Notices by Matt McIrvin (mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz)

@mekkaokereke @sangster @ajsadauskas My experience of talking to white Americans across the political spectrum about this is that there's a lot of instant resistance to almost anything that might make life better for convicts. "What? No, that's part of the punishment. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" etc. It's like we're frozen in the 1970s-80s-90s high-crime world where "get tough" was the universal prescription for a rise in crime nobody understood.

@sangster @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke the 13th Amendment banning slavery had a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, which was an explicit exception for convicts. Exploitation of this became normalized almost immediately, not just in the former Confederacy, and it can even get framed as "rehabilitation".

@futurebird @davep @inthehands @graymiller Anyway, these dark musings of mine were partly inspired by Katharine Hayhoe mentioning that of all the platforms where she talked about climate science, she got a positive reception on Bluesky, hostile denialist troll attacks on Twitter and Threads, dead air on Facebook because the algorithm was soft-shadowbanning her posts...

but Mastodon was, instead, the #1 place for "friendly fire" attention where people were concerned about climate, believed the science but attacked her for advocating it the wrong way. Which is just too perfect. Of course Mastodon would be the home of that.

@futurebird @davep @inthehands @graymiller And that's *before* you even get to the problem of picking a distro, uh, I mean, an instance.

@inthehands @futurebird @graymiller Except that Bluesky right now is exploding on a scale that Mastodon isn't, which is the opposite of the situation with solar and fuel cells.

Unfortunately Mastodon is something like the Linux of social-media networks. It's special in a way that may make it more robust than the commercial systems over the long term, and it makes it adaptable to all sorts of special purposes; but from a user perspective, it's a distinction on the basis of an ideology of technology that we probably can't make most people care about.

I suspect we're going to end up in the position of the people who keep wondering why Linux never took off on the desktop--it's so much better! Other operating systems make you dumb! If you can't jump through the simple hoops to use it, you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer! etc. etc.

(and we even have the equivalent of the people arguing "why aren't you calling it GNU/Linux" and arguing about the distinction of "open source" vs. "free software" etc. etc.)

@nyrath @futurebird What makes that doubly painful is the knowledge that if the late-era Heinlein were alive today, given where his thinking was going, he'd almost certainly identify today's liberals as the equivalent of Nehemiah Scudder and think of Trump and particularly Elon Musk as liberators. I certainly see plenty of his fans making that kind of leap.

Star Trek: TNG did an episode, "The Drumhead", that was a courtroom parable about a Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt. I recently saw an excerpt from that on YouTube and most of the comments were from people drawing parallels between the villain of the episode and liberal governments supposedly oppressing us with COVID prevention measures, vaccination and "wokeness". The problem with this kind of art is that you can take it just about any way you want.

@whknott @nyrath @futurebird Yes, Heinlein was an anti-democrat for that reason. He also had a vastly inflated opinion of his own infallibility (judging from his statements on technical subjects I actually know something about), so I never found his position on the desirability of rule by intellectual elites who resembled himself very convincing. And I say this as a fan of a lot of his writing.

It's an attitude that's very common in the science-fiction community, actually. I think it comes from the experience of being precocious kids who realized early on that they were smarter than a lot of the adults around them, which is something a lot of science-fiction fans have had. But it turns out this doesn't map very well to being fit to rule.

@futurebird Rich people seem worse than they've been in decades. They were never great but for Christ's sake, they've lost all sense of fake propriety. That's my biggest complaint.

@apophis @futurebird Rich people are WAY RICHER than they were a few decades ago, in comparative terms. A smaller number of them control a much larger portion of the total economic product, and have tremendous power, and being in this position seems to be absolutely toxic to the human brain.

The situation is more like the late 19th century, the Gilded Age. And the rich people of that time were buck wild.

@futurebird I keep hearing cultural critics and educators talking about the young as if they are intellectually stunted in some unprecedented and alarming way (and they always say they know the reason: it's the pandemic closures, it's smartphones, it's social media, it's that they don't read books, it's pop culture)

and I think, I don't know, maybe they're talking about the ones I haven't met. The kids I've known seem all right.

@skinnylatte the dangers I worry about almost all boil down to the gap between what actually existing "AI" can do, and what people think it can do. People ranging from children to venture capitalists. LLMs seem to have a powerful ability to generate misplaced trust.

@skinnylatte My wife had an interesting observation along those lines, which is that managers and investors seem to see AI as a tool to give cheap junior employees the productive power of more senior ones; but really junior workers are the ones least equipped with the judgment to see whether the AI is leading them down a wrong path. What they need is something the AI doesn't have.

@mekkaokereke @craignicol A few decades from now the whole world is going to run out of countries making lots of babies.

But we're not there yet. Won't be for a while. And anyone who is marginally less racist now is going to benefit when the global shortage comes. Is there any country in the world that will learn? Dunno. I was hoping the US actually had a better shot than most of Europe but I guess not.

@Sylvhem Similar reasons, too. In French it's because they used to pronounce those letters 1000 years ago, and in English it's probably because the word was imported 1000 or 500 years ago from another language with completely different spelling rules, or because the spelling was vaguely established at a time when all the vowels were pronounced differently.

@Robert_Brandt @JoshuaACNewman @cstross @nyrath And yet, New Hampshire is still absolutely full of libertarians, living in more conventional societies and complaining that the government is oppressing them.

@futurebird @JorgeStolfi @dymaxion @whknott I think that all the way back to at least Leibniz there was this idea that you might be able to automate the general search for truth by reducing it to turn-the-crank derivations. It's the same impulse that leads people to treat ChatGPT as an oracle.

@dymaxion @futurebird @whknott Where I wish people understood calculus is in *political* discussions, particularly involving economics. Not any of the techniques, just the basic idea of a function, its derivative and its integral being different things.

And maybe the idea that if you have a function of multiple variables, its rate of change is going to depend on which specific things you're holding constant.

But that last one is a HARD idea. It doesn't even really show up in AP Calculus, it's a later class. It trips people up when they're studying college-level thermodynamics.

@hannu_ikonen @mekkaokereke I learned it from conservative anti-feminists who were trying to get me to be anti-feminist, anti-abortion etc.

Of course that's bullshit and it didn't work. But getting out in front and acknowledging things is one way to forestall that kind of argument. It doesn't work when they talk about how the Democrats used to be the Southern white supremacist party either, because everybody knows that.

@ZachWeinersmith Do you think the punch-card property actually contributes to the comic effect of the stories? Thinking of Henri Bergson's theory of comedy emerging from "the mechanical layered on the living".

(The simplicity of it might help make the stories comforting to read.)

@futurebird They don't like any of that stuff but they'll put up with it if it means they don't have to go on a voyage of discovery and complete a self-taught computer science course to get a simple thing done.

A perennial problem in open source etc is that computer people enjoy the voyage of discovery, and many kind of think that attitude is the entrance fee for being fit to use a computer. But not everyone is like them.