Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 2

Adrienne Lafrance distills the free-speech implications of this American election

they're huge

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/donald-trump-hates-free-speech/680515/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/nsfsI

@pluralistic

Yikes!!

Given how much reassessment there’s been about milgram’s work, she must have been busy writing nastygrams

It's interesting to think about what was going on, culturally, in this period of the mid-to-middle 20th century, that all these theories of "the horrible, selfish, violent people that lurk within us" gained such currency

WWI and WWII, certainly, but there's got to be a lot of factors at play in why these theories grew so big and loomed so high

5/5

@phaedral

Yeah, the push for insisting capitalism is the true and only way to govern *everything* was big during this early-middle period of that American century

so anything that helped cement the idea that selfish maximizing is civically *innate* was pumped up

There's the Stanford Prison Experiment, of course, from 1971 -- where the terrible behavior of the guards seems to have been significantly nudged along by the people running the experiment

It didn't emerge *organically*

2/x

There's also "Lord of the Flies", which came out in 1954, and cemented the idea that young boys -- when removed from the moral guardrails of proper British society -- would become absolute terrors to one another

But when this happened in reality -- when six boys were marooned on a remote island for 15 months -- they all cheerfully banded together and co-operated, including carefully tending for one boy who broke his leg, while it healed: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

3/x

And I'm thinking also of game theory -- which, when it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, predicted that people would behave as selfish maximizers

But when they started testing the theory with real people, it didn't work that way

real people were as liable to cooperate and give a fair shake to their supposed competitors

4/x

More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards

In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN

Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true

1/x

Check out the work of the anti-Trump PAC that is placing ads on Pornhub warning that "Trump and Vance's Project 2025 will ban porn," adding "enjoy it while you can"

Turns out doing political advertising on Pornhub is not only pretty cheap, but you can target swing states easily and be assured of reaching a lot of young men who are, statistically, likely Trump voters

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/nx-s1-5168877/2024-election-pac-trump-porn-sites

Project 2025 mentions banning porn on page 5 of the intro: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-porn-ban-lgbtq-transgender-rcna161562

I just discovered the music of @ekis here on Mastodon, y'all should go listen to it *now* it is lovely: https://shehackedyou.bandcamp.com/

It turns out that the major AI search engines, when asked about IQ scores around the world …

… have been citing the racist, deeply flawed data-set of white supremacist Richard Lynn — which offers preposterously low scores for countries like Kenya and Sierra Leone

These numbers are often excitedly cited on white supremacist sites — they have unusual influence. The guy who killed ten Black Americans in Buffalo in 2022? He talked about them

Wired story here: https://www.wired.com/story/google-microsoft-perplexity-scientific-racism-search-results-ai/

@mcc @jeisom

I dig that goal

@mcc @jeisom

aha, very cool -- did not know about these!

Super interested to see your Servo experiments -- I was poking around the servo repo a month ago wondering what it would be like to spin something out of it

"Prairie strips" ...

... are narrow little parts of big farms that the farmers allow to return to nature ...

... with wild native plants growing there, and no fertilizer or pesticides

Turns out these little strips of rewilding have a powerful and postive impact on the health of the surrounding soil

Item #13 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/

Mastodon hive-mind!

I require your assistance

I'm wondering -- what was the first American song written about the problems of becoming famous as a singer/performer? Of the hassles of fame, of life on the road, etc?

When did this become a subject matter of songwriters and performers?

Please boost, the more brains on this one the better

How members of AP3, a far-right militia, cozied up to local police and border officials in the last few years

A *superb* investigation by Joshua Kaplan of @ProPublica, who appears to have gotten access to extensive chat logs from inside AP3

It's pretty mesmerizing

Check it out: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-secret-ap3-militia-american-patriots-three-percent

"Within the next several months, Nevada plans to launch a generative AI system powered by Google that will analyze transcripts of unemployment appeals hearings and issue recommendations to human referees about whether or not claimants should receive benefits."

If we're talking about relying on large language models, this is a simply terrible idea

They say a human will review each recommendation, but the push for speed/efficiency/cost always erodes that

https://gizmodo.com/googles-ai-will-help-decide-whether-unemployed-workers-get-benefits-2000496215

(via @david)

Is there a video game where you just climb a tree

that goes on infinitely

no goals

no powerups

it's not trivially *easy* to climb; you have to think a bit about each move, but it's also not a twitch game, it's chill

the tree gets subtly weirder the higher you go

like just

weirder

The suburbs considered as ...

... the Backrooms: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/13/american-suburbs-are-a-horror-movie-and-were-the-protagonists

A terrific essay in which the author -- who lives in the Austin suburbs -- considers why she feels creeped-out and uncertain when walking through her suburb at night to a grocery store a few miles away ...

... and realizes it's because it feels precisely like one of the "liminal spaces" people share online

@Gergovie @thomasfuchs @acjay

though to be fair “bacon topped ice cream“ is something McDonald’s probably should in reality have on the menu