jme-crocodile

[jme-crocodile]

The universities are putting listening devices and motion detectors in the offices of grad students now. Destroying these bugs when you get the opportunity is a public service.

"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)

This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty technology adoption curve.”

What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech — say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 — you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for “home automation” from Google, Apple, Amazon or another “luxury surveillance” vendor.

Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. Luzzi signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.

Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on “desk usage.” This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.

As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, “Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048837746204672

So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: “They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to schedule your thinking time.”

That’s von Hippel’s theory, and I’m going to go with it, because Luzzi didn’t offer a better one in the flurry of memos and “listening sessions” that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.

This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippel’s thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of “Animal House.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048652215431168

After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.

The letter was delivered to Luzzi, who offered “an impromptu listening session” in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to “give” them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to “make it tick.”

[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]

The students, believing Luzzi was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled “listening session” with Luzzi, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (“Beware of the leopard”).

The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. Luzzi explained to students that he didn’t need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren’t “monitoring people.” A student countered, what was being monitored, “if not people?” Luzzi replied that he was monitoring “heat sources.”

https://github.com/maxvonhippel/isec-sensors-scandal/blob/main/Oct_6_2022_Luzzi_town_hall.pdf

Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: “rats or kangaroos?”). Luzzi fumbled for a while (“a service animal or something”) before admitting, “I guess, yeah, it’s a human.”

Having yielded the point, Luzzi pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because “no individual data goes back to the server.” But these aren’t just grad students — they’re grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.

[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, ‘We are not doing science here’ -Luzzi.]

A student told Luzzi, “This doesn’t matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.” Luzzi shot back, “we are not doing science here.” This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. I’m sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.

From the transcript, it’s clear that this is where Luzzi lost the crowd. He accused the students of “feeling emotion” and explaining that the data would be used for “different kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.”

Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that Luzzi had bypassed. When this is pointed out, Luzzi says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the university’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: “Is the only reason it doesn’t fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?” A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.

Luzzi’s answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the students’ use of their desks, it would cost more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinder — just don’t monitor desk usage, then.

Finally, Luzzi started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of “research assets.” A student replies, “If you want to understand how research is done, don’t piss off everyone in this building.”

Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question Luzzi is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he won’t learn what he’s hoping to learn. It’s really quite a good experimental design critique — these are good students! Within a few volleys, they’re pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.

Luzzi turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didn’t work. Finally, a student asks whether it’s possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. Luzzi points out that their desk currently doesn’t have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, “I assume you’ll put one back.”

[Image ID: A ‘public art piece’ in the ISEC lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out ‘NO!,’ surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]

They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.

Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary — they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEU/comments/xx7d7p/northeastern_graduate_students_privacy_is_being/

Yesterday, Luzzi capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull “all the desk occupancy sensors from the building,” due to “concerns voiced by a population of graduate students.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578101964960776192

The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you can’t skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.

A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement and collect sound:

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether they’re really vacuuming the offices.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387426812972646403

While it’s easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that “this seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,” unplugged the sensor in his office.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers aren’t opposed to sensors — they’re challenging the social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised ‘listening session’ with vice-provost David Luzzi. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: ‘If found by David Luzzi suck it.’]

[jme-crocodile]

If you live and vote in California, I hope by now you've heard that there is an election happening on September 14th. You may have even gotten your ballot in the mail already.

An election? In September? Yes. A stupid one.

You see, some Republicans got Big Mad at Governor Gavin Newsom when he made the decision to lockdown the state last year at the beginning of the pandemic. They decided to start a petition to remove (recall) him from office. California's state constitution allows voters to remove the governor via recall election if they get enough signatures.

How many signatures, you ask? 12% of the total votes cast in the previous election for the office of the person being recalled, or in this case, 1.5 million.

Yeah. That's all. Out of a state of nearly 40 million people. A state that is the 5th largest economy in the world.

Just 1.5 million people need to sign an official recall petition for a statewide vote to remove the governor from office.

(If you didn't know, a recall election is how California got Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor in 2003.)

If a simple majority (50% + 1 vote) of voters choose YES on their ballots, Gavin Newsom will be removed from office and whomever of the 46 candidates on the ballot gets more votes than anyone else (not even a majority vote, just more than the other candidates) will become California's new governor.

The current (as of today, August 20th) frontrunners are a very right-wing talk radio host named Larry Elder, and a real estate broker/YouTube personality named Kevin Paffrath. Neither have what you would call "political experience."

(Caitlin Jenner is also running. Just in case you were wondering.)

How do you get on a recall ballot in California? To replace the governor, the highest office in the state? Well, you need to complete the arduous task of forking over about $4000 and getting 7500 signatures of real Californians saying they back you as a candidate.

Yeah. That's all.

Oh, and just having this election is costing CA taxpayers over $250 million dollars.

So what's at stake if Newsom gets recalled?

Majority control of the US Senate.

You see, Senator Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old this year. She's been Senator since 1992. If she falls too ill to continue her duties, if she resigns, if she dies while in office, California does not hold a Senatorial election.

The governor appoints a replacement.

This is how we got our current junior Senator, Alex Padilla, after Kamala Harris was inaugurated as Vice President.

Let me say that again.

The governor appoints a replacement Senator if Dianne Feinstein cannot complete her term.

If enough people vote to recall Gavin Newsom, and a Republican, or Libertarian, or, let's be honest, any inexperienced wet sack that can be bought off by the highest bidder, takes his place, they will very possibly appoint a Republican Senator to replace Dianne Feinstein and put that fuckface Mitch McConnell back in control of the US Senate.

So please, please, if you're a Californian, make sure you're registered to vote, get your ballot, and vote NO on this stupid waste of money recall election.

More info:

www.sfgate.com/gavin-newsom-recall/amp/Gavin-Newsom-recall-poll-support-Elder-Paffrath-16390077.php

Voter guide:

https://www.kqed.org/recall

[jme-crocodile]

https://twitter.com/postcultrev/status/1428584131835748359

[jme-crocodile]

Thanks to Greg Abbott, I could be fined $10,000 for telling you that misoprostol is an abortifacient medication that can be easily found on grey market sites like All Day Chemist for less than $1/pill, and this document will tell you how much you need and how to administer it to induce abortion.

This post is a crime. Vive le resistance.

[jme-crocodile]

The postwoman was telling me this morning that our little ritual of morning coffee & gossip might come to an end next year because of new regulations for rural post offices—postmen and women in the countryside are ‘less efficient’ than their colleagues in cities, so they will now have a tracking app on their phone monitoring their whereabouts and how long they spend in each house, and will be penalised (more postboxes added to their shift) if they spend more than X minutes per postbox, because if you have time to chat for 5 minutes you have time to deliver more post, which means employing less people and saving money. The postwoman said “The guidelines only talk in terms of postboxes, 800 postboxes per day, delivering post to postboxes—this whole time I thought I was delivering post to people!… A lot of people are waiting for me outside their door when they hear me arrive, am I supposed to throw the letters at them from behind the wheel and not even leave the car to kiss them hello and ask how they are? It’s not like I stay for an hour.” 

She will also no longer be allowed to do any favours—there are elderly people living in isolated farms around here, and she (and other postmen) often offer to bring some groceries to them (which they don’t buy during their shift) in winter when the roads are bad, or meds from the pharmacy, and starting next year there will be inspectors doing surprise inspections of postmen’s cars to check for anything that is not post, with penalties if they find groceries or other stuff. I couldn’t think of why so she explained gloomily that the post company started a (paid) service to provide this kind of assistance so it is now wrong to offer the same help for free. 

We joked about having secret subversive chats over coffee next year but yeah this is all pretty depressing. She said doing people little favours (like when she offered to ask around in farms to find me some kittens to adopt, and deliver the kittens to me) and exchanging a few words to check on people and their little stories every day is what she loves about her job, and these new rules seem to have been invented specifically to make her hate her job. Capitalism makes for a really joyless, loveless society.

[jme-crocodile]

On an investor call last month, the CEO of Pfizer, Frank D’Amelio, discussed what would happen to revenue from his vaccine product as the Covid pandemic ends, what he called the “durability of the franchise.” He told analysts not to worry. People in rich countries will need annual booster shots, and that is where Pfizer will make real money.

For these annual treatments, Pfizer will be able to charge much more than it does now. The current price for a covid vaccine, D'Amelio noted, is $19.50 per dose. He told analysts of his hope Pfizer could get to a more normal price, “$150, $175 per dose,” instead of what he called “pandemic pricing.”

The ghoulish part, however, is why there will need to be annual boosters. It’s not because the vaccine strength wanes over time, though that might happen. It’s because, as D’Amelio told Wall Street, there will be new variants emerging from abroad that can evade the vaccine. And how will variants emerge abroad? Well as outbreaks occur in non-vaccinated parts of the world, new strains will naturally occur as the virus mutates. If the rest of the world gets vaccinated, however, new variants won’t arise.

What D’Amelia really wants is to be able to charge $150 for a vaccine he is now charging $19.50 for. But D’Amelio is also assuming that there won’t be a global effective vaccination campaign. And, in a narrow sense, while Pfizer’s main goal is to keep prices high, it is actually against Pfizer’s financial interest to have the rest of the world vaccinated. If the world gets vaccinated, Pfizer won’t necessarily be able to sell expensive booster shots in rich countries who can afford them. Yikes.

uh oh

[jme-crocodile]

Complex trauma from abuse can cause chronic exhaustion, and chronic pain. This means the recovery, aside from being filled with guilt, shame and rage, will include long time spent in bed, feeling to exhausted and pained to move, or do anything.

This is happening because trauma is hard on the human body, and your body will spend all energy just trying to fight it, or repress it, or process it. The emotional pain of trauma being processed is enough to cause physical pain, chest pain, pain in all of your joints, headaches; your body will be so tense you can end up in chronic back pain and muscle pain just from all the tension and inability to relax. Your mind will be re-living the past and your body will react accordingly, getting terrified, shocked, tense, and finally showing all the damage you couldn’t feel when the abuse was happening. Even if you felt nothing while it was happening, there was no way to avoid this, your body can’t keep the trauma hidden inside of you forever.

One thing common for recovering victims is to feel intense shame for resting, for spending so much time in bed, feeling sick and worried about their future because they can’t get it together enough, or can’t get their tasks done due to pain and detachment from reality. You’ve all experienced being shamed for resting, being blamed for your own pain, and told you have no value if you’re not productive and hardworking. However, none of this applies to you right now. You need to rest. This rest is for survival. This is comparable to recovery from life-threatening injury, you cannot be expected to function or shamed for being lazy if your body is broken and barely hanging onto life. You are surviving, and you need rehabilitation and care, not feelings of inadequacy or shame for still daring to be alive.

It’s alright for you to exist just to rest only. In rare moments you do manage to get up, it’s okay to just do soothing non-productive stuff. There is no limit to how much care you need right now and you are obliged to give that to yourself. If the chronic exhaustion is caused by trauma, it will get better, not fast, not all at once, but slowly, during months and years, your body will let enough trauma out to allow you to use some of your energy for yourself. It’s vital you rest and let the trauma do its thing, and then eventually you will get your body back.

[jme-crocodile]

I saw a picture of a spot in my parents backyard that, when I was a little kid, I planned to turn into a crocodile rehabilitation center. I had a grand plan to feed crocodiles life-sized chocolate easter rabbits/deer/humans to trick them into eating chocolate instead of people.

I had a lot of hope that crocodiles were just confused and once they saw how tasty chocolate was, they'd change their minds.

In retrospect, I've not really changed, have I?

[jme-crocodile]

I recently shared a couple chapters from my old 2014 fanfic, For Want of a Mallory. And you know, sometimes when you share old stuff you wrote you start re-reading it.

When I wrote the fanfic, I thought it was obvious, that everyone reading would be able to tell that there was something seriously wrong with the main character. The body of the text, written from that character's pov, defines her as a hero. But this is juxtaposed against the character's pettiness, vindictive behavior, and delight in other's pain. It's supposed to be jarring. It's supposed to make it apparent that Mallory is delusional.

The main character is not someone to be admired, or aspirational. They're literally possessed by a cadre of demons masquerading as her own soul, attempting to corrupt her.

Years later, it's occurring to me that this isn't obvious. That many people do not think it is obviously fucked up for an eleven year old to be excited at the prospect of participating in blackmailing her headmaster, and that a good portion of my readers probably thought Mallory was precocious, not possessed.

Naivety, man. I had some.

[jme-crocodile]

Scaly babies!

Some gator doodles I felt like doing. Help me keep loosey goosey and experiment.

[jme-crocodile]

The Rise of Catholic Integralism

(xposted to medium)

Catholic Integralism is a little-known and growing threat in administrative law & in the Judicial branch of the US. I first became aware of this threat when I read a piece in The Atlantic about Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard who advocates for the US and UK to adopt Catholic Integralism in place of conservative Originalism in the courts.

The Catholic Integralist position can be found at The Josias, and states that, “Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal.” In other words, this ideology holds that the purpose of the state is to enforce a Catholic interpretation of the ten commandments on the people who live there.

The piece in the Atlantic set of real alarm bells, because I grew up Catholic and know the jargon. So let me explain some of the terminology:

Catholics who treat their religion that seriously typically believe in and endorse the Catholic Church’s teachings across the board. The Church teaches that divorce is forbidden, abortion is murder, contraception is a sin, that homosexual acts are an offence against God, and believe transgender individuals are “going against reality” and against God’s plan. They’re so convinced of the gender binary that they believe intersex people have an “essential” either feminine or masculine nature. Moreover, they believe in strict separation of “duties” according to sex, meaning that they believe that women should only be wives, mothers, or if you’re lucky, a nun.

They justify all of these beliefs through something they call, “Natural law.” Catholic Natural Law sees observing the “natural order” in nature as a universal good. This idea of what that “natural hierarchy” is typically involves some belief that men and women are complementary and serve different functions in life. Homosexuality would be “against natural law,” because sex’s purpose, according to Natural Law, is procreation. Likewise, the beliefs that subjects should follow their rulers, children should obey their parents, and that people should not steal all are claimed to follow from an understanding of Natural Law. This ideology places itself in conflict with commonly held values of equality (they endorse patriarchal hierarchy as right and natural,) and freedom, (they in believe “freedom” as “freedom from sin.”)

Proponents of Natural Law believe the Natural Law applies to every human, regardless of whether you’re Catholic or not. And they believe that this understanding of proper hierarchies and rational order is “written in the human heart.” In other words, according to this interpretation, all gay people “know deep down” they’re sinners, because being gay is “intrinsically disordered” (that’s what the Catholic Church means when they say “intrinsically disordered” — something done in defiance of Natural Law.) but that a gay person is “choosing” to be in denial about it. The idea is that no one can find true happiness or a “good life” outside living a life in accordance with Natural Law. The Catholic understanding of Natural Law in particular reasons that all ten commandments can be inferred from, and are natural extensions of Natural Law, and that it implies male headship through a warped idea of “biological” necessity originating in the order of creation. When Integralists talk about acting in accordance with “human nature,” it is likely they mean Natural Law.

Therefore, when Catholics talk about the “common good” under “Natural law,” what they mean is a return to the patriarchy, and the suppression of queers. Catholic Integralism in particular seeks to abolish the line between state and church, and institute religious law as the foundation of administrative and judicial law in the land.

While such a position would typically be nonviable in the US court system, recent events over the last four years have made Right Wing think tanks take notice of the potential of Catholic Integralism as a vehicle to institute Christian Nationalism. The Claremont Institute’s publishing arm produced a smattering of articles on Vermeule’s piece to drum up attention and interest in the topic. This indicates to me that this originally obscure legal position is now gaining the backing and support of the major Christian nationalist movement. And it comes just in time for Christian nationalists:

During Trump’s term, Mitch McConnell and Trump have appointed 197 Artcle III federal Judges through June 1, 2020. He’s also appointed 51 Judges to the US Court of Appeals. Respectively, that’s 21% and 28% of judgeships across the district courts and courts of appeal. They also appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, who may not explicitly call herself an Integralist, but her written opinions echo Integralist thought. She’s not the only one, either. Justice Clarence Thomas maintains that “natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation.” Thomas, a Catholic, talking about Natural Law in the Court is de facto the Integralist position. While Justice Thomas claims he gets his interpretation of natural law from the Declaration of Independence, his read on it strongly resembles Catholic Natural Law.

Catholic Integralists and Christian nationalists both see the change in composition in the courts as a golden opportunity to move the country towards a more Integralist approach to law. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was this year that more than half of the states in the US began seeking to ban transgender athletes from competing. What better way to sneak in arguments from Natural law, than through the suppression of transgender people? Sex-essentialist arguments for the “(common) good” of women’s sports will pave the way.

These alternatives still have scattered adherents, but originalism has prevailed, mainly because it has met the political and rhetorical needs of legal conservatives struggling against an overwhelmingly left-liberal legal culture. … But circumstances have now changed. The hostile environment that made originalism a useful rhetorical and political expedient is now gone.”

– Adrian Vermeule

Now, Vermeule has a soapbox in an Oxford University project that claims to be “exploring the common good from an array of perspectives.” However, the board of this project consists of six people, five of whom parrot Integralist Catholic beliefs on their twitters and other social media. The members of the board are:

Adrian Vermeule, who we know is a Catholic Integralist from his books, tweets, and blog.

Erika Bachiochi, a Catholic trans-exclusionary radical “feminist” who also parrots common Integralist talking points on her twitter. And calling her any kind of “feminist” at all is dubious, given that her position appears to be something like, “feminism means getting women back in the kitchen.”

J. Budziszewski, who has an email address at undergroundthomist.org. (Thomist ideology is an especially regressive form of Catholicism.)

Conor Casey, who conveniently has a twitter under his real name using the same pic from his academic profile on the linked commongood profile, has an image of the pope has his background image, and shills for Catholic policies on his profile.

Thomas Pink, a scholar on topics relating to Catholic Natural law.

and finally, Jack Goldsmith, who does not appear to be writing anything that especially stands out as Integralist.

Sounds like they’ll be doing a great job of “exploring the common good from an array of perspectives.”

Because of people like Vermeule and the appointment of so many anti-LGBT judges during Trump’s term, I’m expecting LGBT rights to be chipped away in the coming years. This isn’t to say that we’re going to see dramatic reversals, but I do expect some states to carve out broad exceptions to anti-discrimination laws on the basis of “religious liberty” and even see Integralist thought introduced more in the courts. For people living in countries where Integralism is being promoted as a valid alternative to secular law, it is important that they recognize the threat Catholic Integralism poses to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[jme-crocodile]

Lookit! Slithers! Slithering!!!!

[jme-crocodile]

This past week I was made aware of the existence of screenshots from a facebook group where MIRI's decisions regarding the Louie Helm/miricult situation were discussed. It's been a curious mystery to me what kind of logic could lead to an organization that publishes papers on decision theory making such a bad decision.

One poster ("- One of - ") attempted to explain why she believed that MIRI's actions made sense in light of the particular circumstances of MIRI's situation. The argument was poor, but faced no critique and sparked no conversation among the hundred or so people that viewed it. And it seems that anyone at all in the comments thought that post had merit. More relevantly, I've heard other people echo similar sentiments as the OP, so I thought I'd try my hand at clarifying why this position is weak.

The OP of the post argued that because Louie supposedly did not, on net, benefit from his blackmail attempt, that his settlement with MIRI (where MIRI essentially paid him to acquire his silence via an anti-disparagement clause) did not create an incentive for further blackmail. However, he did successfully get a payout in the form of a settlement from MIRI via these tactics. And the specific details of how MIRI responded incentivises more blackmail, not less.

More generally, it seems predictable to me that the scandal would've blackened Louie's name and not MIRI's, were MIRI's reasons for withholding funds good & were the more serious accusations made against MIRI false. The community's response to Cade Metz's article and further revelations was not at all surprising or unique, and I'd expect outrage and an outpouring of support on MIRI's behalf were MIRI to have reported that it was being slandered with blatantly false accusations.

The OP then points out that Louie's actions put him at risk of MIRI taking further legal action against him, but that MIRI chose not to. Louie took actions that put him in a precarious position, yet MIRI didn't pursue it. Why? In the counterfactual world where MIRI escalated, what would've happened? How would Louie have responded? We can't know the answer to that, but MIRI's unwillingness to fight back or do anything but cave to his demands indicates that they had perceived themselves to be in a weak position. An alternative hypothesis could be that MIRI's decision makers feared that making this into a court case would draw more attention to it, and that more people would believe and spread false accusations. But a settlement causes even more suspicion. It's less plausible that they were simply scared into making bad decisions, because the majority of people involved were experienced & intelligent individuals in their late 30s and 40s, who had the ear and investment of a certain veteran of scandal.

But regardless, MIRI's decision here wasn't private. MIRI had the obligation to illustrate that attempting to blackmail MIRI (& that this kind of strategy in general) would fail, as a requirement of their position and responsibility to their mission. And if the leadership at MIRI was engaging in behaviour that would make MIRI vulnerable to threats of blackmail over serious crimes committed by that leadership, then those leaders were abandoning their duty to their donors and supporters. It's not controversial, I don't think, to point out that those in an elevated position of authority and responsibility have a greater mandate to act in the interests of those they're working for. That most people in power seem to take their power as license to behave even worse doesn't free MIRI of that mandate. But even in the case where all the accusations against MIRI are false, settling with Louie was still a bad decision because they revealed themselves as willing to pay out to blackmail, at all.

And if you're thinking, "but why would MIRI need to worry about people trying to blackmail them, again?" then you are underestimating the likelihood that other people and even nations will be and are interested in shaping MIRI's research (and other AGI research orgs) to their own ends. It's a mistake to apply the logic of a mundane nonprofit's threat model, here. MIRI is not an ordinary nonprofit where it'd be unusual to expect other people to be interested in shaping what they do. They're a nonprofit working in a field of international interest that's shaping up to be the next atomic race. The state is already invested. It matters that a major AGI safety org is ethically compromised, and it matters that they're making bad decisions.

The OP of the post then went on to claim that MIRI is defending against future blackmail attempts by controlling information more tightly and using better hiring practices. The OP doesn't speak for MIRI, but it would've been appropriate for a representative or associate of MIRI in that group to explain that responding to leakers with increasing controls on information can be bad praxis. Deciding to handle future attempts to blackmail you by strictly controlling information is the strategy that Julian Assange predicted governments of the world would fall back to with the advent of wikileaks. And that was exactly the strategy Assange wanted them to implement to their detriment, because compartmentalization, paranoid distrust, and strict control over information often cripples organizations. There is a legitimate need to control information so it cannot be used by enemies, but it's within an org's best interests to keep that kind information to a minimum, so that its members can make better decisions, considering more available information. The same logic of defence-against-enemies-of-the-cause doesn't apply to protecting its leaders from sex scandals, which does not advance the goal of AI safety.

Control of information is also a strategy closely associated with the premise that your organization needs to do things that would upset, scare, or otherwise repulse your supporters to survive. (See drives for transparency in government, etc.) MIRI's representatives in that group are de facto declaring such an intent (or are at least proving themselves insensitive to it) by not correcting the OP when she said MIRI intended to better control the flow of information in the context of controlling information of miricult's accusations.

Figuring out how to be more sophisticated at making unethical decisions is not an improvement on the situation.

If you do things that are likely to upset, scare, or otherwise repulse your supporters, you're creating an incentive to blackmail you. Sometimes it may be necessary to do upsetting things, but keep in mind the specific context we're talking about, here. If you fear blackmail for wrongdoings like accusations like rape and fraud, then you fear anyone who knows those secrets, and fear people discovering those secrets. This fear has downstream effects, like worrying that new people brought aboard will blow the whistle on your behaviour. So then you end up associating with people willing to tolerate increasingly bad behaviour. And as time goes on, you may attract opportunistic abusers who believe they'll be right at home in your organization. And people like that who are in positions of power often engage in behaviour that will result in more scandals, opening you up to even more blackmail. Inner rings aren't uncommon or even necessarily bad by themselves, but what secret you base your ring around is critical, because the ethics of the people you hire will shape the character of your organization and even your community.

This is why Robert's and Brent's positions of power were brought up by community members in this context: here is a pattern, revealed. Here are the fruits of your decision to base your inner ring around that secret.

The OP then went on to explain that Louie released essentially all the negative information he could find, and that he also made up a number of accusations (though no one ever clarified in the available screenshots which of the serious accusations were true and which were false, to my knowledge.) If this is true, it makes MIRI's decision to settle with Louie even worse. With the release of that information, people now know that MIRI is the sort of place where its leaders are so desperate to silence a scandal that they are willing to pay out regardless of whether that information is true or not, and regardless of whether the blackmailer has lost most of their leverage.

This explanation of MIRI's behaviour simply doesn't make sense as a reasonable response to the situation, as it has been described in the screenshots. And even if the current leadership had no part in the actions of the previous leadership, the fact that they appear to stand by their predecessors' decisions indicates that they may share the same bad judgment as those predecessors.

[jme-crocodile]

Dhxjsjxhdhshdhd I love my bf so much he just said "hey do you ever see a picture that changes your life forever" and then showed me a photo of a loaf of bread shaped like a crocodile

[jme-crocodile]

i knew this conceptually, but like you dont really KNOW that public school is designed to set you up to be a good worker bee until you're cracking out a report, after hours, at 7 pm on a monday night and it hits you; oh, i'm doing homework, this is why they made me do homework, and suddenly i'm feeling it in my chest. i cant believe i was raised by the state to be an automaton, and worse, i am one of the lucky robots who isn't doing manual labor.

[jme-crocodile]

Baby!

Fresh danger noodle

[jme-crocodile]

You use a pasta machine. They had one with a hand crank. I probably have pictures somewhere. We used to cover a whole big dining room table with flattened-out spools of dough. I used to be gleeful to get to crank it, because squashing the dough was pretty exciting to a little kid, and it made me feel like an adult.

He died alone in the living room while everyone was fussing over my grandmother, which was how most of his life went.

They're calling it heart failure, but he committed suicide. He stopped eating, caring for himself, and was barely leaving the bed. He was very depressed, and from what I understood, wanted to die. I believe them.

we had a ritual when i left the house, where we'd all walk out the back door to the car, and he'd give me one last hug and slip me a few bucks to hide from my mom. especially as I got older, I'd treat each time like it could be the last. So I made sure to tell him I loved him. when he said it back his voice almost always cracked, he sounded so sad. He'd stand in the drive way until the car turned the corner watching us, and it was only as he lost sight of me that he'd turn around and go back.

My grandfather died on February 23rd, 2021. All of his friends and anyone who would've remembered him in a positive light but me are gone, so I want to talk about him, so that his story will live on a little longer. I think he'd like that. His name was Michael, but I knew him as my pop pop. he grew up on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Italy. When I was little, he told me stories of how beautiful the island was, and lovingly described the crystal clear blue water. He liked to tell me how he and his friends used to jump off the cliffs into the ocean. I don't think he ever lost his fondness for the place entirely, because there was a painting of the Island up on the wall of his kitchen for as long as I can remember. His mom died when he was a baby. I'm not sure if it was from later complications from birth, sickness, or something else. His aunt blamed him for it, though. He told me his father was away on business often in the US, so unfortunately his aunt was the one who took him in. She resented him and from what I understand, barely fed him. When his father came back home, he married that aunt, which was apparently the custom at the time. The next time his father left, pop pop was chased out of his aunt's house. He spent most of his time on the streets, he said, eating crusts of bread people left out from him, and longing to join his father. Here, though, the story gets a bit muddled, because he did manage in all this to get his eighth grade education, and at another point he implied that he was allowed to sleep in his aunt's house, but that they didn't feed him to punish him for "killing" his mother. When he was a teenager, he was eager to get out of Italy, and to his father. Somehow this led to him contacting his uncle, who ran a bar in Philly. I never found out what happened with his father, but my suspicion is his father wasn't interested in him. Still, pop pop moved to the US, and started working in the bar. I don't know for how long they worked together, but eventually his uncle was murdered in a confrontation with a robber. After that, pop pop quit the bar and took a job working for the railroad. In all this, my grandfather met my grandmother. It was an arranged marriage. My grandmother had fallen in love with a Greek fellow, and the brothers couldn't have that - my grandma needed to marry an Italian man. They never truly liked one another, and in later years their relationship turned hostile. At the railroad, he broke his arm so badly he needed metal installed in his arm. I used to poke at it and the purple scar on his arm in fascination as a little kid. He had to quit working after that, and instead took up property management and gardening. I suspect this happened after my mom had grown up some, because she was mostly raised by my great-grandmother. (Both of my grandparents worked.) When I was little he used to pick me up and say, "hey-hey my little bambina!" and suchlike. He kept a garden and used to escort child-me through it. He grew a lot of tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers, and a whole wall of rosemary. He'd pull the tomatoes off the vine to show me -- he was very proud of his garden. Their entire basement was filled with canned tomatoes. There are probably still canned tomatoes in the basement. He hid money under the mattress, because he didn't trust the banks. We're pretty sure he hid money elsewhere in the house, too. No, he didn't tell anyone where he hid it. There was some resentment, there. He felt trapped in a miserable marriage (Catholics don't divorce) and didn't see any way out. He didn't have a good relationship with his son in law or daughter, either. He thought they were going to steal money from him, and from his only grandkid.