Month: February 2023

At lunch today I was talking with a friend about Nikki Haley. I suggested she needed something to differentiate herself, something that would grab people's attention and make her more than just another minor league candidate taking on Donald Trump.

Little did I know that apparently she's already decided that slagging old people will be her calling card:

Haley doubles down on cognitive tests as White House, older lawmakers bristle

Right. That should do it. Keep it up, Nikki:

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley bashed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over his criticism of her proposal for mental acuity tests for sitting members of Congress ages 75 and up. “Bernie Sanders lost his mind because I asked for that. He is exactly the reason we need it,” Haley said in response to a crowd member's question about the comment.

I dunno. Is this a winning platform? Does she really want to get down in the mud over who's lost it and who hasn't? And will that persuade lots of people that she's presidential material? Color me skeptical.

Kevin McCarthy has decided to entrust the investigation into the events of January 6 to everyone's favorite TV lunatic:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has provided exclusive access to a trove of U.S. Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has played down the deadly violence that occurred that day and claimed it was a “false flag” operation....“So there’s about 44,000 hours, and we have — you may have read today — been granted access to that. … We believe we have secured the right to see whatever we want to see.”

....McCarthy told reporters last month that he supported the idea of additional footage from the riot being made public. “I think the public should see what has happened on that,” he said.

If McCarthy really wanted the public to see what happened, he would open up the videotape archive for anyone to view or download. But that's obviously not what he wants. What he wants is to give it to someone he can trust to find every possible tidbit that can be twisted into a partisan hammer.

I expect this technique to catch on. It's what Elon Musk did when he turned over Twitter's internal emails to a person he trusted to mine them for anything that could be made to serve his anti-liberal ends. The point was ideological, but it was also a great way to ensure that a ton of chaff would get tossed into the air and divert everyone's attention for weeks or months.

This didn't work out so well for Musk because the stuff produced by Matt Taibbi and others was such obvious BS that everyone stopped paying attention pretty quickly. The Capitol surveillance video might work out better because (a) Tucker Carlson is more experienced in political smeardom than Taibbi, and (b) fuzzy, grainy video is a lot easier to manipulate than words on a page. See that guy in the background? That's the Senate bathroom door. Why did he go in there? Here's what I think....

Anyway, there are treasure troves of stuff all over the place that no one feels like combing through for years on end. So why not turn them over to partisan nutballs who are willing to comb through them? It can't hurt, and you never know what they might come up with.

All that said, can I add: wtf? Since when does a federal employee get to turn over a vast amount of valuable government information to one specific favored person for political ends? Am I losing my marbles, or is this not as corrupt as it looks like?

I was out in the desert last night trying to squeeze in an astrophotography session while the moon was still down but before the weather turned bad. The moon played its role nicely, but the weather didn't.

The weather report had said the sky would be clear except for a couple of hours around 6 pm. That was fine, so I packed everything up and headed out. By the time I got to Indio, however, I was heading straight into the heart of darkness. This wasn't just a few clouds blowing in and then blowing out, it was a complete blackout.

But it was pretty localized. According to my phone, the storm hadn't made it out to either Needles or Blythe, so I headed in that direction for another hour and eventually found clear skies.

Last night's target was the Pleiades, a source of frustration for the past month. They're only visible for a couple of hours at the beginning of the night, and I kept missing my window whenever I'd go out to image them (bad traffic, equipment problems, human error, etc.). This time I finally got them.

The image at the bottom was taken from my backyard. The stars themselves are visible, but there's way too much ambient light to see the delicate tracery of the dust cloud that surrounds them.

The middle picture was constructed from a test series taken Saturday night at Palomar Mountain. It was much better thanks to the darker skies and the 300-second exposure I used.

The top image is my final effort. I took it in the desert last night using an exposure of 400 seconds. The sky was only so-so, and I probably should have used an even longer exposure since my telescope's aperture is a slow f/9. Still, it's pretty good. The stars are sharp, the dust cloud is well formed, and the colors turned out nicely.

This weekend was my first real test of the Esatto electronic focuser I bought last month. It's great. It autofocuses in just a couple of minutes, and it keeps focus regardless of how the telescope moves. It makes setup way, way faster and easier than it was with my old, sloppy manual focuser.

Today the Supreme Court heard arguments in Gonzales vs. Google. It's really Gonzales vs. YouTube, but since Google owns YouTube it gets pride of place in the lawsuit.

Long story short, the question is whether YouTube should be held liable for hosting content from Islamic State—i.e., ISIS. The Gonzales family says that YouTube's algorithms promoted ISIS content, and therefore they are partially responsible for the death of an exchange student at the hands of ISIS.

So far Google has won in lower courts thanks to Section 230, a piece of federal law that prohibits online platforms from being sued over user content they host—comments, blog posts, videos, etc. Critically, Section 230 holds online platforms harmless even if they moderate this content, as YouTube does algorithmically.

Thanks to the general dislike of large online platforms these days—Democrats don't like them because they're monopolies, Republicans don't like them because of a delusion they're anti-conservative—there's a surprising, if vague, bipartisan movement to kill or modify Section 230. But how would that work out?

Big online platforms play host to millions or billions of user comments every day. It is literally impossible to moderate all of them for all possible abuses. An algorithm can do it, but algorithms are imperfect and will never catch everything. If you remove protection from any platform that uses an algorithm—as Gonzales is asking—you would be implicitly opening up these platforms to a massive barrage of lawsuits.

Alternatively, online platforms could stop moderating user content at all. That would leave them protected by Section 230, but no one would ever use them again. An unmoderated platform would be so disgusting that it would drive every decent person away.

And it would be illegal anyway because there are a few subjects that online platforms are responsible for regardless of Section 230. The best known of these is child porn, which platforms are required to take down to the best of their ability.

Section 230, or something very similar, is the lifeblood of social media. Just about every country in the world has some version of Section 230, and algorithms are clearly the only way to effectively moderate the torrent of content on modern platforms. Like it or not, we're stuck with them. There's really no practical way around this, and they need the same protection as human moderators.

The Supreme Court should leave Section 230 alone and leave it to Congress to make changes if it desires. Stomping around in Section 230 like a bull in a china shop is the last thing we need from the court.

Perhaps eventually John Maynard Keynes will finally be right about the four-day workweek. A pilot program in Britain among 61 companies turned out to be popular with workers—hardly a surprise—but was also popular with management:

Companies that participated could adopt different methods to “meaningfully” shorten their employees’ workweeks — from giving them one day a week off to reducing their working days in a year to average out to 32 hours per week — but had to ensure the employees still received 100 percent of their pay....Companies’ revenue “stayed broadly the same” during the six-month trial, but rose 35 percent on average when compared with a similar period from previous years. Resignations decreased.

....Those who took part were less likely to report that they felt they did not have enough time in the week to take care of their children, grandchildren or older people in their lives. The time men spent looking after children increased by more than double that of women, pointing to positive effects of a shorter workweek on gender equality — though there was no change in the share of housework men and women reported taking on.

I'm still trying to cut my workweek to five days, but my brain won't let me. Stupid brain.

Jokes aside, this is a good idea—though for a reason that isn't immediately obvious: robots are on track to eventually start taking away our jobs permanently. That is, there won't be "other" jobs for us to do that robots still can't perform. They'll be able to do everything.

When that starts to happen, maybe in a decade or so, one way to deal with it gracefully would be steady cuts in weekly work hours as human work becomes less necessary—but with the same pay.¹ This could happen with direct government subsidies or simply by government mandate. But something like it is going to happen.

A nationwide change to a four-day workweek would be sort of a pilot run for this. Corporations would learn how best to implement shorter workweeks and researchers would have some time to figure out which types of workweek flexibility work best for different kinds of companies. This will make the transformation to a robot economy smoother, less scary, and more efficient when it finally happens.

¹Or higher pay, since mass robotification will certainly increase productivity massively.

The latest cause célèbre among the political chattering class is the bowdlerization of Roald Dahl's books to remove a few words here and there that are no longer considered suitable for polite company:

The thrilling nastiness that children love about Dahl isn’t completely expunged, but the range of things he can be nasty about is narrowing.

Mrs Twit remains beastly, but no longer ugly. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, spoilt Veruca Salt is still spoilt and Mike Teavee still screen-obsessed; but greedy, doughy Augustus Gloop is now somewhat awkwardly “enormous”, not fat....That “fat” can’t now be employed as a lazy synonym for hateful, or that schools now are infinitely kinder and gentler places than Dahl’s sadistic-sounding prep, is wholeheartedly a good thing. But these cultural shifts do create an unmistakable gap between today’s under-10s — the actual audience for children’s books — and nostalgic adults, which seems increasingly hard to bridge.

From the volume of the bipartisan outrage over this you'd think that woke censors working out of the White House had despoiled the works of Plato. But really, folks, this is not something to get bent out of shape about. These are books for kids, not classics of the Western canon. It really doesn't matter if a few hundred words across all of Dahl's titles have been changed because society today has different ideas about what's suitable for children.

In fact, I'm all for it as long as it's done judiciously and with good sense. Frankly, if you aren't willing to support something this trivial as a way of addressing racism, sexism, fat phobia, and so forth, you might ask yourself just how dedicated you are to fighting those things in the first place.

And keep in mind that this kind of tampering happens constantly. Every time you watch a movie on an airline flight, you're watching a bowdlerized version that was carefully constructed to offend no one. If you can put up with that, surely you can put up with some minuscule changes to a few kids' books.

POSTSCRIPT: As for "nostalgic" parents, give me a break. Children can get along perfectly well without any exposure at all to the stuff you adored madly when you were a child. Conservatives let this sort of nostalgia control their lives, and it does none of us any good.

This is "The Three Shades," in the Rodin Museum in Paris. My question is why it was installed so that the Eiffel Tower is sticking up through the middle shade. The placement is obviously deliberate, but why? Is it meant to convey something? Did it just seem funny to someone? Or what?

According to Trans Legislation Tracker, there are currently more than 300 bills pending in state legislatures that attack transgender health and well-being in one way or another. Some are directed at trans girls in high school sports. Some are directed at K-12 curricula. Some are directed at banning or regulating gender-affirming care among trans children and teens.

In just the past four years, the number of anti-trans bills introduced annually has skyrocketed by nearly 20x:

Anti-trans legislation has spread to a majority of US states:

This is the background for everything happening on the transgender front these days. Conservatives have mounted a vast and brutal attack on transgender people, and the size (and viciousness) of the attack is growing every year.

This has, unfortunately, produced a calamitous wedge issue among progressives. The question is how the medical establishment should treat gender dysphoric children and teens, and as you'd expect the research on this topic is (a) thin and (b) unsettled. What else could it be? It's both a difficult issue and a fairly recent one. It simply hasn't been around long enough to generate a well-accepted corpus of rigorous research that follows transitioning kids all the way into adulthood. Recent evidence hints that there may be some problems with current standards of care, but we don't know for sure.

So what do we do while we wait for more research? Given the ongoing assault on trans lives from conservatives, trans activists would basically like everyone to shut up. Maybe there are issues with currently popular treatments, but debating them in public does nothing but provide conservatives with political ammunition—usually twisted and willfully misinterpreted in service of their cause.

Non-activists don't accept this. As with most things, they believe that transparency and public debate are the best way to eventually establish best practices. Trying to hide the facts is both unlikely to succeed and bad for everyone in the long run.

The leadership of the trans community has long had a reputation for ruthlessness against heretics, and that plays into the ongoing war over how to discuss all this. Activists attack the non-activists with absolutely no holds barred: they are murderers, liars, zealots, and pawns of the right. Non-activists hit back with charges that the trans community has no interest in the truth.

The worst part of all this is that, as near as I can tell, both sides in this progressive civil war really and truly believe they have the best interests of the trans community at heart. But the war has long since reached such a fever pitch that everyone on every side probably thinks I'm being laughably naive here.

And me? I'm nearly always on the side of honest research being publicly debated. There are downsides to this—namely that partisans will often distort it for their own ends—but the downside of getting into the habit of suppressing honest research is far worse. At the same time, a topic that touches on raw emotions and life experiences as harrowingly as this one should be debated with extraordinary care and sensitivity to the harm it can produce. Facts and statistics are all very fine if you're literally presenting at a conference of fellow professionals, but outside that milieu it's not enough.¹ You need to make it crystal clear whose side you're on.

I'm on the side of trans people. I'm also on the side of (trying to) ferret out the truth—precisely because this is almost certainly best for everyone, both cis and trans, in the long run. These days, I'm not sure where that puts me.

¹Yes, I realize I'm hardly one to talk.

Some stats about ChatGPT:

• ChatGPT crossed one million users within a week of its launch.
• In the first month of its launch, ChatGPT had more than 57 million monthly users.
• ChatGPT crossed the 100 million users milestone in January 2023.
• 13 million individual active users visited ChatGPT per day as of January 2023.

This doesn't just represent revenue. It represents training. First mover advantage provides ChatGPT with a temporary lead over Google and other chatbots, which in turn means billions of more words of real-world training every day.¹ This is a virtuous circle, which allows ChatGPT to improve faster, gain even more market share, and improve faster yet. So maybe it's actually a semi-permanent lead?

There will be an endless procession of shiny objects to report about ChatGPT over the next few years. The latest, of course, is the "disturbing" conversation Kevin Roose had with a runaway ChatGPT-powered bot a few days ago. Ignore this stuff. It's only disturbing if you've internalized the false idea that ChatGPT is sentient. It's not. It's just a tool for now, but it's a tool that's going to get way better in a very short time.

Keep your eyes on the prize, folks.

¹All provided free of charge by you!

John McWhorter writes this week about the changes made by the College Board to the African American Studies AP test between its original draft and the final curriculum outline:

The board claimed that the changes were responses to “the input of professors” and “longstanding A.P. principles.” I am unconvinced, to say the least, especially given the degree to which the counsel of these “professors” was mysteriously consonant with DeSantis’s.

I wrote about this a couple of days ago, but I realize that my mind was a little hazy at the time and I might not have explained myself as well as I could have. Let me give it another (brief) try.

As near as I can tell, the first time Florida officials discussed actual course content with the College Board was during a Zoom meeting in November. Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development, attended for the College Board:

“What became clear very quickly is that these were not content experts,” said Dr. Manoharan, who has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard.

The state officials first asked whether the Black Panther Party was taught as a historical topic, or whether the course was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking,” Dr. Manoharan recalled. He said he explained that the Black Panthers were a common part of introductory courses, and “that is not something that we can change or compromise.”

Another official, he recalled, asked, “I see this term intersectionality. What do you mean?”

....As Dr. Manoharan explained the concept, the state officials were “stone faced,” he said, and he was not sure they understood him.

“I have interacted with many DOEs — this DOE acts as a political apparatus,” he said of Florida’s Department of Education, adding, “It’s not an effort to improve education.”

He said that overall, Florida had not given useful feedback about what was wrong with the course, and he had been baffled and frustrated about how to respond.

The Florida Department of Education declined to respond to this. What's more, in their public letter of February 7 they provided no evidence about what, if anything, they had objected to in the course curriculum. Given the obviously political nature of that letter, it's barely plausible that they left out anything that would have made their case more credible.

Long story short, the College Board has produced evidence that (a) the changes to eliminate specific readings by specific authors was made long before Florida complained about anything, and (b) when Florida finally met with them they had nothing very concrete to say—and this was at a time when the final curriculum was all but finalized anyway. Florida, by contrast, has produced no evidence for anything, even in their own letter.

On this subject, there's simply no reason to believe either Ron DeSantis or Florida education officials unless they make a case—any case at all—that they had specific objections which the College Board responded to. They haven't done that.

POSTSCRIPT: This is not to say that the College Board might not have responded, either directly or indirectly, to right-wing criticisms from other people that were floating around in mid-2022. I don't know any way to judge that. This is strictly about whether DeSantis and Florida played any role in the curriculum development process.