morlock-holmes - Tumblr blog

[morlock-holmes]

I continue to be baffled that the October 7th attacks seem to have made people *more* dismissive of the idea that dissolving Israel would result in mass violence against Israeli civilians.

And, in fact, seems to have a lot of people asserting that the spectre of such violence is an absurd hallucination that no sane person could believe in.

Various I/P thoughts that are going into their own post because I don't feel like putting them as responses on the posts of de-facto hostile people...

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I saw someone on a different social media site ask something to the effect of, "why don't liberal Zionists recognize that it would make more sense for the people who believe in two states for two peoples to ally with the people who believe in one state for two peoples against the people who believe in one state for one people?" and I have a number of responses to this:

It it implies that the 2f2 are currently allied with the 1f1 people, which is false, and relatedly

There are no 1f2 people; just 1f1 people who are lying -- to themselves and/or others -- about it. 2f2 are varying degrees of unhappy with all of them.

One could thus turn the question around and ask why the sort of person asking this question is allied with the people who are explicitly pro-Hamas, since they are also 1f1 (though they've recently moved in to the "sometimes lying to others" category).

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"Anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism" (where anti-Zionism means "Israel should not exist even within 1948 borders") is an argument that continues to seem potentially true in theory but false in practice. If the clear real-world implication of you argument is "I would be okay with ~40% of the worlds Jews getting ethnically cleansed (again)" then you're making an antisemitic argument.

People inclined to argue with this should ask themselves: if a binational state proves unworkable, is my second preference for two states or to see the Jewish population killed/expelled/subjugated? If this is a hard one for you, then yes, you're antisemitic.

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It appears that a lot of people pushing a binational state don't really understand the nature of the opposition here. Religious Zionism is a relatively recent thing. The thing that Israel has meant to most Zionists is "for the first time in two millennia, there is a place where Jews are not dependent on the mercy of others because they have an army of their own"; trying to tell them that you can have a country where everybody's holidays are respected is rather missing the point. (Bonus question about the hypothetical binational state: How is Yom Ha-atzmaut observed? If your answer is something other than celebratory, you've already failed to grapple with anything.) I expect that outside of the ideological core of Hamas (who have actual religious objections), there is an almost mirror-image problem on the other side. A binational state is something that many US protestors and almost nobody in Israel/Palestine wants.

[morlock-holmes]

It's interesting how "tech" here, isn't any particular technology, it is rather a series of symbols, and by wearing, parading around and showing fealty to those symbols you demonstrate that somebody else (The perfidious "blues") can no longer tell you what to do.

Elon musk is "tech" so if he wants to ignore safety regulations then ignoring safety regulations is "tech" and enforcing them is "blue".

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.” The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over. “Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.” In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

[morlock-holmes]

Like, I'm really boggled by how much the Metaverse isn't a thing. NFTs might be a morally heinous waste of resources and time, but they, you know... Exist. They have a pretty concrete definition, you can tell what is or is not an NFT.

Metaverse is just... anything that might happen to the internet in the future? But also sometimes virtual reality shared spaces, like what we've had for twenty plus years now? But different because... They're worse than the popular existing ones that have decades of experience and refinement behind them?

And that was enough to get hundreds of millions in venture capital?

I just watched the Folding Ideas video about "The" Metaverse.

Guys this whole time I thought that "Metaverse" was the brand name of Facebook's VR Chat style game for their headset.

Apparently it's actually... Nothing? Used interchangeably to refer to the sum total of all internet technology or to Second Life style VR hangouts with user generated content?

The rebranding now simultaneously makes more or less sense. Expanding into AR and VR technology in general is a much saner choice than betting the farm on Second Life But Owned By Facebook.

But also, like... This is a mature technology? We already know that nobody wants to shop in a virtual Walmart because we've tried that. Minecraft and Roblox are two of the most popular games on the planet.

It's like Facebook is rebranding itself after, I don't know, MP3s and telling us how exciting it might be to ditch our CD players for a machine that would hold all of our music as digital files.

Really weird.

[morlock-holmes]

I just watched the Folding Ideas video about "The" Metaverse.

Guys this whole time I thought that "Metaverse" was the brand name of Facebook's VR Chat style game for their headset.

Apparently it's actually... Nothing? Used interchangeably to refer to the sum total of all internet technology or to Second Life style VR hangouts with user generated content?

The rebranding now simultaneously makes more or less sense. Expanding into AR and VR technology in general is a much saner choice than betting the farm on Second Life But Owned By Facebook.

But also, like... This is a mature technology? We already know that nobody wants to shop in a virtual Walmart because we've tried that. Minecraft and Roblox are two of the most popular games on the planet.

It's like Facebook is rebranding itself after, I don't know, MP3s and telling us how exciting it might be to ditch our CD players for a machine that would hold all of our music as digital files.

Really weird.

[morlock-holmes]

There's no contradiction, though; it seems you are increasingly being asked to handle your own training. Why train new employees when you can simply wait for them to buy their own training?

Adam Smith in 1776: "There's an obscene amount of waste that goes into the accreditation system for labor. Yeah a clock inventor needs to be a genius, but a clock-maker can learn everything he needs to know in a month tops. Making him serve a 7-year apprenticeship is absurd."

2024 entry-level stem position: Your job duties will be data entry, sample conciliation, and glassware cleaning. Read sample labels and enter appropriate data into this database with a UI that only runs on Windows 94. You will not be permitted to manipulate samples or testing procedures beyond what is necessary for rote data entry. 9th-grade reading comprehension preferred but not required. Pay is $11.50 per hour, non-negotiable. Shifts are in 12-hour increments, non-negotiable. REQUIRED: Bachelors of Science in chemistry or related field, Masters preferred, 3 years lab experience or 2 years lab instruction+2 years field work.

[morlock-holmes]

Apparently college campuses across the nation have decided to show their commitment to student safety by inviting armed men to beat their students with truncheons.

[morlock-holmes]

I recently got bitten by a dog and called the ER to make sure that they had the rabies vaccine just to avoid wasting time, and was told that nobody could tell me that over the phone. After hours they have a call center take calls and operators aren't allowed to, or informed about issues like this. I could be transferred to intake and a nurse would get back to me (probably in a few hours, probably to say that of course the ER has it, but you don't know ahead of time) or to customer service to lodge a complaint.

There was no way to answer the simplest question on earth in less than half an hour, 15 minutes on the phone and another 15 to drive out and ask at the ER.

Consider, for example, the following situation. A characteristically modern form of social interaction, familiar from the rail and air travel industries, has become ubiquitous with the development of the call centre. Someone – an airline gate attendant, for example – tells you some bad news; perhaps you’ve been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you’re brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can’t do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you’re told that’s not company policy. The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself. Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage, and they may give some lacerating feedback online. Meanwhile, the managers who made the decision to prioritise Gold Elite members are able to maximise shareholder value without any distractions from the consequences of their actions. They have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean... An employee/employer relationship is inherently instrumental so anybody claiming that it isn't should get you asking, why are they pretending here?

Excessive concern with looking like you aren't instrumentalizing people that eventually overshadows the actuality is definitely a problem.

Classic bit of ethics that you "don't instrumentalize people, don't treat people like objects" but when it looks like someone's going out of their way to not instrumentalize you (Including an employer but not only) that ends up being a red flag, that's someone who's going to obsequiously nice and then when the time comes really put the screws to you, perhaps it means that they're engaged in elaborate self-deception.

[morlock-holmes]

Was looking for someone to anon this to since it relates a bit too much to my irl job and you've been responding to posts about the Cass Report, so, tag!

I work for one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK. Everyone is responding to this thing as if it's a done deal that whatever it says goes, and that just isn't the case. In my Trust, the position so far seems to be:

1. We don't actually have to do anything differently because this has been published; we're free to set (and retain) our own policies

2. We will be deferring to this trans charity to advise us on how to talk about this to patients and how to support trans kids in this difficult time

Short version is medics are smart; they can see through the bad science here so if they're not already ideologically on board it won't change their minds. The Tories forced NHS Trusts to become independent and the fun thing about that is that it means they can't directly control what they do! All they can do is write reports for us to ignore.

Yeah, I'm not very familiar with UK health politics. Here in the US the Republicans have a lot less interest in coherent health policy, they just take a shotgun approach of "Here's 20 studies that vaguely say transition isn't always beneficial, therefore it has to be banned."

EDIT: It's hard for me to tell what the Cass report actually means for UK policy, is what I mean.

[morlock-holmes]

Opposite politics to me would be something I imagine as genuinely monstrous, like, "Jim Crow was good and should be restored." which is a line I don't think I would cross, and I can't imagine any taste bad enough to be more of a turnoff than aggressive racism.

In terms of like... Politics that I find really annoying but not actively evil ("Actually Biden and Trump are the same so I'm not voting") that's trickier.

It depends how aggressively obnoxious their taste is, I think. Also how much they decide to openly deride my taste. I think I'd just barely rather have someone who knocks my politics whenever they come up than someone who knocks my taste whenever it comes up.

"art" here is defined in the broadest of terms. they are vocal and grating about their opposite opinion. imagine the worst possible options. if you are against "marriage," then this is defined as living with a partner.

[morlock-holmes]

@poipoipoi-2016 posted this, and I have thoughts that are entirely unrelated to the context it was originally reposted in.

First, I don't like the way it assumes that capability is a sort of set metric, that some workers are just good enough to do O-Ring work and some aren't, because process design and environmental factors will also play a role.

In an uncontroversial environmental design example, I think it's quite likely that even good workers make more mistakes at the end of a 100 hour work week then they do at the end of a 40 hour work week.

So who decided on those 100 hour work weeks?

Second, process design; there's an apocryphal story I heard about nurses plugging IV tubes into the wrong ports, no matter how thoroughly they were trained, until somebody gets the smart idea to redesign the shape of the ports so that you can't plug them in wrong anymore.

I also have a real life example from my brother, who works in safety. His employer was a crucial industry that had to stay open during the pandemic, and so HR came up with a very complicated worker's comp scheme for people who had COVID symptoms and needed to stay home. Part of the policy is that people who stayed home got paid 60% of their salary.

My brother told them, "Hey, a lot of the people covered by this policy are working paycheck to paycheck, and if you tell them that they have to take a 40% pay cut every time they sneeze, they are going to come in to work anyway and pretend to be healthy"

From what he's told me, HR's response was essentially that tweet where the 911 operator says, "He can't kill you, that's illegal!"

So I know a lot of you know math, and I've been thinking a lot about the psychology of certain choices, in particular choices where you have two paths:

In path A, you definitely pay a moderate cost.

In path B, one of two things happen. Most of the time, you pay no cost at all. But occasionally path B creates catastrophically high costs.

I'm curious how people think about situations like that mathematically.

I feel like there's a point at which the moderate cost of path A gets high enough that, when presented with the choice, most people will choose path B, even though the expected cost of constantly choosing path B works out to be much higher.

[morlock-holmes]

I'm going to cop to being a little inconsistent on my thoughts here, but essentially my interpretation of OP would be, "Debates about evidence are often used as proxies for debates about value, and if you accept the underlying value you might get into big trouble if the scientific debate doesn't go your way."

Again, this is what I thought the risk of arguing over "born this way" was. The right says, "If we can prove that gay people aren't born that way, it would show that conversion therapy and legal discrimination against homosexual people is totally valid."

Then the left response, "Well, science is going to show that gay people ARE born that way, so that means you'll eventually have to admit that gay marriage should be legal"

This is nonsense, the whole chain of logic is total gibberish, even though "Are gay people born that way" can be reformulated into a well-posed question which is in principle answerable through science.

And one objection at the time was, "What if you take this bargain, and then find out that gay people AREN'T born that way?"

It turns out that people were essentially only pretending to argue about that, do that risk sort of depended on a false assumption that we were, in fact, interested in science.

For the issue of transition of children, we're seeing the same dynamic; opponents of childhood transition almost universally condemn non-medical, personal interventions, such as wardrobe changes, name changes and pronoun changes; they are also almost universally willing to allow puberty blockers to be used in all other cases aside from transition.

And like... the jury is not out on this. There is *zero* chance that changing your pronouns causes dangerous brain swelling or osteoporosis. We already have far more than enough evidence to show that social transition cannot cause certain harms that other medical intervention might.

So we are already at the point, with name changes and pronouns, where we have to argue about things on the level of values; but we resolutely resist actually formulating our values, preferring instead to pretend to argue about evidence, to pretend that there is some missing piece of evidence that will conclusively, objectively determine for us whether or not pronoun and name changes should be allowed or forbidden.

PS - Born this way is sneaking back into this; the dominant right-wing position in the US is that a few people are really trans, but most people only think they are and should be discouraged in their confusion. But "Some people are confused about gender" does not, and cannot, lead to "Therefore they should be forced to be cis" unless you are smuggling value arguments in.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

[morlock-holmes]

It would be very weird to argue, at this date, "The jury is still out on childhood drinking, so we should ban it until more evidence comes in."

I'm... uh... not actually convinced that "very few people" are talking about banning transition.

Here's what I am saying:

Conflating a 17 year old using new pronouns with giving an eight year old puberty blockers is simply going to confuse the issue. (Or, for that matter, a 20 year old having one glass of wine at dinner is probably less harmful than a 21 year old getting blackout drunk).

Am I speaking Greek here? "Who's to say how we should handle harm" is not my point.

My point is in order to know how to "handle potential harms" you'd have to know what those harms are, and what you're evaluating them against.

If you are going around positing that puberty blockers and pronouns cause the same type of harm and should therefore be blocked for the same reasons (And I've literally never seen an anti-childhood-transition activist who wasn't overtly against pronouns and name changes), this is evidence that your definition of "harm" is extremely vague and calibrated to get a certain result.

Waiting for and trusting the evidence will not solve that problem, because absence of evidence is not the issue here.

Another factor is, do we think the jury is still out on pronouns? What's the absolute worst case scenario we could discover about the harms of preferred pronouns, and how does it compare to the worst case of, say, letting kids take shop classes? What evidence are we waiting for?

There isn't scientific debate, because a scientific debate would require well-posed questions.

Instead, it has become vitally important to pretend that a debate about values is a debate about an empirical question, very similar to the way that we all collectively decided to pretend that the gay rights debate was a scientific debate about the evidence for whether homosexuality was inborn.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

[morlock-holmes]

Of course, to argue with myself (Or also kind of just restate myself) the gay marriage debate demonstrates that the production of scientific consensus is completely irrelevant to these issues. It's hardly been a decade and nobody could give two shits about whether anybody was born that way or not. Arguing that empirical question was always entirely beside the point.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

[morlock-holmes]

That's not even kind of my objection, and I kind of thought that was clear.

Drinking alcohol can cause demonstrable harms which can be measured fairly accurately: Therefore, our policy for alcohol ought to be...

?

That sentence can be finished in multiple ways even when the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol are known to a very accurate degree.

In terms of the pro/con position, does the fact that people enjoy drinking weigh in on the pro side or is it a meaningless irrelevancy that should be ignored?

I come at this from my memory of the gay marriage debate in the US, which was widely held to hinge on the answer to an empirical question:

Are people born gay?

If they are, it was said, gay marriage makes a lot of sense. If not, well, obviously conversion therapy is ethical.

I thought this was self-evident nonsense at the time, and still do.

I also come at this from a perspective of, some hypotheticals are just so obviously not the case that it's kind of meaningless to consider them. "What if science discovered that methamphetamines have no addictive properties and no negative health side effects?"

Well, science isn't going to discover that, so perhaps we shouldn't worry about that.

Look, maybe I'm steel-manning OP, but they were talking about a liberal paper wringing their hands about how letting kids (Still hate lumping all minors together by the way) change their names or ask for preferred pronouns is dangerous when we don't have evidence of the effects.

This is a sign (Like the born this way debate) that something has gone completely off the rails. What evidence are we waiting for? *What* harms might or might not be demonstrated that would answer the question of whether we should let children change their names? What about letting kids use nicknames, have we done any science to determine the potential harms?

My point is not that these questions are unanswerable or not amenable to scientific study; my point is that scientific study of an essentially narrow point with narrow implications is used as a synecdoche for the whole issue.

And you can't dodge this by telling me that actually, whether gay people are born this way really is an empirical question.

And in terms of trans issues in general, people are not asking well-posed questions. We don't know what "evidence" we are seeking because that's not the point, rather, the chain is, "If I can point to a gap in evidence, it's okay to ban things related to trans people"

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

[morlock-holmes]

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

[morlock-holmes]

The attachment to this timeline (A big problem that started about a decade ago and now the chickens are coming home to roost) really fascinates me because you know the Sokal hoax happened in 1996, right?

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.