In an article in the Atlantic asking why 1M deaths seems to have been normalized, the end of the article discussed changes that we could make as a society to address this and the next pandemic in more effective, more equitable ways, and then said this:

Such changes are popular. Stephan Lewandowsky, from the University of Bristol, presented a representative sample of Americans with two possible post-COVID futures—a “back to normal” option that emphasized economic recovery, and a “build back better” option that sought to reduce inequalities. He found that most people preferred the more progressive future—but wrongly assumed that most other people preferred a return to normal. As such, they also deemed that future more likely. This phenomenon, where people think widespread views are minority ones and vice versa, is called pluralistic ignorance. It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.) “This is problematic because over time, people tend to adjust their opinions in the direction of what they perceive as the majority,” Lewandowsky told me. By wrongly assuming that everyone else wants to return to the previous status quo, we foreclose the possibility of creating something better.

Today I was talking with Paul about people taking on the opinions of the group they live in, which sounds like a related phenomenon. Our beliefs are structured by our understanding of what the people around us believe, sometimes correctly, sometimes because that’s what we are told they believe.

How difficult it must be for the population of Russia to understand the situation in Ukraine.

Man. All the reviews were pretty meh, but I’m loving it. All the talk is about Eve and Villanelle, but Caroline is the bomb.

I remember Lessig talking about this. What if we treated the law (as regards technology products, anyway) as if it were a set of regression tests that all new code had to pass? So, you express the legal constraint in some sort of test-able way that the authors of the law agree constitutes a valid expression (“all users of the software must be able to easily erase any record of the history of their usage of the software” => a test spec: sign up as a user, do some things, find the mechanism to erase history (perhaps limited by number of clicks or time involved or … to provide a metric of “easily”), execute it, verify that history is in fact unobtainable.

As the law evolves, the test suite evolves. As the software evolves, it is constantly re-tested against the latest version of the test suite.

Legal terms, such as “reasonable”, “easily”, … tend to be well-defined within the context of the law. As such, they’re like shortcuts, and perhaps can be implemented using something like Prolog.

no, wait: Lessig’s formulation was “code as law”, precisely the opposite: the embedding of social values, etc, into technological artifacts (consciously or not).

cf: “smart contracts” in blockchain. otoh, witness the lack of transparency in machine learning, which can result in seemingly arbitrary decisions and classifications with no explanation of their rationale. Interesting reading in “The Expansion of Algorithmic Governance: From Code is Law to Law is Code”, Hassan and de Filippi, https://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/4518

Not houseboats. An apartment complex. Amsterdam permitted this a couple of decades ago, and it was complete by 2011. Prefab houses built on concrete tubs that are half-submerged as ballast, anchored to the bottom. Beautiful, and practical, and a few other cities are starting to think that, with 1m sea-level-rise, they should start looking at how to add flexible housing like this.

https://rohmer.nl/en/projects/waterwoningen-ijburg/#

I think she is playing the role that Tom Paine played. Explaining what’s what for the common man.

Oh. I’m getting to that age, where all the people I used to look up to are disappearing.

Screenshot of the top 10 Music stories on the Guardian website today:

King Crimson, John Lydon, Madonna, Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Def Jam, Snoop Dogg … wow. Music hasn’t moved on much since I was a kid.

https://cdm.link/2022/02/jon-appleton-composer-and-synclavier-innovator-has-died/

When I was running sound at the U of Auckland, they held a conference and Jon Appleton presented the Synclavier. He came to me before he gave the paper and asked that I make available four channels of audio input, set the levels once, and then leave the board alone. Intrigued, I attended the presentation.

I was completely blown away. I’d dabbled in analog electronics for audio since high school, but this presentation set me on a course of working with computers to make music.

I got in touch with Appleton when I was in the US, asking about graduate school. He told me not to bother, to just keep working in the field outside of academia. Glad I didn’t listen to him and joined the CCM at Mills instead. Interesting note: Larry Polansky, one of my thesis advisors, ended up running the department at Dartmouth where Appleton taught.

There’s been a rise in the visibility of abuse of power one group to another in the past few years: the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, pushback against trans-phobia, … As these ideas matured, they’ve gone from illuminating injustices that were formerly condoned or invisible to be wielded as weapons against transgressors, often bringing on very public falls from grace. In short, they’ve arrogated power to groups of people who formerly were powerless; by identifying as with a group, the powerless have taken back power. It’s no coincidence that many such groups model their operation on the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.

This is coincident with another well-documented trend of the last few decades, that of economic inequality (the 10%, the second Gilded Age, etc), and I’ve come to think it’s not an accident. It’s become clear that economic inequality goes hand-in-hand with an imbalance of power; for example, see the Princeton study showing government activity being completely unrelated to what the “regular guy” wants and close correlated with what the wealthy individuals and corporations prefer.

As a result, I believe the general population have become increasingly of the opinion that the institutions and formal processes of society, the law, the government, the police, the media, and so on are not operating in their interests. This ties in with the lack of trust in such institutions that Fukiyama speaks of.

In such a society, how do you move the levers to address issues that are of concern to you? You can’t sue, because the courts aren’t your courts. You can’t appeal to normal democratic institutions, because the government doesn’t have your interest at heart. You can’t expect the media to help, because they don’t tell the truth. In many respects, you’re like the small child in a dictatorial family, not listened to in conversation, powerless.

Children revert to using the power they have: to invoke sympathy, to demand attention. When you’re powerless, you need to get the powerful on board, and you can do that to some degree by invoking shame, anger, or at least making enough noise to make the powerful pay attention to you. I think this is the basis of the rise of the groups I mentioned above. Not to imply that they’re childish, but that they find themselves (as do 90% of us) without access to the mechanisms of power to make change that a healthy society supports, and hence must use the mechanisms they have available.

In a reasonable and fair society, an individual or group that was the victim of a clear injustice would be able to use the courts to get redress, or expect their government to listen and address the issue, or present their case to the media and expect that there would be an investigation into the issue and a public airing of the result. But if you believe the courts only work for those with money, the government long ago ceased to be “of the people, by the people and for the people” and the media have abandoned fact-finding for publishing partisan opinions handed down from the rich and powerful, you don’t have access to those mechanisms. So you use the mechanisms you have at hand: make a loud noise, and try to shame or anger the powerful into allying themselves with you and making change on your behalf. The power of the victim.

This has a couple of problems. In order to be effective, it needs to be consequential. Hence the return of shunning as a punishment, often self-imposed, sometimes unjust. The principles of justice that we’ve evolved over time (innocent until proven guilty, proportionate punishment, malicious intent, …) tend to fall by the way. Secondly, the increase in power invites push-back from other groups using similar methods, or simply refusing to acknowledge shame, guilt and the other tools in the powerless’ arsenal, leading to some truly abhorrent abuses by people refusing to acknowledge the justice in the other’s claims. In short, if nobody trusts the institutions that have been evolved to address conflict between groups of people in society, that conflict will express itself in more primitive ways, and will be cynically used or put down in more primitive ways by those who do wield power.

If we addressed economic inequality in society, I believe we’d see a more just and fair airing of legitimate grievances and a willingness to address them.

Ghazala
— Read on www.anti-theory.com/bio/