“Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said… The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.”
-NYT ethical guidelines
As the world crumbles all I need is a bot to tell me whether cottage cheese is in stock. Otherwise no real need to go to extreme lengths and leave the house.
Student responses in my socialism class today: the socialists focus on workers as a class because they’re the majority of consumers. If they don’t buy things the capitalists won’t make a profit. What do I say?
Trolling must produce a flame. It is provocation as a transitive verb. Also see Yurchak and Boyer on stiob, where they discuss the overlap between late socialist and late capitalist ironic forms.
Ok not regretted actually
Dostoevsky’s characters would have posted so hard and then regretted it so hard
If you're wondering how middle-class anti-radicalism can lead to authoritarianism, consider the case of the Russian opposition in the 2010s. Also-what Russian versions of slurs like 'vermin,' 'deplorables,' and 'liberal snowflakes' had to do with it. My latest paper: doi.org/10.1111/jola...
Here @parkermolloy.com describes a dynamic that is obvious to everyone who has paid attention but you will *never* see acknowledged in the MSM: for decades the right has rolled out one fake bullshit controversy after another, always with the goal of exaggerating the extremity of Democrats.
Here's why "alignment research" when it comes to LLMs is a big mess, as I see it.
Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".
Oh no, there goes my potential strategy for getting my recently cut migraine med limits back up…
Harris, I was wondering about what your Baltimore specific take would be! Also possibly he was actually Albanian?
Democrats spent 5 billion dollars losing to Trump. ~10 percent of that could fund a major media presence nationally, and locally in every swing state prospect.org/politics/202...
Oh and the system of elite ‘civilization’- in Elias’ sense - seems to definitely be unraveling. And of course biopolitics (both neoliberal and socialist variants)
What will replace systems theory in all its guises? What’s after cybernetics, networks and ecologies? Doesn’t seem like “thing theory” or object oriented ontology were good contenders.
It’s become noticeable, on an everyday level, that we’re living in the age of the great unraveling of (20th c) systems. Everything is broken (geopolitics, healthcare, supply chains, housing, search, links, education). Every thing is an island.
The arm binding! Readymade for a picaresque Ostap Bender/Interpol detective stand-off.
Operation Pushkin is begging for Elif Batuman’s novelization but I hope there will be several contenders
All the embarrassing emails about the protests are suddenly coming from “Internal Communications” - which one cannot lose confidence in, presumably. The campus Kafkaesque.
managing contention is more difficult than managing elections -- a small number of committed opponents in the streets can create an impression of a problem.
incumbents in hybrids more vulnerable to street protest than incumbents in other kinds of political regimes. authoritarians need to not only defeat proof elections but also the streets. challenges can signal weakness of incumbents and encourage elites to change sides.
Congrats to university presidents for demonstrating that the way they manage protests categorizes us as a “hybrid authoritarian” regime type
every time I hear T*****r S***T I'm always just like "well that sure is music." like what if music was neither good nor bad, but somehow that exact average where it's just the most neutral music ever made
But those pained by: “shows up to the vast majority of his commitments” - I’m sorry, this is just standard for a celebrity tenured prof. I too wish the bar was higher, but it’s not.
The Huberman piece was funny because it revealed that his intellectual promiscuity is isomorphic with his sexual promiscuity (no accountability and at times offensive). But that’s kind of his brand, at least on the podcast.
Hooray!!!!!!!!!! Long deserved!
They hated the czarist police state in general - but with such particular vehemence, born of personal experience with its brutality.
The hope I see for Russian anti-regime activists is that Navalny’s death and the threat looming over all the other political prisoners will add a heavy dose of personal spite to their motivations- not unlike that driving Lenin and his circle.
I’m excited bc maybe now my students will know who he is when I rant about the historical failure of ironic distance on politics.
Hydra of imperialism!
Climate change is making the world a better place