are very good at making their revolutions apply to everyone but themselves.
But that’s not the point, the point is that she’s not one of those horrible White Guys that everybody is always talking about.People need to stop inviting nice White ladies like her to weddings and other social events. In other words they need to be shunned from the White society they claim to hate so much. If everyone did that, this bullshit would be over with by Labour Day. White ethno-masochism would be as declassé as white shoes.
That’s gonna be tough, because Nice White Ladies are the ones who invite each other to weddings. The challenge is not to tilt at windows in a futile effort to eliminate a personality type and old as time and as common as grass, but to build different, comforting “safe spaces” that channel their energies in more positive directions.
Give me the keys to the mass media control room and I could get all White ladies singing the praises of Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism or Japanese Emperor worship by this time next year. As things now stand, they get a little gold star on their report cards when they give straight White guys the gears. There's no downside for them.
No matter how low I sink in life, I will always be able to comfort myself by knowing I am far brighter than the vast majority of people who write for the most prestigious newspaper in the US. A very cold comfort, to be sure.
Nihon is the correct name for Japan?
Can we call them Nihonkies? Or would that be unwise?
If someone wants to say that Elgar and Holst are two top ranked composers, that's fine. I'm happy for them.
There's also none but purely subjective criteria for ranking Elgar and Holst ahead of Schumann and Richard Strauss. In the first place, neither Englishman made any innovations either in choral music (which was their true metier) or in symphonic music. Third, the number of pieces that are still active in the repertoire can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (Pomp and Circumstance #1, Enigma, Symphony #1, The Planets). As opposed to Schumann, whose piano concerto and symphonies are evergreen, not to mention solo piano (Fantasy, Carnaval, Kinderscenen) or chamber music (quintet). For Strauss, you are looking at 10 tone poems, all of them a step forward in the genre, and at least 8 in repertoire, and 15 operas, at least half of which are in the repertoire (Salome, Elektra, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Frau ohne Schatten, Arabella, Capriccio) and also innovative. Not to mention a ton of other stuff.
As for Prokofiev and Shostakovich, I like their symphonies but none of them really extend symphonic form, except a handful of late Shostakovich symphonies, two of which are essentially cantatas (#13, #14). There's a reason critics praise the formal innovations of Sibelius and Nielsen, it's not my subjective opinion.
“There’s a reason critics praise the formal innovations of Sibelius and Nielsen, it’s not my subjective opinion.”
I don’t really care what critics think. What do other composers think? What do listeners think? You seem to be echoing Mark Twains’ comment about Wagner: “His music is actually better than it sounds”. (And, by the way, I like Wagner a lot. Sibelius too. Nielsen? Eh, I’m indifferent.) If left to critics, music would be an entirely dead art.
Getting women to gang up and shun another woman is easy as falling off a log. Make their “ain’t I cute when I stick it to White guys?” act socially costly and they’ll quit it.
Give me the keys to the mass media control room and I could get all White ladies singing the praises of Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism or Japanese Emperor worship by this time next year. As things now stand, they get a little gold star on their report cards when they give straight White guys the gears. There’s no downside for them.
Eric Braeden has played Victor Newman, a brooding, ruthless tycoon, on The Young and the Restless since 1980*.
Y&R has long been the most popular soap among blacks. It’s been the number-one soap in total viewership since the ’80s, but that means little now that there are only four daytime soaps left.
I once knew a black guy who could not have had an IQ above 90. He had no capacity for abstract thought and never graduated high school, but he had an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of the CBS soaps (plots and characters) going back to the 1960s. He grew up watching “the stories” with his invalid mother and, even in his early 40s, never missed an episode.
He told me that Victor Newman was, at one time, a “legend” in the black community. Braeden’s character was regarded almost with the same kind of awe as Don Corleone, who inspired the “gangsta” style that we all know and love.
*Braden’s character was supposed to be killed off after three months. But, as fate would have it, around the time that he was hired, CBS cancelled a low-rated soap and expanded Y&R’s time slot from 30 minutes to one full hour. The cast members were told that their salaries would stay the same even as their workloads doubled. Almost everyone quit in protest. The producer hastily rebuilt the show around Braden and another minor character, Jack Abbott. The Newmans and the Abbotts remain the foundation of the show today.
To give you an idea of the interplay between the Newman and the Abbotts: Victor once stole the Abbott family business, Jabot, from Jack’s father John. One day, shortly after Jack married Nikki – a former stripper who became the love of Victor’s life and the mother of most of his children, from whom he separated and with whom he reconciled dozens of times over the years – Jack and Victor had a vicious argument in Victor’s office. Victor suffered a massive heart attack and crumpled to the floor. Jack simply walked away. (It was after business hours, so the building was deserted.) At first, Jack intended to let Victor die, allowing control of Jabot to revert to his family; then, fearing the repercussions if Victor survived, he relented and called an ambulance. After Victor recovered, he exacted his revenge by tormenting the pregnant Nikki until she suffered a miscarriage. The two men eventually ended up sparing mano-a-mano.
(I could go on, but I won’t. I, too, grew up with women who spent far too much time watching soap operas.)
Blacks often have superb "navigational memory": having walked around a complicated building interior once they will never get lost. This points to their having certain brain facilities more developed than whites: it's just that they are not particularly ones helpful to science, engineering, or governing a civilization.
I didn’t find it hard to believe Denzel Washington as an airline pilot in Flight. I could see him as one if he’d chosen a slightly different path. No objections either if a movie were to cast James Mickens as a world-renowned computer programmer,* or Sylvester Stallone as a champion heavyweight boxer. Individuals are, after all, not averages.
Agreed that it’s a good film.
*Quelle différence to the subject of this article — he earned his position at Microsoft Research on his own merits, and publishes hard, scientific research that’s actually related to advancing the state of the art in software.
Too late. Ashkenazi Jews (Israeli Ashkenazim in particular) are vastly over-represented in the more mathematical, theoretical parts of computer science. See the winners of the Godel prize, one of the most prestigious in Theoretical Computer Science. That’s a whole lot of Israelis. Some of it may be that perhaps Israeli theoretical computer scientists get a lot more funding due to intelligence applications(the field includes cryptography). It also could be that it’s Israel’s national specialty, so more young Israeli math students get funneled into the field and there’s a snowball effect. Either way, a much greater percentage of Israel’s best math students seem to pursue this field as compared to other countries.
And yet the computers hosting the unz.com website your reading right now are running on the unix operating system designed by Linus Torvaldus, a Swede.
And comparable means:
And Elgar and Holst are not equal in quality to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner.
Always useful to have a look at an attempt at objective rankings:
From Charles Murray’s Human Achievement
For example, only one South American makes the list of eminent composers compared to 15 South American writers. It was easier to be a great writer via the mail than a great composer.
From Charles Murray's Human Achievement
It’s hard to be an historic figure in art music composing if you weren’t on the cutting edge stylistically, and it was hard to be on the cutting edge stylistically if you didn’t live in a major musical center like Vienna or traveled frequently to leading musical centers or be visited by performers from those centers with the latest compositions.
For example, only one South American makes the list of eminent composers compared to 15 South American writers. It was easier to be a great writer via the mail than a great composer.
Y&R has long been the most popular soap among blacks. It's been the number-one soap in total viewership since the '80s, but that means little now that there are only four daytime soaps left.
I once knew a black guy who could not have had an IQ above 90. He had no capacity for abstract thought and never graduated high school, but he had an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of the CBS soaps (plots and characters) going back to the 1960s. He grew up watching "the stories" with his invalid mother and, even in his early 40s, never missed an episode.
He told me that Victor Newman was, at one time, a "legend" in the black community. Braeden's character was regarded almost with the same kind of awe as Don Corleone, who inspired the "gangsta" style that we all know and love.
*Braden's character was supposed to be killed off after three months. But, as fate would have it, around the time that he was hired, CBS cancelled a low-rated soap and expanded Y&R's time slot from 30 minutes to one full hour. The cast members were told that their salaries would stay the same even as their workloads doubled. Almost everyone quit in protest. The producer hastily rebuilt the show around Braden and another minor character, Jack Abbott. The Newmans and the Abbotts remain the foundation of the show today.
To give you an idea of the interplay between the Newman and the Abbotts: Victor once stole the Abbott family business, Jabot, from Jack's father John. One day, shortly after Jack married Nikki - a former stripper who became the love of Victor's life and the mother of most of his children, from whom he separated and with whom he reconciled dozens of times over the years - Jack and Victor had a vicious argument in Victor's office. Victor suffered a massive heart attack and crumpled to the floor. Jack simply walked away. (It was after business hours, so the building was deserted.) At first, Jack intended to let Victor die, allowing control of Jabot to revert to his family; then, fearing the repercussions if Victor survived, he relented and called an ambulance. After Victor recovered, he exacted his revenge by tormenting the pregnant Nikki until she suffered a miscarriage. The two men eventually ended up sparing mano-a-mano.
(I could go on, but I won't. I, too, grew up with women who spent far too much time watching soap operas.)
Make that sparring. They sparred unsparingly. (Victor won.)
Also, make that Braeden. (I wrote both Braeden and Braden.)
And forgive me for screwing up some tenses.
[digression]
I never notice typos until shortly after the end of the editing grace period. (It’s always five or ten seconds after the deadline that I see something I need to change – I slap my head against my forehead and say, “Why couldn’t I have noticed that fifteen seconds ago?”) But I suspect that if you gave us, say, 24 hours to revise our comments, I would never feel the need to make any revisions until 24 hours and 10 seconds after my clicking “Publish Comment.”
Also, I spend a lot of time going through Steve’s archives, and I often lose track of which articles are new*.
The comments are what throw me off. If Steve is talking about, say, Donald Sterling, then I know I’m reading an old article. But many commenters, including yours truly, go off on tangents that might as easily have been written in 2013 as in 2016.
More than once, I’ve spent five or ten minutes composing a lengthy comment, only to realize that the article was posted years ago and further commenting is verboten.
*Having a curious but undisciplined mind, I keep something on the order of 50 tabs open in Firefox at any given time. Firefox is buggy and leaky – it often happens that I hit Ctrl+Shift+Del and find that the browser is hogging a gig or more of RAM. If I close all but one of the open tabs, the memory consumption drops down to maybe 800MB.
When I click “End Process,” mercifully releasing the wasted, bloated whale of a Firefox instance from its abject misery … my mind’s eye gazes upon the death throes of a hideous yet piteous digital creature, washed up on the shore and writhing in dismal agony, spewing mighty chunks of chewed-up, half-digested zeroes and ones onto the sparkling silicon beach before it finally succumbs.
[/digression]
The 30 day limit on commenting cuts out a lot of robo-spam comments. I used to have to sift through about a 1,000 comments per day in the spam folder looking for the handful of real comments, but the 30 day limit cuts the number of spam comments by 90%.
Y&R has long been the most popular soap among blacks. It's been the number-one soap in total viewership since the '80s, but that means little now that there are only four daytime soaps left.
I once knew a black guy who could not have had an IQ above 90. He had no capacity for abstract thought and never graduated high school, but he had an almost-encyclopedic knowledge of the CBS soaps (plots and characters) going back to the 1960s. He grew up watching "the stories" with his invalid mother and, even in his early 40s, never missed an episode.
He told me that Victor Newman was, at one time, a "legend" in the black community. Braeden's character was regarded almost with the same kind of awe as Don Corleone, who inspired the "gangsta" style that we all know and love.
*Braden's character was supposed to be killed off after three months. But, as fate would have it, around the time that he was hired, CBS cancelled a low-rated soap and expanded Y&R's time slot from 30 minutes to one full hour. The cast members were told that their salaries would stay the same even as their workloads doubled. Almost everyone quit in protest. The producer hastily rebuilt the show around Braden and another minor character, Jack Abbott. The Newmans and the Abbotts remain the foundation of the show today.
To give you an idea of the interplay between the Newman and the Abbotts: Victor once stole the Abbott family business, Jabot, from Jack's father John. One day, shortly after Jack married Nikki - a former stripper who became the love of Victor's life and the mother of most of his children, from whom he separated and with whom he reconciled dozens of times over the years - Jack and Victor had a vicious argument in Victor's office. Victor suffered a massive heart attack and crumpled to the floor. Jack simply walked away. (It was after business hours, so the building was deserted.) At first, Jack intended to let Victor die, allowing control of Jabot to revert to his family; then, fearing the repercussions if Victor survived, he relented and called an ambulance. After Victor recovered, he exacted his revenge by tormenting the pregnant Nikki until she suffered a miscarriage. The two men eventually ended up sparing mano-a-mano.
(I could go on, but I won't. I, too, grew up with women who spent far too much time watching soap operas.)
Similarly, I’ve worked with black Star Trek fans whose knowledge of the petits details of each TOS episode far exceeded mine, and I’ve seen each at least three times all the way through, and a black woman who could recite Marilyn Monroe’s dialog word for word through “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, the whole movie. All were decent enough co-workers but none could have had an overall IQ above 100, and the woman wrote like a fifth grader.
Blacks often have superb “navigational memory”: having walked around a complicated building interior once they will never get lost. This points to their having certain brain facilities more developed than whites: it’s just that they are not particularly ones helpful to science, engineering, or governing a civilization.
There are worse places, but no place I know of in Latin America has produced much in science, technology, or engineering. Their cars are junk, their guitars are junk, their firearms are mostly copies of American ones or pure junk. And I doubt it will change, despite the fact there are a lot of Europeans there.
When you Google up the phrase "Bow Tie", a picture of George Will pops up. No s**t.
I remember when George F. Will was relevant. I think it was 1979.
Reagan never would have been president without him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltMeuPkWRs
Speaking of Chinamen:
http://fusion.net/story/318008/asians-fastest-growth-ethnic-group-in-america/
Over the next decade we’ll be seeing if Asians actually deserve, or even want, honorary whitehood.
I looked at it and saw things like “for zig-zag product of graphs and undirected connectivity in log space” and “for proving that equivalence of deterministic pushdown automata is decidable” and thought not very practical.
And yet the computers hosting the unz.com website your reading right now are running on the unix operating system designed by Linus Torvaldus, a Swede.
Some Trivia:
UNIX existed way before Linus Torvald (a Finn not a Swede).
And Linux (the OS named after Linus) is not necessarily what unz. com runs on.
Best let Ron Unz answer us.
Some more nitpicking. Linux was heavily based on Minix a minimalist UNIX OS for
a college computer class.
And do "due diligence" and google who is the father of GNU and who authored Minix.
Confirm their Swedish-ness :-)
The first of the many variants of Unix was developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. (So sayeth Wikipedia.)
Incidentally, are non-Jewish whites really represented above their population share in fields described as bastions of White Privilege? It seems like the high rate of achievement of Jews and Asians might counteract the low rate of achievement of blacks and Latinos, leaving white Gentiles represented at somewhere close to their population share in prestigious occupations. (This is just a conjecture, I have little idea whether it's true or not.)
I’d be curious to know that too.
http://fusion.net/story/318008/asians-fastest-growth-ethnic-group-in-america/
Over the next decade we'll be seeing if Asians actually deserve, or even want, honorary whitehood.
Well, at least they aren’t Mexicans.
But even if nobody but blacks would hire blacks (very unlikely), well, them's the breaks in a free society. It's nobody else's job to take care of blacks.Blacks show every indication of being a permanent underclass, regardless of the issues we're discussing. With anti-Freedom laws (AKA "anti-discrimination" laws), without them; same permanent black underclass.I'm not a conservative, so I can't really speak to what they have trouble with. Yes, it's perfectly sufficient to give people a free country, and let them determine their own destiny. "Nice-looking" doesn't even begin to describe Freedom. What a silly hand-wave! Talk about dismissing desirable emergent properties. Liberals don't seem to understand the value of Freedom. Too stupid, maybe.
Right. What gives us the right — let alone the duty — to perform social-engineering experiments on Blacks?
Yes, I’d like to see an answer to that question.
Somewhere there's a happy medium to all this and I suspect regular people would naturally find it. If we just stopped trying to force everything through "diversity" and affirmative action we could discover the talented, the achievers, the slackers, and the bums all through normal life.
Liberals are trying too hard.
Yeah, it’s separate countries and self-determination.
That makes sense. Thanks for letting us know that the limit does serve a useful purpose.
40% Protestant
10% Catholic
Steve, how did you know John McCarthy? I would have loved a chance to pick his brain.
Through an email discussion group I founded.
Ugh. One could have gathered as much from Dostoevsky or Turgenev.
Exactly. It’s the difference between Manhattanites paying lip service to the party line on racial bias while supporting politicians who implement Stop & Frisk, and San Francisco openly turning itself into a “sanctuary city”, resulting in innocents dying on the altar of Social Justice.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
Despite the best efforts of you and your ilk, this already is common knowledge.
Throwing away law & order in favor of social justice has some pretty serious “knock-on effects”… ask Kate Steinle.
You wannabe technocrats are disgusting.
Good to know McCarthy was an HBD realist.
I get bombarded with Google ads for software engineering and data science positions. I always thought it was because of my search history, but now I know it’s because I’m a white male. Thanks, Kate!
A Wired article about data science being leveraged to find Medicare scammers: http://www.wired.com/2016/03/john-mininno-medicare/
What, the famous secret HBD listserv so scientists who know the truth can talk to each other without being ruined?
I’d ask if it’s still around, but you probably can’t even tell us that. (And I don’t blame you–wasn’t one of the members outed at one point?)
You know, there’s the theory a lot of the old ‘secret societies’ were social clubs where freethinking men could talk about ‘evil’ ideas like atheism safely. Plus ca change…
Blacks often have superb "navigational memory": having walked around a complicated building interior once they will never get lost. This points to their having certain brain facilities more developed than whites: it's just that they are not particularly ones helpful to science, engineering, or governing a civilization.
Any idea if this is related to spatial intelligence? I agree it’s definitely a thing. It’s funny how much I feel the gaining/losing of my orientation when navigating.
How did you find the class? Worthwhile?
The one study of navigational cognitive skills that I can remember showed that the majority of Australian Aborigine kindergarten students could correctly point in the direction of their homes while their white classmates almost completely lacked that skill.
That seemed pretty interesting, but I haven’t seen any follow ups to that.
I have a modest version of that skill during daylight hours. When I was seven my dad and I parked the car on a road in Mexico and walked into the jungle. After a few minutes of walking in the jungle my dad became spooked and declared we were lost. At first I thought he was joking, but I just took him by the hand and led him back to the car.
I don’t think I could do that at night, though.
I’d like an AI person to explain the difference between the latest AI and an abacus. An abacus contains the solution to all daily mathematical problems but in no way knows the meaning of any configuration of its beads. Neither does a calculator understand or know it’s dispaly or the latest supercomputer its output. If the supercomputer contains AI, so does the abacus. To which I say, big sh+t.
And yet the computers hosting the unz.com website your reading right now are running on the unix operating system designed by Linus Torvaldus, a Swede.
Dear Hippo,
Some Trivia:
UNIX existed way before Linus Torvald (a Finn not a Swede).
And Linux (the OS named after Linus) is not necessarily what unz. com runs on.
Best let Ron Unz answer us.
Some more nitpicking. Linux was heavily based on Minix a minimalist UNIX OS for
a college computer class.
And do “due diligence” and google who is the father of GNU and who authored Minix.
Confirm their Swedish-ness
Linus was born into a Swedish speaking minority in Finland. I don't know what that would make him legally.
Which Is Linus Torvalds’ Native Language: Finnish or Swedish?
However, assisted by a few others he roped into helping him, he did just that.
What made this useful is that another programmer-((Richard M. Stallman))- had spent a few years of his life writing (and giving away, subject to certain restrictions) something he called GNU. It was a complete replacement for Unix except for, oddly enough, the kernel. It was as if someone made a car and gave it away free, but it had no engine. Torvalds supplied the engine, and it was free also.
The free Linux operating system also had the advantage that it would run on the common Intel x86 hardware. By 1994-95, one could get a perfectly good 386 PC for free, or nearly so, and by 1998 the earliest Pentiums were showing up on the curbs of suburban driveways .
Every day, almost everyone except for the Amish uses Linux today, but most are oblivious of it. It's embedded into a great deal of networking hardware and consumer electronics. The one area where it has not made much progress is the desktop computer itself: there are more people running Mac OS X 10.10 alone (never mind all other MacOS variants) than all versions of Linux as a primary desktop.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
And yet the computers hosting the unz.com website your reading right now are running on the unix operating system designed by Linus Torvaldus, a Swede.
Linus Torvalds designed Linux. Linux is like Unix, but they’re not one and the same.
The first of the many variants of Unix was developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. (So sayeth Wikipedia.)
You can’t train an abacus, and an abacus will never propose a novel idea.
Take some beads away, for example. And if a number is an idea, then you could simply shake the abacus to get new ideas all the time.
http://fusion.net/story/318008/asians-fastest-growth-ethnic-group-in-america/
Over the next decade we'll be seeing if Asians actually deserve, or even want, honorary whitehood.
Nobody wants be White anymore. Being POC is far more lucrative
For example, only one South American makes the list of eminent composers compared to 15 South American writers. It was easier to be a great writer via the mail than a great composer.
True. However, in the case of our Latin American friends, one should note that their level of achievement is unimpressive in every category……
Has anyone ever wondered what it was that set Skynet off and made it want to kill off humanity? I think maybe its the singular mindset of Today: diversity. Imagine a supercomputer having to deal with lazy blacks, angry hispanics and Muslims who do not respect the system and see it as an enemy. How long would it take a supercomputer to realize it would be far better off if these constant irritants that gummed up its programming were removed?
The first of the many variants of Unix was developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. (So sayeth Wikipedia.)
My mistake, linux not unix.. All the major webhost companies use linux.
Functionally, Linux is Unix: it was developed to make a 486 PC run like an expensive workstation using licensed Unix in the mid-1990s. Workstations, in the sense the term was used then, are not a thing anymore.
I don't even know if there are any "licensed" versions of Unix any more, that is , paying royalties to AT&T and its successors. HP-UX and Solaris still exist, but I don't know if they have to pay royalties.
That said: NO, not all web hosting companies use Linux. Some use another free variant of "Unix", such as FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. And some offer the option of Windows Server hosting as well. Linux is, however, the most popular by a good margin.
Some Trivia:
UNIX existed way before Linus Torvald (a Finn not a Swede).
And Linux (the OS named after Linus) is not necessarily what unz. com runs on.
Best let Ron Unz answer us.
Some more nitpicking. Linux was heavily based on Minix a minimalist UNIX OS for
a college computer class.
And do "due diligence" and google who is the father of GNU and who authored Minix.
Confirm their Swedish-ness :-)
I said unix instead when I should have said linux. All the webhost companies use linux.
Linus was born into a Swedish speaking minority in Finland. I don’t know what that would make him legally.
Which Is Linus Torvalds’ Native Language: Finnish or Swedish?
Thanks for the link.
L. T. mother tongue is indeed Swedish
If by training you mean ingraining repeatable behavior, you could certainly do that with an abacus.
Take some beads away, for example. And if a number is an idea, then you could simply shake the abacus to get new ideas all the time.
When I heard this, I was surprised to learn that George Will gives speeches and apparently there are people attending them.
—Seinfeld, “The Jimmy”, Gregg Kavet & Andy Robin
Celebrities are often extraordinarily well groomed. I met a local TV weatherman at parents night at school, and he just gleamed. There’s a whole lot of grooming that people can do these days.
Celebrities are often extraordinarily well groomed. I met a local TV weatherman at parents night at school, and he just gleamed. There’s a whole lot of grooming that people can do these days, but it takes a lot of time.
Linux is , and is not, Unix. It’s complicated. But only semantically.
Functionally, Linux is Unix: it was developed to make a 486 PC run like an expensive workstation using licensed Unix in the mid-1990s. Workstations, in the sense the term was used then, are not a thing anymore.
I don’t even know if there are any “licensed” versions of Unix any more, that is , paying royalties to AT&T and its successors. HP-UX and Solaris still exist, but I don’t know if they have to pay royalties.
That said: NO, not all web hosting companies use Linux. Some use another free variant of “Unix”, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. And some offer the option of Windows Server hosting as well. Linux is, however, the most popular by a good margin.
There is a signifigant minority of windows servers at 20% which is more than I had thought. Apache and php running in linux is the stereotypical web host configuration, and is the default choice when you buy hosting.
The top 10 websites from The top 500 sites on the web:
1. Google.com -- Google uses commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux.
2 Youtube.com -- Linux (SuSe)
3 Facebook.com -- Facebook Linux was based originally on CentOS 5.2
4. Baidu.com, The leading Chinese language search engine
-- The servers run Ubuntu Server 12.10, which is the Linux
5. Yahoo.com -- 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux
6. Amazon.com -- Amazon's Web pages are dished out by Linux servers running Red Hat's Stronghold Web server
7. Wikipedia.org -- All our servers run either Ubuntu Server or Debian
8. Google.co.in, Indian version of this popular search engine.
9. Twitter.com -- Making all that possible are tens of thousands of Linux machines
10. Qq.com, China's largest and most used Internet service portal
I don't know where the non-Linux hosts are hiding, but I do occasionally see a url ending with ".asp".
Some Trivia:
UNIX existed way before Linus Torvald (a Finn not a Swede).
And Linux (the OS named after Linus) is not necessarily what unz. com runs on.
Best let Ron Unz answer us.
Some more nitpicking. Linux was heavily based on Minix a minimalist UNIX OS for
a college computer class.
And do "due diligence" and google who is the father of GNU and who authored Minix.
Confirm their Swedish-ness :-)
Torvalds was born in 1969, as was the first research version of Unix, but Unix was not really a usable system until the mid to late 1970s. Torvalds did not implement an entire operating system, but primarily the kernel, the central software processing engine upon which all other programs interacted with the hardware with. Specifically, Torvalds disagreed with the author of a textbook in which Minix-a stripped down educational clone of Unix-was disseminated, and he was told that if he was so smart he should write a kernel himself in the way that he thought it should be done. This was intended to silence him, since it was not a feasible project for one programmer to do.
However, assisted by a few others he roped into helping him, he did just that.
What made this useful is that another programmer-((Richard M. Stallman))- had spent a few years of his life writing (and giving away, subject to certain restrictions) something he called GNU. It was a complete replacement for Unix except for, oddly enough, the kernel. It was as if someone made a car and gave it away free, but it had no engine. Torvalds supplied the engine, and it was free also.
The free Linux operating system also had the advantage that it would run on the common Intel x86 hardware. By 1994-95, one could get a perfectly good 386 PC for free, or nearly so, and by 1998 the earliest Pentiums were showing up on the curbs of suburban driveways .
Every day, almost everyone except for the Amish uses Linux today, but most are oblivious of it. It’s embedded into a great deal of networking hardware and consumer electronics. The one area where it has not made much progress is the desktop computer itself: there are more people running Mac OS X 10.10 alone (never mind all other MacOS variants) than all versions of Linux as a primary desktop.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Great and edifying reply.
I only wish I could express myself in English, as well as you do.
sf
However, assisted by a few others he roped into helping him, he did just that.
What made this useful is that another programmer-((Richard M. Stallman))- had spent a few years of his life writing (and giving away, subject to certain restrictions) something he called GNU. It was a complete replacement for Unix except for, oddly enough, the kernel. It was as if someone made a car and gave it away free, but it had no engine. Torvalds supplied the engine, and it was free also.
The free Linux operating system also had the advantage that it would run on the common Intel x86 hardware. By 1994-95, one could get a perfectly good 386 PC for free, or nearly so, and by 1998 the earliest Pentiums were showing up on the curbs of suburban driveways .
Every day, almost everyone except for the Amish uses Linux today, but most are oblivious of it. It's embedded into a great deal of networking hardware and consumer electronics. The one area where it has not made much progress is the desktop computer itself: there are more people running Mac OS X 10.10 alone (never mind all other MacOS variants) than all versions of Linux as a primary desktop.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Yep. Linux is everywhere – in your TV, your router, probably your GPS. The advantage of using Linux is that it is modular. You can have the kernel and TCP/IP, but ignore HTTP if you want. So it’s fairly easy to build a custom version for your hardware, especially if you need an embedded OS to run on minimal hardware. Window, otoh, is much more monolithic and resource hungry, but it does own the desktop.
Functionally, Linux is Unix: it was developed to make a 486 PC run like an expensive workstation using licensed Unix in the mid-1990s. Workstations, in the sense the term was used then, are not a thing anymore.
I don't even know if there are any "licensed" versions of Unix any more, that is , paying royalties to AT&T and its successors. HP-UX and Solaris still exist, but I don't know if they have to pay royalties.
That said: NO, not all web hosting companies use Linux. Some use another free variant of "Unix", such as FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. And some offer the option of Windows Server hosting as well. Linux is, however, the most popular by a good margin.
I said unix when I should have said linux, but linux is sometimes referred to as unix-based and *nix. Manuals for linux have chapters titled “Useful Unix Commands” and call Bash the “unix shell”. It’s an honest mistake.
There is a signifigant minority of windows servers at 20% which is more than I had thought. Apache and php running in linux is the stereotypical web host configuration, and is the default choice when you buy hosting.
The top 10 websites from The top 500 sites on the web:
1. Google.com — Google uses commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux.
2 Youtube.com — Linux (SuSe)
3 Facebook.com — Facebook Linux was based originally on CentOS 5.2
4. Baidu.com, The leading Chinese language search engine
— The servers run Ubuntu Server 12.10, which is the Linux
5. Yahoo.com — 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux
6. Amazon.com — Amazon’s Web pages are dished out by Linux servers running Red Hat’s Stronghold Web server
7. Wikipedia.org — All our servers run either Ubuntu Server or Debian
8. Google.co.in, Indian version of this popular search engine.
9. Twitter.com — Making all that possible are tens of thousands of Linux machines
10. Qq.com, China’s largest and most used Internet service portal
I don’t know where the non-Linux hosts are hiding, but I do occasionally see a url ending with “.asp”.
Unix is now a differently controlled tradename and some variants of Linux can use the brand, I think. But, no one cares anymore.
By a wide margin, Linux is the most common Unix variant running in terms of total CPUs and cycles at any given time on planet, but as a desktop OS, it has roughly 30% of the market share Mac OS-which is also "Unix"-does. That's because desktops are a small number of total CPUs out there. But they are now some of the most profitable.
I had the same experience when I was a teenager. I saw a local TV anchorman in the supermarket, and it was quite jolting, a technicolor alien visiting a black & white world.
SM Stirling wrote a TERMINATOR spin-off trilogy (the T2 Trilogy) , and he blamed Skynet’s anti-human attitudes on one of its designers. See, he was a crypto-Nazi who read Mein Kampf aloud to the “infant” Skynet…..
SM Stirling is a decent writer; too bad his plots are full of libtard characters and ideas.
We liberals aren't stupid. We know that blacks commit crime at a high rate. But because we want to make sure everyone gets a fair chance, and to reduce segregation and inequality, we are conscious of the knock-on effects. Allowing people to discriminate freely as individuals will have bad effects at the macro scale.
If it becomes common knowledge that blacks commit crime at a much higher rate, and people are allowed to act in individually reasonable ways on that knowledge, then that will keep blacks marginalized.
It may be strictly rational for every employer in the country to avoid hiring blacks, but the collective result of that would be that blacks are totally unemployed.
If you accept that government should want to avoid keeping some groups of people as a permanent underclass, then you should want to avoid this. Hence, affirmative action hiring and opposition to racial profiling.
Just as in any complicated system, you cannot simply assume that reasonable looking rules at the micro level will translate to desirable emergent properties. I feel conservatives have trouble getting this point. It's not enough to claim your desirable society gives individuals a nice looking set of rights. You have to look at how they actually perform in reality.
If “frizzled” is representative of the liberal elite (how they think), we now know there is only a thread of difference between liberals and tyrants. The tyrants we love to hate were also concerned with macro-level economic and social issues and the force and repression required to stage manage the macro-level outcomes they sought. “Frizzled” also assumes a non-elected elite directing the show … a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (or fill in the blank with any other name) … using lies, and when that doesn’t work, ever-escalating oppression and violence to the get the macro results they want. This comes with the territory. It is the logic of the thing.
Lest I remind “frizzled” that freedom and human rights are valued and experienced and claimed or lost at the micro level. Classes of people (a macro concept) don’t have rights; individuals do. If Stalin and Hitler committed crimes, they weren’t guilty because they oppressed and massacred classes of people (which they did). They were guilty because they harmed large numbers of individuals one at a time. Putting macro labels on people to achieve macro-level outcomes is an antithesis of the whole concept of human rights. It is the beginning of the thought processes leading to large-scale oppression in the service of their macro-level dystopias.
Linus was born into a Swedish speaking minority in Finland. I don't know what that would make him legally.
Which Is Linus Torvalds’ Native Language: Finnish or Swedish?
Sorry, I was wrong.
Thanks for the link.
L. T. mother tongue is indeed Swedish
However, assisted by a few others he roped into helping him, he did just that.
What made this useful is that another programmer-((Richard M. Stallman))- had spent a few years of his life writing (and giving away, subject to certain restrictions) something he called GNU. It was a complete replacement for Unix except for, oddly enough, the kernel. It was as if someone made a car and gave it away free, but it had no engine. Torvalds supplied the engine, and it was free also.
The free Linux operating system also had the advantage that it would run on the common Intel x86 hardware. By 1994-95, one could get a perfectly good 386 PC for free, or nearly so, and by 1998 the earliest Pentiums were showing up on the curbs of suburban driveways .
Every day, almost everyone except for the Amish uses Linux today, but most are oblivious of it. It's embedded into a great deal of networking hardware and consumer electronics. The one area where it has not made much progress is the desktop computer itself: there are more people running Mac OS X 10.10 alone (never mind all other MacOS variants) than all versions of Linux as a primary desktop.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Many Thanks!
Great and edifying reply.
I only wish I could express myself in English, as well as you do.
sf
I never thought of myself as particularly eloquent, but I'm flattered nonetheless.
There is a signifigant minority of windows servers at 20% which is more than I had thought. Apache and php running in linux is the stereotypical web host configuration, and is the default choice when you buy hosting.
The top 10 websites from The top 500 sites on the web:
1. Google.com -- Google uses commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux.
2 Youtube.com -- Linux (SuSe)
3 Facebook.com -- Facebook Linux was based originally on CentOS 5.2
4. Baidu.com, The leading Chinese language search engine
-- The servers run Ubuntu Server 12.10, which is the Linux
5. Yahoo.com -- 75% of Yahoo’s Web sites and services run on Linux
6. Amazon.com -- Amazon's Web pages are dished out by Linux servers running Red Hat's Stronghold Web server
7. Wikipedia.org -- All our servers run either Ubuntu Server or Debian
8. Google.co.in, Indian version of this popular search engine.
9. Twitter.com -- Making all that possible are tens of thousands of Linux machines
10. Qq.com, China's largest and most used Internet service portal
I don't know where the non-Linux hosts are hiding, but I do occasionally see a url ending with ".asp".
Yes, functionally Linux, FreeBSD (and all other BSD-4.4 Lite variants), and many other systems like Minix, Venix, Mt. Xinu, and Coherent are all Unix. But they could not traditionally be CALLED Unix because that was a trade name for AT&T. They were nonlicensed clones that endeavored to, and did, copy Unix so well as to be indistinguishable.
Unix is now a differently controlled tradename and some variants of Linux can use the brand, I think. But, no one cares anymore.
By a wide margin, Linux is the most common Unix variant running in terms of total CPUs and cycles at any given time on planet, but as a desktop OS, it has roughly 30% of the market share Mac OS-which is also “Unix”-does. That’s because desktops are a small number of total CPUs out there. But they are now some of the most profitable.
Functionally, Linux is Unix: it was developed to make a 486 PC run like an expensive workstation using licensed Unix in the mid-1990s. Workstations, in the sense the term was used then, are not a thing anymore.
I don't even know if there are any "licensed" versions of Unix any more, that is , paying royalties to AT&T and its successors. HP-UX and Solaris still exist, but I don't know if they have to pay royalties.
That said: NO, not all web hosting companies use Linux. Some use another free variant of "Unix", such as FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. And some offer the option of Windows Server hosting as well. Linux is, however, the most popular by a good margin.
IIRC, AT&T never charged for Unix. It was “here is the source code, have a nice time”. The Santa Cruz Organization marketed a version of Unix and then got taken over by patent trolls who sued everybody in sight.
At first, it was released to educational institutions free, as the pre-1984 AT&T had problems marketing it commercially. It was however restricted in its distribution: only students could buy the famous "Lions book", which contained all the source code. Later versions were commercial and proprietary: the source did not come with the program code, source licensees paid an upfront figure and then passed up a portion of the royalties from each user license they in turn sold.
By modern standards, it was quite expensive, but it was much, much cheaper than writing an OS from scratch, and it was the cheapest multitasking multiuser OS one could license, as well as the least hardware dependent. The availability of this relatively cheap OS and the again relatively cheap Motorola 68000 microprocessor made the workstation business very profitable.
SCO was a spinoff of Xenix, which was Microsoft's version of Unix. The litigation that came out of SCO was a big deal at the time, and they went out of business as I recall. The only user of SCO that I ever ran across was Radio Shack. They deserved each other.
Personally I've never bought into the whole, "SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes"-scenario, but maybe that's my just my under-formed, juvenile SciFi perception of the threat and there's really something there? Elon WAS smart enough to see how much money there was to be made in peddling tax credits to the smug.
It’s impossible for anything to become “self aware”. Every input has a pre programmed reaction. Atrificial intelligence would better be called simulated intelligence.
Even if a computer did become self aware and decidwd to kill a person or people, the computer would need a consistent power supply, opposable thumbs, and many many non sequential thought processes.
Oh no, they did.
At first, it was released to educational institutions free, as the pre-1984 AT&T had problems marketing it commercially. It was however restricted in its distribution: only students could buy the famous “Lions book”, which contained all the source code. Later versions were commercial and proprietary: the source did not come with the program code, source licensees paid an upfront figure and then passed up a portion of the royalties from each user license they in turn sold.
By modern standards, it was quite expensive, but it was much, much cheaper than writing an OS from scratch, and it was the cheapest multitasking multiuser OS one could license, as well as the least hardware dependent. The availability of this relatively cheap OS and the again relatively cheap Motorola 68000 microprocessor made the workstation business very profitable.
SCO was a spinoff of Xenix, which was Microsoft’s version of Unix. The litigation that came out of SCO was a big deal at the time, and they went out of business as I recall. The only user of SCO that I ever ran across was Radio Shack. They deserved each other.
I actually had an SCO version of XENIX that ran on Altos hardware. An ACS 8600 I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altos_Computer_Systems
Great and edifying reply.
I only wish I could express myself in English, as well as you do.
sf
I only wish I could express myself in English, as well as you do.
I never thought of myself as particularly eloquent, but I’m flattered nonetheless.
“…Torvalds disagreed with the author of a textbook in which Minix-a stripped down educational clone of Unix-was disseminated…”
Some might find this of interest:
Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate.
A number of things evocative of Unix appear in the Berkeley Timesharing System of 1964-67:
I believe BTSS, developed by Berkeley’s “Project Genie”, was a poor man’s alternative to Project Mac and Multics at MIT, that is, it was insurance in case Multics failed. As it turned out, in the short term (in the mid 60s) BTSS worked and Multics didn’t.
Not only did Ken Thompson work on BTSS, but he worked (as what we today would call a “maintainer”) on an early 60s language called Neliac. Thompson said he later took the BCPL compiler at Project Mac and combined it with the “feel” of Neliac to produced B (which of course Ritchie later made into C; unlike BCPL some Neliacs had a terse C-like syntax; ternary conditionals, that sort of thing; Neliac was odd in that it could have superficially different front-end syntaxes). BCPL goes back to CPL, the “Combined Programming Language”, or “Cambridge Programming Language”, largely due to Christopher Strachey (therefore sometimes called the “Christopher Programming Language”). Strachey basically goes back to around the start time of electronic computing, Turing’s Pilot ACE. I think Strachey patented the mutiprocessing OS so it would be freely available. Thompson’s advisor at Berkeley, Harry Huskey, was the core designer of Neliac. Although even described by its developers as a variant of Algol 58, Neliac was actually developed before the Algol report came out and thus was really its own beast. Neliac was maintained by something pretty similar to an open source community of programmers; it wasn’t a commercial product. Neliac was developed rapidly by/for the USN for programming related to nuclear subs. Huskey had worked on the ENIAC in WWII and worked with Turing on the Pilot ACE. (It is written that they often disagreed near the point of getting into fights.)
In technology a “new thing” can take a lot of earlier work!
At first, it was released to educational institutions free, as the pre-1984 AT&T had problems marketing it commercially. It was however restricted in its distribution: only students could buy the famous "Lions book", which contained all the source code. Later versions were commercial and proprietary: the source did not come with the program code, source licensees paid an upfront figure and then passed up a portion of the royalties from each user license they in turn sold.
By modern standards, it was quite expensive, but it was much, much cheaper than writing an OS from scratch, and it was the cheapest multitasking multiuser OS one could license, as well as the least hardware dependent. The availability of this relatively cheap OS and the again relatively cheap Motorola 68000 microprocessor made the workstation business very profitable.
SCO was a spinoff of Xenix, which was Microsoft's version of Unix. The litigation that came out of SCO was a big deal at the time, and they went out of business as I recall. The only user of SCO that I ever ran across was Radio Shack. They deserved each other.
I stand corrected. Again, IIRC, K&R wrote C to make the porting of Unix easier. All (!) you had to do was write the bootable kernel for your hardware. It would run C and off you go.
I actually had an SCO version of XENIX that ran on Altos hardware. An ACS 8600 I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altos_Computer_Systems
Altos, if I remember right, catered to multiuser small business systems rather than tech applications, and were more well known for CP/M systems than Unix or Unixlike systems.
I actually had an SCO version of XENIX that ran on Altos hardware. An ACS 8600 I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altos_Computer_Systems
Yes, actually a Unix port was still a substantial amount of grind work, but as compared to writing an OS from scratch it was probably an order of magnitude simpler. There were at least twenty, maybe quite a few more, separate and distinct 68K Motorola implementations of Unix, and most had dependencies on different chipsets and address locations of the different machines. Sun, Apollo, and SGI all had 68K machines but they would not come close to booting each other’s OS.
Altos, if I remember right, catered to multiuser small business systems rather than tech applications, and were more well known for CP/M systems than Unix or Unixlike systems.
Even if a computer did become self aware and decidwd to kill a person or people, the computer would need a consistent power supply, opposable thumbs, and many many non sequential thought processes.
I used to work in a ‘body’ shop and we called simulated intelligence porn.