I’m not necessarily convinced by Stoller’s approach to solutions, which is always lots more regulation, but he’s great at highlighting important problems.

There is a third explanation for inflation and shortages, and it’s not simply that the Fed has printed too much money or that Covid introduced a supply shock (though both are likely factors.) It’s a political and policy story. The consolidation of power over supply chains in the hands of Wall Street, and the thinning out of how we make and produce things over forty years in the name of efficiency, has made our economy much less resilient to shocks. These shortages are the result.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/counterfeit-capitalism-why-a-monopolized

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. This could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Someone who has been made uncomfortable now has multiple paths through which to demand redress. This has given rise to a new facet of life in universities, nonprofits, and corporate offices: the committees, HR departments, and Title IX administrators who have been appointed precisely to hear these kinds of complaints. Anyone who feels discomfort now has a place to go, someone to talk to.

Some of this is, I repeat, positive: Employees or students who feel they have been treated unfairly no longer have to flounder alone. But that comes at a cost. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

The combination of chromatophores, iridophores and photophores (and non-ocular light perceiving organs) makes for a strongly interactive relationship with aqueous light, or rather lights, since squids engage with different types of light, and in ranges difficult for us to imagine or measure. But we can recognize that squids metabolize their aqueous environment through both water and light. Just as their squishiness, in Aristotle’s terms, could be understood as water with the agency to perceive, judge and act, so their luminescence can be understood as light altered—digested, if you will—into intentional actions. Squids engage with changing, moving light as receptors, conveyors and projectors of light. They receive it, diffract it and create it. And they do so differently in different directions, at different depths and through different means. Their movements on a daily, seasonal and ontogenetic basis all participate in the environmental movements of lights, some of which we can perceive with our non-squid eyes and instruments designed to translate polarized light (as well as the light received in the non-visual photoreceptors), and much of which we cannot. The dynamics of the squid environment involve light and water interacting, and squids participate in those dynamics by metabolizing the continual changes into motion.

http://oceans.nautil.us/article/686/the-light-magic-of-squid

This long Twitter thread from a researcher is partly about the object-level question of mask effectiveness, but more interesting to me as a look at the meta-level question of how to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that’s poorly suited to randomized controlled trials.

https://twitter.com/trishgreenhalgh/status/1414294003479089154

Traumatic insemination, also known as hypodermic insemination, is the mating practice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity (hemocoel). The sperm diffuse through the female’s hemolymph, reaching the ovaries and resulting in fertilization.

The process is detrimental to the female’s health. It creates an open wound which impairs the female until it heals, and is susceptible to infection. The injection of sperm and ejaculatory fluids into the hemocoel can also trigger an immune reaction in the female. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination

Sam Altman has one of the best-thought-out plans I’ve seen for keeping our society viable over the next decades in the face of technological change from AI. Recommended. Very interested to hear other people’s thoughts.

My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.

We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.

https://moores.samaltman.com/

This is a really interesting argument:

The media has panned Donald Trump’s First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: “sure to fail,” “as stupid as you’d think,” “ridiculous.” Mr. Trump’s complaint omits important precedents, facts and claims for relief, but there’s a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. If his lawyers do better in court than in their initial filing, Mr. Trump can win.

It’s true that the First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than private companies. But the central claim in Mr. Trump’s class-action lawsuit—that the defendants should be treated as state actors and are bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship—has precedent to back it up. Their censorship constitutes state action because the government granted them immunity from legal liability, threatened to punish them if they allow disfavored speech, and colluded with them in choosing targets for censorship.

The Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973) that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” As Jed Rubenfeld and I argued in these pages in January, that’s what Congress did by passing Section 230(c)(2) of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech and immunizes them from state liability if they do so.

The high court has repeatedly held that federal immunity pre-empting state law can transform a private party’s conduct into state action subject to constitutional scrutiny. In Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson (1956), the justices found state action in union-employer agreements because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association (1989), the court again found state action in a private company’s conduct because federal laws immunized companies from liability if they tested employees for drugs.

Prominent congressional Democrats have also issued severe, explicit and repeated threats to retaliate against social-media giants if they fail to remove “hate speech” and “misinformation” that the government can’t directly censor under the Constitution. These threats have worked.

Opinion | Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants

A thoughtful essay from Freddie deBoer.

The obsession with microaggressions is a perfect example of the desperate need for materialism in racial politics. Yes, it’s unfortunate if people say or do things that subtly indicate racial superiority or otherwise embody imperfect racial attitudes, such as making oblique references to stereotypes. But human beings have profoundly limited control over their minute social interactions. (Among other things, we literally do not choose the things we say.) Policy cannot effectively stop microaggressions, even if we implemented heavy-handed laws to attempt to do so, and I certainly hope we won’t. Meanwhile a mile or two from me a bunch of Black children live in Brownsville in environmentally unhealthy housing, go hungry every night, and are regularly exposed to violence and crime. The notion that we should spend so much time talking about microaggressions and so little talking how to improve the conditions of those children can only happen when the racial discourse has been hijacked by a bunch of cossetted affluent college-educated journalists and academics who are as far removed from Brownsville as they are from Mars, whatever their race. And this is another key element of materialist approaches to race: recognizing that we in fact have limited political and social and argumentative resources, that we must prioritize, that we will never achieve a perfect racial environment and that our efforts to do so are counterproductive. We have to decide what comes first, and what should come first is making sure people are safe, fed, housed, clothed, educated, and cared for. After that we can worry more about being nice to each other.

[…]

The current “racial awakening” illustrates the contrast very well. If your antiracism is concerned with symbols, feelings, words, ideas, then you can celebrate. We’ve had an absolute revolution in race relations. If on the other hand you care about the material dimensions of race and the concrete reality of the average Black life, then the whole thing is a joke. How has the past year of yelling about race materially changed the life of a Black family struggling to keep the lights on in their impoverished community in the Mississippi river delta? What for them has changed?

A Materialist Alternative to “Antiracism”

Cult-style brainwashing? Not really a thing. As a matter of fact, cults are barely able to keep anyone around — nearly all members leave within two years. In retrospect, the whole cult hysteria of the 60s and 70s — including support from courts of kidnapping voluntary, adult cult members for “deprogramming” — seems to have been more or less a moral panic. Yet another reminder that moral panics are very dangerous and hard to resist (I can think of at least one going on currently, and another in the past few years).

Research from Gwern, who I completely trust to present the research thoroughly and dispassionately.

Psychologists searched in vain for a prevalence of “authoritarian personalities,” neurotic fears, repressed anger, high anxiety, religious obsession, personality disorders, deviant needs, and other mental pathologies. They likewise failed to find alienation, strained relationships, and poor social skills. In nearly all respects – economically, socially, psychologically – the typical cult converts tested out normal. Moreover, nearly all those who left cults after weeks, months, or even years of membership showed no sign of physical, mental, or social harm. Normal background and circumstances, normal personalities and relationships, and a normal subsequent life – this was the “profile” of the typical cultist.

…Numerous studies of cult recruitment, conversion, and retention found no evidence of “brainwashing.” The Moonies and other new religious movements did indeed devote tremendous energy to outreach and persuasion, but they employed conventional methods and enjoyed very limited success. In the most comprehensive study to date, Eileen Barker (1984) could find no evidence that Moonie recruits were ever kidnapped, confined, or coerced (though it was true that some anti-cult “deprogrammers” kidnapped and restrained converts so as to “rescue” them from the movement). Seminar participants were not deprived of sleep; the food was “no worse than that in most college residences;” the lectures were “no more trance-inducing than those given everyday” at many colleges; and there was very little chanting, no drugs or alcohol, and little that could be termed “frenzy” or “ecstatic” experience (Barker 1984). People were free to leave, and leave they did – in droves.

Barker’s comprehensive enumeration showed that among the relatively modest number of recruits who went so far as to attend two-day retreats (claimed to be Moonies’ most effective means of “brainwashing”), fewer than 25% joined the group for more than a week, and only 5% remained full-time members 1 year later. Among the larger numbers who visited a Moonie centre, not 1 in 200 remained in the movement 2 years later. With failure rates exceeding 99.5%, it comes as no surprise that full-time Moonie membership in the U.S. never exceeded a few thousand. And this was one of the most successful cults of the era! Once researchers began checking, rather than simply repeating the numbers claimed by the groups, defectors, or journalists, they discovered dismal retention rates in nearly all groups. [For more on the prevalence and process of cult defection, see Wight (1987) and Bromley (1988).] By the mid-1980s, researchers had so thoroughly discredited “brainwashing” theories that both the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Sociological Association agreed to add their names to an amicus brief denouncing the theory in court (Richardson 1985).

(quoted section is from Iannaccone 2003, “The Market for Martyrs”)

Notes on Brainwashing & ‘Cults’ – LessWrong