For your weekend... as I traditionallly do, here's a round-up of recent science news...
First, here's the latest CARTA conference - the Center for Anthropogeny (human origins) at UCSD. This one with talks having to do with the theme of "The Planet Altering Apes."
== Physical Science ==
The observation of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has validated the last missing piece of the standard model (SM) of elementary particle physics. The mass of the W boson, a mediator of the weak force between elementary particles, should be tightly constrained by the symmetries of the standard model of particle physics. So… do recent results mean we have a problem here?
“Wireless Sensors: Tiny Battery-Free Devices Float In The Wind Like Dandelion Seeds…” or a lot like the ‘localizer nanochips in Vernor Vinge’s great novel A Deepness in the Sky.
A new form of ice discovered, which forms at high-pressures: Shades of Kurt Vonnegut! Here’s ‘ice-ten’ or Ice-X! Scientists speculate that it could be common on distant, water-rich exoplanets.
Asking the Ultimate Questions, Robert Laurence Kuhn’s recent presentation at the Institute of Art and ideas (IAI-UK), is posted on the Closer To Truth YouTube channel.
== The biologic world ==
States and cities have also begun to decriminalize psilocybin – the core of magic mushrooms - in general or for medicinal purposes, especially treatment of depression.
The disturbing rise of bird flu; already more than 27 million birds have died or been slaughtered. Will we see a poultry vaccine?
Apparently fish can calculate....stingrays can perform simple addition and subtraction in the low digit range.
Forty to fifty percent of all animal species are actually parasites, including 300,000 different types of worms that parasitize vertebrates.
Interesting question: Why didn't our primitive ancestors get cavities?
== Insights into our planet ==
In Earth’s past, two gargantuan 'super-mountain' ranges may have fueled two of the biggest evolutionary boom times in our planet's history — the first appearance of complex cells roughly 2 billion years ago, and the Cambrian explosion of marine life 541 million years ago.
Is Earth’s ‘solid’ inner core something like my fictional-hypothetical descriptions in Earth? If the material is ‘superionic,’ then the majority iron atoms might be 'solid' in the crystalline lattice structure, whereas the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules would diffuse through the medium, creating the liquid-like element.
And in related matters, the top mineral form of the mantle is perovskites… which are still (since I wrote Earth) among the best high pressure/high temperature superconductors. So… is she alive? Way too soon to tell. But the traits (or potentialities) keep piling up!
Moving a bit outward toward Earth's mantle… “Earth is layered like an onion, with a thin outer crust, a thick viscous mantle, a fluid outer core, and a solid inner core. Within the mantle, there are two massive blob-like structures, roughly on opposite sides of the planet. The blobs, more formally referred to as Large Low-Shear-Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs), are each the size of a continent and 100 times taller than Mt. Everest. One is under the African continent, while the other is under the Pacific Ocean.” Might this explain the unusual solidity of the African continent?
Meanwhile, fast melting Alpine permafrost may contribute to rising global temperatures.
There have been wonderful paleontologic finds at the Tanis site, in the Dakotas, which show many creatures exceptionally well-preserved who seem to have died suddenly the very day that asteroid ended the era of the dinosaurs. I look forward to the show - Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough, which was broadcast on BBC One. A version for the U.S. science series Nova on the PBS network will be broadcast later in the year.
And...an allegory of uncertainty
“No, but we know exactly where we are,” Heisenberg replies.
The officer looks confused and says, “you were going 120 km/h!”
Heisenberg throws his arms up and cries, “Great! Now we’re lost!”
The officer looks over the car and asks Schrödinger if they have anything in the trunk.
“A cat,” Schrödinger replies.
The officer opens the trunk and yells, “This cat is dead!”
Schrödinger angrily replies, “Well it is now.”
Bohr says, “on the bright side, a moment ago we didn’t have a position, speed, or a cat. Now we have all three!”
Fed up, the officer says, “I just want to know how many of you I need to bring back to the station!”
“Roll dice for it?” Einstein asks.
heh.
Now back to your regularly scheduled 21st Century crises...
120 comments:
Dr Brin in the main post:
Four quantum physicists are in a car. ...
Heh. That reminds me of the Star Trek TNG episode in which Data plays poker on the holodeck with re-enactments of Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking (who actually appears playing himself). Someone raises the bet by three (or so), and Einstein doesn't know how much that would be, to which Newton berates him, "Can't you do simple arithmetic?"
At the end, Einstein insists that Hawking is bluffing, and he confidently rants something along the lines of "Not all of your quantum fluctuations can alter the cards in your hand," to which Hawking shows a winning hand and goes, "Wrong again, Albert."
One of the coolest applications for citizen science is the design of small, fully autonomous robots to search for bio-signatures, up to and including fossils. I can't find the links right now, but I'll grab them if I see them again. This is a scaled-down, DIY form of NASA's BRAILLE (Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments) project (cave exploration on other worlds). Such machines could be sent throughout the Solar System for a very tiny fraction of manned missions, both in terms of cost and time. We've discussed ETI lurker probes before too, but this is very doable now.
gerold,
When it comes to a sniff test, I admit I'm in the pop science theory territory. However, I wasn't imagining it for sexual partners the same way. A possible mate has to smell way off before guys loose motivation. Where smell might matter a little more is if he has choices.
I was thinking more about trade partners. Think about those shifty eyed people who live over the hill. Do you risk bringing your pig to trade for their hens? They might just beat you and take your pig.
———
For everyone else offering up anthropology examples of a lack of xenophobia, please note your examples are all relatively recent. Humans changed about 3000 generations ago. You have to look more to archeology than anthropology to see it because of the time involved.
Recent HG nomadic groups aren't really nomadic in the sense our ancestors were. Up until the ice melted, there weren't that many of us. 5 to 10 million tops. Those folks were nomadic in a way recent bands simply can't be. Those nomads didn't have to deal with farmers carving out land and defending water supplies. Everyone still had hunting turf, but that's not the same and farm and grazing turf.
Xenophobia in our original form dominated human existence for a VERY long time. We did NOT trade between kin groups back then in a volume large enough to be seen in the archeological record. Then… suddenly we did. Something changed how we thought about non-kin related risks.
Alfred: a lot of things changed around 50,000 years ago; John Pfeiffer called it "The Creative Explosion" and it coincided with the sudden expansion of modern humans all around the globe, going from Africa to Australia, Europe and all points in between. You mentioned a change in human mating patterns 3000 generations ago; 3000*20 years/generation = 60,000 years ago. Prior to that time humans were very different; we are looking at a sudden change in cognition probably associated with a new level of complexity in language. We see this in the sudden appearance of art, personal adornment and technology. I do wonder why you say that HG bands didn't exchange females before that however; what is the basis for that claim?
One of the reasons I've always assumed that hominids were patrilocal is because chimps are too. For me traits held in common by humans and chimps probably go way back in our evolutionary history.
Here's a paper on patterns of chimp and human distribution of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000973
Chimps also engage in warfare between bands, which is one of the selectors for patrilocality. It doesn't prevent them from exchanging females however. They don't trade anything else, but they make an exception for females.
Four quantum physicists are in a car
I've got one:
Three Buddhists walk into a bar. The first one says "This bar sucks!" The second one consoles him "It's alright, we're not going to be here very long". The third pipes up "As a matter of fact, the bar doesn't really exist."
A really old one from Christopher Hitchens:
A Buddhist monk orders a hot dog from a stand.
He pays for the $2 dog with a $5.
The vendor says Thanks and moves on to the next customer.
The monk says, "What about my change?"
The vendor says, "Don't you know? Change comes from within."
gerold,
I'm sure humans traded mates between bands to avoid inbreeding. Whether they thought of it that way or not, I'm sure that's been going on a long, long time.
I mean trading stuff. My shiny shells for your colored pigments.
The reason I go on and on about trade (of stuff) between kin groups is it may be the thing that really distinguishes us from our cousins. We do it. They didn't. Other things distinguishes hominids from cousin apes earlier, but within hominids... we trade stuff and go to quite a bit of trouble to make it happen.
When comparing us to chimps, don't forget bonobos. I suspect we all split down the middle some time ago. Find any of our ancestors where males were disproportionately large and they're closer to the chimp line. Without huge differences and males have to use their minds to dominate... just like females can.
Re: Trade
Trade/coinage, language/writing, and science/technology form one big interconnected positive feedback loop. I suspect that if you can model it with enough vastness (billions of agents) and fine granularity (Forthlike compute:connect ratio*), then the big stuff will emerge (on a quantum not geological timescale). The real trick is to not introduce human bias. A totally different process than raising children or striving towards a more perfect union.
* that is, concatenative computation in the style of the ribosome. Creation on a universal scale, but from mindless molecular machinery. No master control program.
How annoying to create a list like this just prior to yesterday's announcement that the accretion disc of Sag a had been imaged, confirming it to be a black hole (a much smaller one than M87. The feat was compared to imaging a donut on the Moon. Which gives one to wonder what else the Apollo astronauts left up there)
Also some significant news on the medical front: a possible cause for SIDS has been determined.
As to the other thing...
A priest, an imam, and a rabbit go into a blood bank. The nurse asks them what their grouping is.
"I am a type A" answers the priest
"Type B" adds the imam.
"And what are *you*!?" says the nurse to the rabbit.
The rabbit looks sheepish.
"I- I think I'm a typo"
Alfred,
My cursory search of teh internetz suggests that research of Neanderthal artifacts does not show evidence of long-distance trading, and that this MAY be a contributing factor in their demise in the face of changing climate - and us, whose ancestors DO leave evidence of trading networks.
Moving way forwards in history, Prof Deveraux recently marshalled evidence that the Roman Empire suffered an actual decline in population as it fell, and that this was related not so much to "Barbarians killed everyone" as "Agriculture became predominantly subsistence as loss of predictably safe trade routes curtailed regional specialization", particularly in the West.
I suspect that if ravens were a little bit smarter, we would be finding evidence of a Shiny Thing trade network between flocks as birds swapped for stuff that was new and rare to their local prospective mates. There's already anecdotal evidence of ravens giving Shinies to people who feed them.
Pappenheimer
Sort of a Quid Pro Quork
Pappenheimer
Neolithic trade in baltic amber and miditerranean shells suggest at least some very long distance networks and likely shared language. Which I speculate in Uplift War etc as explaining the extreme SHannon coding embedded in highly inflected languages like German and Russian.
Pappenheimer,
My impression from what I've read is our version of homo sapien spread and replaced a previous version almost completely. What we were before wasn't all that dissimilar to our cousins in most ways. What we became wasn't either... except for a tiny thing which turned out to be a huge reproductive advantage.
I've seen the collapse of trade argument a few times now and I am inclined to accept it as a way to terminate civilizations. I suspect it is also what gives birth to them. Necessary, but not sufficient.
I try to explain some of this to my space friends, though, and they don't listen long. They like to imagine space colonization will involve heroic and hardy people able to live in a self-sufficient state.
Hogwash. Isolation is the main ingredient poverty. Those would be colonists will not have time to teach their children more than subsistence living within two generations. What would subsistence look like on a planet where you can't breathe the air? In my not so humble opinion, it looks like a skull and crossbones. Dead colonists.
------
If ravens are seen to trade shiny things widely with each other to secure better mates, we'd best set a place for them at the adult's table.
Crows trading with humans takes it to another level. Here the crows are training the human to buy peanuts and the human is training the crows to progress from coins to bank notes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS57A_2yWg4
Big Data reveals the obvious:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/sunday/rich-happiness-big-data.html
...
Big data tells us there are very simple things that do make people happy, things that have been around for thousands of years. After reading all the studies on happiness, I concluded that modern happiness research could be summed up in one sentence, a sentence we might jokingly call the data-driven answer to life.
The data-driven answer to life is as follows: Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.
It’s a lot easier than owning an auto dealership.
In the spirit of treating mass shootings as acts of God--random inexplicable tragedies completely outside human control--and naming them the way we do hurricanes, I propose the Replacement Theory-inspired shooting in Buffalo NY be referred to as "Massacre Carlson".
Replacement Theory”? Is that the worst the Republican Party can do? You call that lame-o whinge paranoia? Listen up, and I’ll show you how existential dread is really done.
For you see, in a mere 2 centuries - a measly 200 years, a blink of history’s eye - every man, woman, child, infant, fetus, and freshly conceived zygote, every one without exception will have completed their life cycles, and be dead and gone. All without exception! And not only everyone now alive, but their children too. There will still be people, but they will all be someone else’s kids.
And not only will everyone alive be replaced, their culture will not be ours either. They will speak different words, with different meanings, pronunciations, spelling, and grammar. Their technology will be radically different, and their economics, and politics, and culture. They will have heard of our culture, but they will misunderstand it. To them we’ll be quaint.
100% demographic turnover, plus major cultural turnover: how’s that for a great replacement? And here’s the cream of the jest: that’s normal! 100% replacement is how the biosphere works! Whoever has a problem with that has bigger problems than immigration policy. Their problem is with something called the human condition.
Wait, the incels are worried about skin tint? Listen up: no-one has white skin; everyone has white bones.
“Great Replacement”? SMH. What a bunch of losers!
@Paradoctor,
I can't argue against anything you just said, but they won't care.
In the novel Out of the Silent Planet, the protagonist, Ransom, speaking for author C.S. Lewis, rhetorically jibes with the antagonist, Weston, pointing out that a future human race adapted for space travel and extraterrestrial living will so little resemble human beings as to be aliens themselves. Therefore, what is the point of Weston's work to overrun other planets and replace native lifeforms with those "humans"? Ransom, and Lewis himself, finally concludes that the only characteristic that Weston cares about is the seed--that those future inhabitants of other worlds be descended from the loins of humans.
The modern day white supremacists are similar. They don't care whether their descendants will resemble them ideologically or culturally. As long as the future masters of earth are descended from the sperm of white men.
Larry Hart:
They'll care about looking mockable.
So it isn't even skin-tint politics, it's sperm politics? That's even funnier. How incel!
My 100th donated pint. To commemorate this milestone I brought cookies for the fine folks at the Blood Bank, and they gave me an icecream cone! (After the ritual draining.)
Feeling fine, so my next target is 111!
See FB or tit-cenral for my selfie there. (Obviously, I could work on my selfie skills.)
In the United States one might be challenged to find a descendant of slaves without masters and overseers in their ancestry.
"Great Replacement"...
Why aren't the presumably rich pushers of this garbage not putting their money down? With this Supreme Court, it should be child's play to set up religious charities to reward (de facto, if not de jure) white pregnancies and fund white baby care in the US.
re: phlebotomy: Good on yer, Dr Brin. I haven't tried to give blood for years - my veins apparently play hide and seek with the needle.
Pappenheimer
P.S. and remember these words from the most accurate documentary ever made on life - if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
First black US president did not have a gram of slave ancestry. I suppose possibly some owner in there.
Blood donation
After Thatcher "de-regulated" the requirement to cook the animal protein fed to cattle and we got "Mad Cow Disease" the countries I have lived in have refused to take blood from those of us who lived in the UK then
So I have not been able to donate
I hear that Australia has cancelled the ban - I hope that NZ follows suite
Hint to Alfred about "regulations"
Replacement Theory strikes me as an old ploy (that works) for convincing people it's all a zero-sum game.
Larry,
Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.
Well... yah.
Throw in some bread, wine, and cheese/fruit too, but not to satisfy hunger... of course.
The real puzzle is why we aren't all doing it.
Duncan,
We've got a Senate candidate here in California who is running in opposition to Musk. Single issue candidate who feels we are heading over a cliff regarding self driving cars.
He might be right, but we don't know it the same way we know certain things about food safety. Thatcher's error was one of putting our trust in people who weren't properly incentivized by us due to the distance between them and us. Musk displays his incentives daily making him damn easy to read. So... what we already know can be brought into decisions about regulations.
I'll occasionally argue for de-regulation. I do it most often for industries where assumptions were made that I feel are unproven.
I'll often argue for avoiding regulation of industries where we don't really know much about them yet. That doesn't mean all the moral laws don't apply, though. Fraud is fraud in any industry and a known cheat. Go right ahead and ensure rules apply broadly.
I went through most of my life without knowing the existence of the Paraguayan War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War
Paraguay was unique in South America because it started as a protectorate of the Jesuit Order, run as an experiment to see if Native Americans could be converted into civilized humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_missions_among_the_Guaran%C3%AD
The Jesuit Order was suppressed by the Spanish Crown in 1767, which left Paraguay as a standard Spanish colony. But the racial mix was quite different. Unlike most other colonies there had never been the usual genocide aimed primarily at Native men, so the Y-chromosome distribution lacked the normal European bias.
In 1864 began the War of the Triple Alliance, where Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay combined to redress the anomaly. Over the course of the next 13 years every effort was made to exterminate Guarani men. I expect Guarani women were strenuously persuaded to bear mestizo children at the same time, but this is conjectural since no records of rape were made.
It does have all the hallmarks of race-based sperm competition however. I wonder how the participants thought of it?
Hi Alfred
Self driving - as soon as its better than an average motorist it should become the moral and sensible thing to do
I suspect that its already better than that
As soon as it is better than the best human driver .......
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/buffalo-shooting-replacement-theory.html
White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.
To the extent that anyone else cares about eradicating "whiteness", it is only because those defenders of white hegemony are so brutal to the rest of us. In that sense, they are like Putin's Russia justifying an active hostility against the West on the grounds that the West is a threat to Russia. The only reason the West cares a whit about Russia is Russia's aggression against us. And the only reason anyone outside white nationalist culture cares a whit about white nationalists is that they are perpetually at war with us.
@Dr Brin, the last sentence above links the racism and the hostility to nerds. It's all connected.
When neo-Nazis, Klansmen, militiamen and skinheads came together in the 1980s and 1990s, they worried about the “Zionist Occupational Government” or the “New World Order.” They also clarified that their nation was not the United States, but a transnational body politic of white people that had to be defended from these conspiratorial enemies and from racial threats — defended through violence and race war.
Emphasis mine. These are not American patriots, but something else, ironically noted as "transnational" when so much of their anti-Semitic rhetoric is directed at "globalists". No wonder they are so simpatico with Putin. Their allegiance is so clearly to something external to the USA that in theory they should be considered foreign agents.
Dr Brin:
First black US president did not have a gram of slave ancestry. I suppose possibly some owner in there.
Well, not American slave ancestry anyway. Possibly Kenyan*? I don't know enough history to speak to whether slavery was practiced over there.
* I don't mean to imply birtherism. He was obviously born in Hawaii, but the black side of his ancestry was genetically Kenyan, whatever that entails.
* * *
Alfred Differ:
The real puzzle is why we aren't all doing it.
Two thousand years of Christianity.
duncan cairncross:
Self driving - as soon as its better than an average motorist it should become the moral and sensible thing to do
Depends what you mean by "better". I suspect that self-driving works better in very carefully controlled conditions. That's not the same as being better at adapting to irregularities and surprises.
Tangentially but related, how does a self-driving car react in a carjacking situation? I'd be all in favor of one which knows it is being stolen and refuses to budge. I'd prefer it to self-destruct or otherwise kill the driver, but there are too many ways that could go horribly wrong.
* * *
gerold:
It [war against Paraguay] does have all the hallmarks of race-based sperm competition however. I wonder how the participants thought of it?
At the risk of repeating myself, they thought of it in terms of Christian Replacement Theory. And they saw that as a good thing.
Yes, the elephant in the room is so freakin' obvious...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/opinion/buffalo-shooting-replacement-theory.html
Replacement theory is an attack on democracy. It privileges the purported interests of some Americans over those of others, asserting, in effect, that the will of the people means the will of white people. It rekindles fears and resentments among white Americans that cynical practitioners of American politics have stoked throughout the nation’s history. It also provides a disturbing rationalization for people inclined to resort to violence when the political process does not deliver what they want or protect what they see as their place in society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/nyregion/buffalo-shooting-attack.html
...
A day later, Mr. Casado, who is Latino, learned that his friend was accused of committing the racist massacre.
“Until Saturday, I always knew him as a good person. He was never racist towards me, or around me,” Mr. Casado said in the backyard of his home in Conklin. “I didn’t know he was racist.”
...
An allegory with a lesson. The friend might as well stand generally for Latinos, and the shooter for the Republican Party.
A topic that never comes up is the ethnicity of the tribes that lost intra-Africa conflicts and who were herded by the vicvtor kingdoms to the slave docks. Should those victor kingdoms share the debt of reparations?
Another inconvenient question. After likely tens of thousands of years practiced on every continent, on which continents and in which culture did anti-slavery become a fervent moral movement?
Dr. Brin, your inconvenient questions indeed cut to the heart of the matter. There is no 'us vs them' solution. Again, either we all get to the stars, or none of us do.
There's a deeply disturbing "Three-Body Problem" fan short that apparently Liu Cixin liked. It's meshing with my Buffalo horror right now, which is where I get my 'to the stars' line reminder. Sorry if this was posted in CB long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QYwGIdYm2w
Happiness, 2 feet of blower powder, 15°, snowing 2 in an hour with a 20 mph wind to fill your tracks in between runs
@Don Gisselbeck,
It took me a bit to realize you weren't making a cocaine reference.
Larry Hart:
<<
To the extent that anyone else cares about eradicating "whiteness", it is only because those defenders of white hegemony are so brutal to the rest of us. In that sense, they are like Putin's Russia justifying an active hostility against the West on the grounds that the West is a threat to Russia. The only reason the West cares a whit about Russia is Russia's aggression against us. And the only reason anyone outside white nationalist culture cares a whit about white nationalists is that they are perpetually at war with us.
>>
Indifference is a harsher affront than hostility. Some people would rather be obnoxious than be ignored. Therefore, for instance, the acting-out of troubled teens. Or when my cat Charlie gets between me and the computer screen. "Pay attention to me!"
Yes, cats are people. They insist.
Sometimes, when Charlie is being needy, I throw a cat treat out the door and close the door after him. But this rewards his obnoxiousness. Other times, I grab the water-spray bottle, and Charlie takes the hint and leaves. That rewards _my_ obnoxiousness.
scidata:
<<
... either we all get to the stars, or none of us do.
>>
I call that a "zero-difference game".
Here's another one:
#ALMOND
- meaning "All Lives Matter Or None Do".
@Paradoctor
Not sure I understand - both sides of the -or- are equivalent maybe?. However, I do think that line is also a possible Fermi solution.
Duncan, do you believe that the average driver can recognize bicycles? Is the average driver led astray by tape on the pavement? Can the average driver tell when a speed-limit sign has had lines taped or spray-painted onto it?
Because if so, self-driving cars are nowhere near the level of the average driver. We just don't have good AI yet.
Paradoctor:
Indifference is a harsher affront than hostility. Some people would rather be obnoxious than be ignored.
I'm not disagreeing, but that's irrelevant to my point. Both the white nationalist terrorists and Putin's Russia claim their belligerence is justified because the non-deplorables are scheming to eradicate them. So their brutality is actually self-defense.
And my rejoinder to that is that we've always been willing to live and let them live. It's only because they position themselves as an existential threat to us that we are forced to neutralize the threat one way or another.
Jon S
The current Beta version of FSD can recognize bikes and determine speed limits at least as well as the average driver
And it is still being worked on
Remember "Do not let the Perfect get in the way of the Better"
Dr Brin
"Should those victor kingdoms share the debt of reparations?"
That is part of the reason that "reparations" should be colour blind and simply based on transferring wealth from the rich (who have benefited) to the poor (who have been afflicted)
Once you get past one human lifetime its impossible to have actual "reparations" so we need the "effective reparations" instead
Re: self driving cars
We have a Tesla, and are usually very pleased with it (especially as we charge it at home from solar panels, without recourse to the insanity at the gas pumps). However, it does have some quirks. A major artery we use daily is having extensive roadwork done on it. We have to take over from the kitty-brain AI in that area, lest it freak out at the conglomeration of mispainted lines, cones, and signs; to be honest even a human driver has problems. A recent software update borked the hard drive that records what the car cameras see; it did, however, fix the tendency of the AI to brake hard at long afternoon shadows that cross the road. While I might trust the AI to handle situations where there are few surprises, it still has a way to go.
Larry: those Jesuit-trained Guarani were plenty Christian, so the religion excuse was unavailable.
Heinlein once said that every editor likes the flavor better after he's pissed in the pot. To me it sure looks like all those hidalgos in the surrounding countries liked the looks of Paraguay better after a haplogroup transplant from Europe.
Larry,
...belligerence is justified because the non-deplorables are scheming to eradicate them...
Well... when it comes to the Russians, their history backs them up. Everyone around them as been out to get them at some point. Kinda goes with the territory over there... since it is essentially undefendable.
If we grew up in that part of the world, chances are pretty high we simply wouldn't believe someone who claimed they'd rather live and let live. I can't say I blame them either, because the truth is only some Americans think that way. Others of us ARE over there exporting our revolution.
So... I think the better argument is the insanity one. When has belligerence ever worked for them? When has it ever brought them peace? Never. Not even once. They've dominated others for a generation or two and then had their asses handed back to them when their economy collapses due to the costs OF that domination.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Duncan,
I'm with you regarding the software. I won't be voting for our single minded candidate even if he might be right. I don't think he is, but that's beside the point.
They reason I pointed him out is he comes from an industry where we do NOT know the dangers for which we should be enacting regulations. He IS in the industry and claims to know of dangers Musk neglects, but I worry about him writing those regulations because it looks too much like one player rigging the rules against another. Both are rich guys, but I don't like being played my anyone when it comes to helping them through rule rigging.
I suspect the danger associated with Mad Cow disease could have been foreseen. It probably WAS foreseen, hence there were regulations for Thatcher to repeal.
I suspect the dangers associated with software are NOT likely to be foreseen. I work in the field too, so our candidate isn't speaking to a doofus when I hear his campaign pitch. If we could anticipate the impacts of software... I'd be out of a job. If we could anticipate what might be smaller impacts when changing a package with a minor revision... I'd likely be out of a job.
We can't! We've tried! What we CAN do is stick to good engineering practices and learn from our screw ups. I think we should be doing the same damn thing when it comes to regulations, but it MUST start with the humblest of questions.
"Do we know enough to write any yet?"
Alfred
The way that Tesla is developing their full self driving is by running it in parallel with hundreds of thousands of drivers
The software decides what to do - and watches what the driver does - and sends that information back to "headquarters"
This means that the software has had a HUGE amount of "testing" before it ever goes "live"
YES it can still make a mistake - and possibly KILL somebody
But this is like saying that seatbelts can possibly kill somebody
Before it ever goes "live" it will have had a huge amount of testing - and been SHOWN to be involved in LESS accidents than human drivers
I suspect the "ratio" of human "kills" to software "kills" will have to be about 10:1 before it is switched on
The fact that each Tesla can run two iterations of the software at the same time should enable any "updates" (as you say a risk point) to be run alongside the old version for an extended period before making the switch complete
Nothing is perfect - but we don't need FSD to be perfect - just better than a human
duncan cairncross:
Remember "Do not let the Perfect get in the way of the Better"
It's not perfection that some of us here are requiring before accepting self-driving cars, but accountability for potentially serious mishaps.
Remember the stanza from Kipling's "The Secret of the Machines":
But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Paradoctor:
#ALMOND
- meaning "All Lives Matter Or None Do".
I like it. Unfortunately, "All Lives Matter" has been turned into a counter to "Black Lives Matter" to the extent that, as a slogan, it now means something like, "No, actually black lives don't really matter after all." I'm not sure your version would avoid being taken in that way
Back when the earth was cooling in the 2016 Bernie/Hillary debates, one of the moderators asked them to answer, "Is it 'Black Lives Matter', or 'All Lives Matter'?", clearly asking them to choose between the two. The answer I wish they'd have been smart enough to give was, "Black lives matter because all lives matter."
.
Larry Hart
Accountability - yep go for that
The cost of an accident is currently covered by the insurance company
With a self driving car the same would apply - it would be covered by the insurance
The insurance companies would see that 10 accidents is MORE than 1 accident
I suspect that the "Tesla Insurance Company" (part of Tesla motors) would be the initial insurer - with other companies slavering at the bit when they see the numbers
But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
That would be the car!
And the FSD software handling the car would make LESS "slips" than a human driver
I usually find Brett Stephens annoyingly forgiving of the excesses of the right, but today I have to agree with him wholeheartedly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/replacement-theory-us.html
...
What all of this says is that the phenomenon of replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice. What the far right calls “replacement” is better described as renewal.
The first immigration bill was passed by the first Congress and signed into law by the first president. The American heartland was almost certainly more linguistically diverse in the 1890s than it is today — and adult immigrants often never learned to speak more than rudimentary English. The people who today think of themselves as regular Americans, people with surnames like Stefanik, Gaetz or Anton, would, on account of their faith or ethnicity, have been seen by previous generations of nativists as uncouth and unassimilable, dirty and disloyal.
All this is of a piece with our traditional self-understanding as a country in which a sense of common destiny bound by ideals matters more than common origins bound by blood. It’s also necessary to any form of conservatism that wants to draw a line against blood-and-soil nationalism or white-identity politics. You cannot defend the ideal of “E pluribus unum” by deleting pluribus. To subscribe to “replacement theory” — the sinister, conspiratorial kind now taking hold of parts of the right — is to weaponize America against itself.
...
duncan cairncross:
Accountability - yep go for that
The cost of an accident is currently covered by the insurance company
With a self driving car the same would apply - it would be covered by the insurance
If you are prone to accidents, your insurance company jacks up your rates to cover their costs. That gives some financial incentive to the human driver to avoid collisions. There are also social and legal costs to the driver for collisions more egregious than your average fender-bender. Would self-driving cars be similarly "incentivized"?
"If you make a slip in handling us you die!"
That would be the car!
It works both ways. But a human driving a car is not trusting the car to make the decisions. A human sitting in a self-driving car is.
And the FSD software handling the car would make LESS "slips" than a human driver
My concern isn't so much the number of slips as the possible severity of them. A human driver is incentivized by its own self-preservation to not do things like drive sideways off a bridge or straight on into a building. A human driver is incentivized by tort law and human compassion not to hit pedestrians or bicyclists. What "incentivizes" a self-driving car to do the right thing? The software might note that a human driver takes the same action to avoid a puddle in the street, a squirrel, or a kid chasing a ball. How does it know that one is simply a precaution, one is an act of sensitivity, and one is essentially crucial. If it has to choose between the obstacle and (say) hitting a lamppost, will it know in which situations the lamppost is the lesser damage?
If I sound as if I am absolutely against self-driving cars, no, I'm just demanding a higher standard of proof that turning decisions over to machines is a good thing--more than just an assertion that "they're more infallible than humans." And maybe more important, I want to know how questions of liability and judgements work when no human is in control.
Larry Hart:
Yes, people can misinterpret #ALMOND. But you could argue, "Black lives matter because if they don't then yours doesn't either." Good old enlightened self-interest! It's enlightened so it deserves to exist; but it's also self-interested so it's able to exist.
ALMOND's logical negation is "Some but not all lives matter". SBNALM. That is the operating system of present-day policing. Some would regard SBNALM as cynical, but I say it's only superficially so. Its worldliness is actually naive; but ALMOND is the true down-home nitty-gritty awful truth.
About self-driving cars: there's an institutional problem. Human-driven cars have pockets only as deep as that human's; but a self-driving car has pockets as deep as a corporation's. If a human plows into a crowd, then there's a limit to what the law can do in response; but if a self-driving car plows into a crowd, then every lawyer in the country will smell money. With self-driving cars, every mass-casualty event will trigger a mass-litigation event.
So any company making self-driving cars is gambling its very existence; a gamble that, statistically, is bound to go bust sooner or later. Would the stockholders approve? The CEO might brag that his cars will _never_ go that wrong; but that is requiring not just superiority, but perfection.
Paradoctor:
So any company making self-driving cars is gambling its very existence; a gamble that, statistically, is bound to go bust sooner or later.
Weren't some cities in the southwest so champing at the bit to have self-driving cars that they were essentially indemnifying them against lawsuits? That's the problem I have with trusting them--that any accidents will be treated as acts of God that are no one's fault--the way hurricanes and mass shootings are today.
Hurricanes, mass shootings, and robot crashes are acts of God? Yeesh. I am constantly amazed by how low an opinion that the religious have of God. Also: are guns God? Are robots?
Does anyone here remember the movie version of I, Robot? Will Smith's character formed his distrust of robots around an incident where an AI had to decide whether to try saving him or a young girl from a car crash, and let the cold numbers decide. Humans will reserve the right to triage a situation until they can trust an AI to do it 'right'.
I continue to be a bit surprised at how pathetic robot skiers are. They can barely manage slopes that a three year old can rip after a few hours of instruction. It looks like icy moguls, breakable crust, suncups, etc are a lomg way off.
Paradoctor:
Also: are guns God?
No one actually calls mass shootings Acts of God except me when I'm being cynical. But they're treated as if they are just inevitable forces of nature about which we can't do anything but pray, much like hurricanes or earthquakes. So I figure we might as well give them names like we do with hurricanes.
Re the accident triage problem
Car accidents happen so fast that a human never has to make that sort of decision
Your self driving car is different
You see something jump out in front of you and you swerve - but you don't have TIME to check the lane you are swerving into
A self driving car with its 360 degree vision KNOWS what is next to it and 99.9% of the time will swerve to avoid a collision
With the Tesla "autopilot" (IMHO should be called Copilot) we are already seeing collisions avoided because the car can react so fast and it can do things no driver can - like applying full power to the RHS wheels and full brakes to the LHS wheels
Any incident when a person could possibly make a triage decision will simply be a collision avoided
The self-driving AI debate is similar to the DALL-E 2 uproar. People are howling "It's not art. IT'S NOT ART!!!". But they're having a deucedly hard time explaining exactly why. FWIW, I agree with them, it's not art. But 90% of the garbage hanging on walls and packaged as NFTs isn't either. The only ones who've chewed me out more than anti citizen science types are art valuation types.
Sure it's clever, but is it art? - Rudyard Kipling
Alfred: I hear your argument about Russia's belligerent paranoia a lot; they have no defensible borders, they have been invaded many times, so of course they're very security conscious.
I don't find that argument convincing. Western European countries have been involved in wars for more of their history than Russia yet that doesn't seem to have produced a pathological paranoia. I think there's a better explanation.
It appears to me that Russia is suffering from an unfortunate founders effect. The state got its start as a vassal for the Mongols, attacking neighboring peoples (mostly Slavs) on behalf of their masters. When Russia was finally able to throw off the Mongol Yoke they basically stepped into that role. Their first Czar Ivan the Terrible (or Ivan Grozny as he's known in Russia: "Ivan the Great") was a psychopathic murderer who set the pattern for all his successors.
Not every Czar was a psychopathic murderer of course, and some of them really tried to bring Russia out of their medieval mindset. Yet somehow they keep going back to that basic template.
When Russia was able expand over the Urals all the way to the Pacific it vindicated their inner Mongol. Russia became the greatest empire on earth, and that too left a deep imprint on the national mythos. The idea that Ukraine would want to leave Russky Mir is a mortal insult to be avenged by blood. They really do seem to take it personally.
Duncan: agree completely about self-driving cars. Insurance companies have already calculated what the effect of lower accident rates will be on their business model. Eventually it'll mean lower premiums, but during the transition period it'll mean more profit.
In the meantime settlements should be handled the same way as they are now. That's what insurance companies are for. Unless an auto maker can be shown to be criminally negligent they aren't liable for accidents. The fact that accident rates will go down means it's in the interest of society to prevent predatory lawsuits trying to capitalize on the inevitable accidents.
Key word here is accidents. We call it that because it's understood that they will happen. We drive all these cars, sometimes they run into things or people. That's the price we pay for having these personal vehicles. We're willing to accept the cost because we like driving around. AI drivers will just decrease that cost by decreasing the number of accidents.
Why is a crash involving an AI so much worse than ten crashes involving human drivers? Doesn't add up.
Duncan,
You are preaching to the choir if you are trying to convince me to adopt the driving software once it is better than I am. I wouldn't wait for a 10x advantage. I driven long enough to know some of the ways in which my decision making truly sucks. If the AI fails to get bored, people around me are more likely to survive unharmed when I want to get from point A to point B.
The problem isn't with the software, even though there are problems with software. The problem is that 'accidents' have a new 'cause' that can be sued. We faced the same situation with airplanes and would up solving it by indemnifying plane manufacturers and flyers IF they follow the certification rules. It works pretty well as a system. Those mass-payout lawsuits people think can happen when a full plane falls out of the sky are actually very tough to bring successfully. IF the people making them and flying them get CERTIFIED, they have legal protection in court in the form of a payout cap.
The problem with doing that for other industries, though, is we do not yet know what safe design should be. The market will figure it out real, real quick in the form of manufacturers being sued into oblivion when they do something stupid. Cases are made before less than competent juries, so case law winds up dictating early market rules. From THOSE, we can begin to figure out what regulations make sense and whether indemnification should be considered.
I'm not worried about the driving software. I happen to think Tesla is using a good approach. My concern is Musk-haters will conflate their anger for the man with their supposed engineering experience and try to regulate a fledgling industry long before we know what makes good engineering sense.
For everyone else,
If fewer people die because cars drive themselves, I sincerely hope you'll take that into account when you sit on one of these juries some day.
It's not just death that happens in accidents. Look at the odds of a kid getting through to old age WITHOUT being involved (ever!) in a car accident. Try to look that up. Please. NOW consider what injuries people carry with them through life because of stupid human decisions that we couldn't do anything about back in the day. *
We had to accept the risks… until we didn't. And we DIDN'T sometimes. Seat belts used to be a joke. Air bags were a thing of the future. Crumple zones interfered with the sleek design needed to sell cars in the first place. Pfft. Software doing the driving for you will eventually be one of these things our UNINJURED kids will think so damn obvious they'll wonder what the fuss was about.
* My second girlfriend was t-boned in an intersection before I met her. She was slammed against the driver's door and the lower portion of her left rotator cuff was destroyed. It wasn't a big accident and she went on with her life.
If you walk up to her and pat her on the shoulder when she's not expecting it, though, you can dislocate her shoulder. Doesn't take more than a love tap sometimes even after PT. Imagine my alarm when I discovered that by accident. Imagine the degradation of her enjoyment of life over the years. THAT'S what we can prevent in statistically significant ways. THAT'S worth doing.
Elon Musk is on the wrong side of democracy...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-calls-democrats-party-of-division-and-hate-2022-5
Elon Musk posted a tweet on Wednesday vowing to vote Republican while hitting out at the Democratic Party.
"In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party," Musk wrote.
He then bashed the Democratic Party, writing: "But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican."
"Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold," Musk wrote, adding a popcorn emoji to his tweet.
duncan cairncross:
With the Tesla "autopilot" (IMHO should be called Copilot) we are already seeing collisions avoided because the car can react so fast and it can do things no driver can - like applying full power to the RHS wheels and full brakes to the LHS wheels
That sort of thing is actually what made me think of the Kipling poem about machines. It's great when it all works together, but a tiny failure somewhere in the complex system might lead to a catastrophe. I'd be looking to be convinced as to multiple redundant safety features.
Alfred Differ:
So... I think the better argument is the insanity one. When has belligerence ever worked for them [Russia]? When has it ever brought them peace? Never. Not even once.
When has belligerence against Russia ever worked for anyone? The only reason we'd have for attacking Russia would be to stop them from threatening us.
Not sure why, but a post of mine that I saw earlier has disappeared.
I'll try to make the point again.
gerold:
Why is a crash involving an AI so much worse than ten crashes involving human drivers? Doesn't add up
It has to do with the suspicion--possibly irrational--that a mistake made by the AI could be a failure to characterize a particular kind of situation that hasn't been accounted for, and that that particular sort of accident might happen many more times in similar situations. Whereas a mistake made by a particular driver is a one-off, a mistake made by AI might be endemic.
I am (was?) an Elon fan, but these latest comments by him have me pissed. Saying the Democrats are the party of division and hate? REALLY?
Not to mention that Tesla would be nothing without the huge clean energy subsidies passed by DEMOCRATS.
I am very interested in a transition mode for self-drivinf cars. A mode where it engages:
1. total control when the car is in REVERSE!! I want that now. Right now.
2. Automatic colission braking or lane-change prevention when obstacles are detected.
3. Detection of driver inattention or drowsiness.
Give us those and trust will augment in a major increment.
Elon is reacting to attacks the way many people with Aspergers do. Liberals (on the left) drive away allies any chance they get.
Also, Elon is very smart. This could be a head fake.
Elon donated to the Trump recount slush fund both before and *after* the 1/6 coup attempt. His "democrats were mean to me" defense is nothing but an attempt to preemptively taint a potential jury pool for his ham-fisted attempts at market manipulation. He's using the Trump defense - claiming he cannot get a fair trial or a fair shot at buying Twitter because of leftist politics.
It's a lie.
Elon is very rich. I have yet to see data supporting the idea that he is very smart.
And please don't try to tell me he's reacting "like someone with Asperger's". I'm "someone with Asperger's". He's reacting like someone who's been living with privilege his entire life and has finally encountered a situation where someone has told him "no".
Dr Brin:
Elon is reacting to attacks the way many people with Aspergers do. Liberals (on the left) drive away allies any chance they get.
I've heard of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," but Elon's tweet is akin to a Jewish person saying he'd vote for Hitler because a Pole was once mean to him. I get that he must be on Twitter quite a bit, but immature tweets from lefties on Twitter are by no means emblematic of The Democratic Party. And to use that as an excuse to back Republicans of all people on the grounds that Democrats are the party of hatred and division?
Seriously?
I get that he's invented all kinds of cool stuff, but how smart can he really be after all? Might as well walk into a concentration camp and ask for a room wi' a view.*
* I'll be really impressed if anyone can identify the paraphrase.
matthew:
He's using the Trump defense - claiming he cannot get a fair trial or a fair shot at buying Twitter because of leftist politics.
The Trump defense is that most people are biased against him because he's insulted them all so badly, so the only fair jury would consist of full-blown MAGAts.
Stephanie Miller's radio show speculated that Elon Musk is trying to get out of buying Twitter--a deal he committed to at a price now far above its current valuation.
Jon S:
He's reacting like someone who's been living with privilege his entire life and has finally encountered a situation where someone has told him "no".
Or as Paul Krugman once said of Wall St's antipathy for President Obama (under whom they did very, very well), he despises liberals because a liberal looked at him funny. Not even a Democrat, mind you, but someone from that side of the aisle.
Back to cars...
Dr Brin:
I am very interested in a transition mode for self-drivin[g] cars...
I'm admittedly a bit confused over exactly what we're currently talking about. Self-driving cars in which a human is expected to take over when the AI says so? Or self-driving cars which don't even have human controls built in because the human isn't supposed to interfere?
In the latter case, which I used to hear advanced all the time, the human "driver" could never be held responsible for a collision, as he is essentially a passenger in taxi. Not a driver at all.
In the former case, how exactly does the liability work? I've heard of some accidents where it was said afterwards that the human was supposed to be alert and take the wheel when necessary. That somewhat defeats the purpose. After all, a taxi passenger isn't expected to be alert for the need to lean into the driver's seat and take the wheel.
But even worse--Is it fair to the human when the AI gets itself into a situation it can't even figure out how to navigate and then goes, "Ok, it's up to you to get us out of this"? Seems to me that the fault for anything that happens next is with the machine, and that if the human is able to avoid harm, that counts more like a heroic intervention.
* * *
Separately, part of human driving involves interacting with other drivers. Waving, "No, you go first." That sort of thing. Or realizing that, despite the light having almost turned red, that oncoming car is going to keep going, so you better not start your left turn. Is there an analogous form of communication between self-driving cars? Between a self-driving car and a human driver? I don't know the answer, which is why I'm asking the question.
Ah, more context for Musk saying that political attacks on him will increase. He tweeted that line about 2 hours after he was contacted by the publisher of this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5
It also helps to know that California just dissolved NDAs over sexual harassment. The Business Insider article alleges that there was an NDA in place.
If the self-driving car has a mind of its own, then it's like a horse. In a horse accident, how much responsibility is legally assigned to the horse? Or the horse breeder?
Letting the car drive is how Don Quixote rode Rosinante. He let the horse make the decisions; that was his idea of adventure.
@matthew,
Oh, now it makes sense. The Democrats are indeed the party of hatred and divisiveness--toward sexual predators.
Paradoctor:
If the self-driving car has a mind of its own, then it's like a horse.
I see a slippery slope here. How long before the car with a mind of its own acquires the legal right to do what it wants to rather than what an enslaver demands?
Larry Hart wrote:
Separately, part of human driving involves interacting with other drivers. Waving, "No, you go first." That sort of thing. Or realizing that, despite the light having almost turned red, that oncoming car is going to keep going, so you better not start your left turn. Is there an analogous form of communication between self-driving cars? Between a self-driving car and a human driver? I don't know the answer, which is why I'm asking the question.
I've always assumed that longer term as self-driving technology evolves, it's logical that there would be standards for interaction between vehicles, although whether that information could be treated as trustworthy and whether it'd end up being a mess of competing standards is a major concern. In theory there also could be ways to display information to other cars with human drivers, but it's unlikely something like that would work in both directions, as people have varying ways to communicate information that would be difficult for AI to interpret reliably.
Also don't forget it's not just interaction with other cars where this happens, but with bicycles, pedestrians, etc. One of the most common forms of interacting between pedestrians and car drivers is the "you go first". Whenever I ride my bike, I go out of my way to watch for whether a driver is actually able to see me when I'm riding in an area where I might need to cross a driver's path.
One other consideration of the evolution of self-driving and how it might affect accident rates is whether the types of accidents would change. If we end up with technology that causes less accidents, but a far greater proportion of accidents involving pedestrians instead of cars for example, how does that impact our calculus on when the technology is good enough for general use? I'm not really sure where the most likely failure modes are going to be as we get further along on this technology, but I'm fairly sure the proportions of accidents we see will shift, and it could end up that the balance works out on paper but in a way that isn't necessarily equitable. This might be a temporary issue on the path to a much lower rate of injuries/deaths in general, but the transitional period could be very problematic.
Historically I've always felt that once self-driving got to the point that the safety rate was slightly above human driver rates, that it would be sufficient, but that the general public and legal entities wouldn't accept it until it could prove to be far more safe. But over time I've been realizing that it's not just a matter of the general safety rate but also the distribution of what kinds of issues come up.
I'm also getting more and more concerned about whether companies will properly be held to account for failures to the level that they make the right level of effort to improve. Car companies have historically shown they are willing to take safety risks if they think the costs of fixing a problem are lower than the costs imposed by lawsuits/public opinion when they don't fix them. It is difficult to properly price these things in a way that overrides corporate greed while at the same time encouraging technology innovation.
Personally I hate driving and I'm greatly looking forward to the days when self driving technology is really ready for primetime. I can't ever drive a car without being focused on just how dangerous they are, and how easy it is to accidentally hurt/kill someone with just the wrong second of inattention, and how most people treat them like toys. But I won't lie to myself about the complexities of what they're dealing with to make the tech work well enough to take over general use.
With regards to Musk- when he shows us who he is, I'm inclined to believe him.
Looking at the world today it's easy to feel despair and helplessness. I found something that helps me get over those kinds of feelings and makes me realize that our species is always capable of creating great beauty.
After "Classical Gas" had reached the Top 10, Mason Williams asked an experimental filmmaker named Dan McLaughlin to adjust a student video montage that he had created of classical art works and edit it in time to "Classical Gas", using the visual effect now known as kinestasis. The work, "3000 Years of Art", premiered in 1968. Made before music videos were even a thing, this is still one of the greatest pieces of video art ever done. Some of you may be old enough to remember when this was first broadcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viyufRQKlto
Jon S said
Elon is very rich. I have yet to see data supporting the idea that he is very smart.
He is very rich because he is very smart !!
Musk has created THREE multibillion dollar companies - the other "smart guys" have created one each
I can sympathise with Elon's view of the Democrats - they have been attacking him right from the start - inviting GM and others to the White House because of EVs - but not inviting Tesla!
The Democrat establishment has been very hostile to all of his operations - DESPITE the fact that they achieved so much
The GOP is full of nasty nasty people - but they have not been nasty to Musk
From Musk's personal experience the Dems have been - "the party of division and hate"
Re communication and self driving cars
I can see a future when most cars are self driving where the presence of a human driven car results in an area of massively reduced speeds centered around that potentially erratic human driven car
Larry,
The only reason we'd have for attacking Russia would be to stop them from threatening us.
Perhaps as a nation, this is true. For you, I'm sure it is. For all of us, it most certainly isn't. We used to object to communists exporting their revolution. Hypocritically. We've been exporting revolution for as long as we've been a nation. Look at how we acquired Texas and Hawaii for just two examples. Need a third? California.
For everyone else,
I'll take that step our host is too polite to make. Y'all are being stupid in attacking Musk. You don't have to like him to make use of him as an ally.
These attacks remind me of my Libertarian friends who would rather be right and suffer the governance of people who strongly disagree with them... than win and suffer the governance of those who only partially disagree with them.
Yah. Y'all* are being THAT stupid.
You die on that hill and worse people take our government.
*Okay. Not all of you.
And I still like you all.
We've been exporting revolution for as long as we've been a nation. Look at how we acquired Texas and Hawaii for just two examples. Need a third? California
You don't have to remind me of our history. But my point was specific to Russia. Your recognition of how difficult that land is to hold works both ways--why would it be worth our bother? Especially after the humiliating end to 20 years of trying to export revolution to another such land in the same general vicinity.
I'll take that step our host is too polite to make. Y'all are being stupid in attacking Musk. You don't have to like him to make use of him as an ally.
"Attacks" is a bit strong, considering he's not likely to see or feel effects from what I'm saying over here. "Venting" is closer to home.
An ally in what way? He says he's going to support Republicans because he can't abide hatred and division. How do we work with that?
These attacks remind me of my Libertarian friends who would rather be right and suffer the governance of people who strongly disagree with them... than win and suffer the governance of those who only partially disagree with them.
Isn't that what Musk himself is doing? Willing to suffer the governance of authoritarians because a liberal looked at him funny?
My beef with Musk--and my surprise that someone so demonstrably smart can be so blind in this area--is not that he disagrees with me politically. It's that his stated reason for supporting Republicans is diametrically opposite to the reality of what Republicans are. I'm getting the same vibe I used to get from Dave Sim--that he must be testing us to see if we'll just nod politely at whatever he says, or if we'll have the integrity to point out the absurdity.
duncan cairncross:
I can see a future when most cars are self driving where the presence of a human driven car results in an area of massively reduced speeds centered around that potentially erratic human driven car
There are still laws on the books which require someone to walk ahead of an automobile ringing a bell in order to warn off the horses. Maybe those will be enforced again?
What Musk might find attractive about Republicans is antipathy towards organized labor. What's left of the unions is politically valuable enough for Democrats to turn a cold shoulder towards Tesla.
Duncan, Musk is rich because he was born rich. It's the classic case of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
He didn't "create" companies - he bought them. The one case in which he did found a company, he sold because it was failing - its purchasers turned it into the PayPal we all know and tolerate today. His sole success has been as a pitchman, and he's losing even that lately (he couldn't even trade a horse for a handjob, apparently).
I don't know why you're so all-in for someone who's clearly a flagrant grifter, and who is losing the one thing that used to make him a successful grifter.
Jon S:
he couldn't even trade a horse for a handjob,
Didn't Hamlet say, "But, I know a horse from a handjob"? Or something like that anyway? :)
Interesting take on competing individualist and collectivist moral paradigms. The whole article is worth reading, but this is the money shot:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/democrats-morality-wars.html
This is the ultimate crisis on the right. Many conservatives say there is an objective moral order that demands obedience, but they’ve been formed by America’s prevailing autonomy culture, just like everybody else. In practice, they don’t actually want to surrender obediently to a force outside themselves; they want to make up their own minds. The autonomous self has triumphed across the political spectrum, on the left where it makes sense, and also on the right, where it doesn’t.
It's not just me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/opinion/republicans-trump-elections.html
That’s because Republican election denialism is simply the strongest form of a belief that has defined the Republican Party since at least the Gingrich-era in the 1990s. For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect, their policies un-American, even when they have the support of most people in the country.
Today's a day for "It's not just me."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/putin-russia-sanctions-ukraine.html
One final point: The effect of sanctions on Russia offers a graphic, if grisly, demonstration of a point economists often try to make, but rarely manage to get across: Imports, not exports, are the point of international trade.
That is, the benefits of trade shouldn’t be measured by the jobs and incomes created in export industries; those workers could, after all, be doing something else. The gains from trade come, instead, from the useful goods and services other countries provide to your citizens. And running a trade surplus isn’t a “win”; if anything, it means that you’re giving the world more than you get, receiving nothing but i.o.u.s in return.
LH that NYT paragraph is utter bull. Look at China today. They built all tht by selling us crap no one really needed.
Dr Brin:
Look at China today.
I think Krugman's point is that you have to do something with the money. Simply collecting piles of money from exports isn't enough on its own.
"It had always been the conventional point of view, especially in the economic beliefs of the Conservative Party, that a prosperous nation required a favorable trade balance or gold balance as it was formerly called. In simple language that means that a country is best off when it exports more than it imports. Phrased in that way it sounds silly, for it is surely evident that a country that ships out more than it takes in gets poorer every year in terms of real wealth. Nevertheless there was an element of truth in it, a very practical truth at that time. The economic life was organized in such a comical fashion that each year the country produced goods of greater value than the people of the country were able to buy back and use up. This was known as over-production and many were the esoteric nonsensical things said about it. But the situation was that simple. The system of necessity produced more than it consumed. Of necessity. You can go into the mathematics of it later. Being an engineer you are bound to see the truth of it, and will probably be vastly amused by it."
-Heinlein, in For Us, The Living
On trade balance, we can quibble over the specifics of various situations. But the facts of Russia's present situation are as Krugman states them:
* Russia has been exporting to us (and Europe), not nick-nacks, but something we really do need (energy).
* Currently, they are having a hard time importing, which increases their trade surplus.
* This situation is not serving them well.
Therefore, it is not a universal truism that a trade surplus is a good thing. The opposite is not a universal truth either, but that was neither Krugman's point nor my own.
A trade surplus is analogous to a paying job. You do well when you earn more than you spend on the cost of living. But eventually, you should have some practical use for the surplus that you accumulate. Dying with a big bank account is not a "win".
In response to Elon Musk's tweet, Jon Favreau, a former Obama speech writer, said:
"Hey man, if you want to support a bunch of electric vehicle-hating climate deniers, that’s on you.
Not sure it helps the cause that you and your team have dedicated much of your lives to, but I guess you’ll get some attention on Twitter, so there’s that!"
https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/1527002709743763457?s=20&t=KO74B7v1hIsJifQvCmSLzQ
I'm always trying to promote true computational thinking (a fancy term for WJCC), more in gov't than in schools, but it's becoming quite the thing these days, everywhere from the Baltics to Mongolia.
https://time.com/6174935/bolor-erdene-battsengel/
Jon S - said
Musk is rich because he was born rich. It's the classic case of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
He didn't "create" companies - he bought them
Which is the biggest bollocks I have heard since the last GOP announcement
Musk started with a LOAN - living in his office
His first company was a games company and made a few Million
Then Paypal - until he fell out with the money people
Then Tesla - the founders were there but they had nothing before Musk bankrolled the company and led to success
Then SpaceX
Those are the BIG ones
China sure did sell us a lot of stuff, but I think that distracts from what really happened over there.
Most importantly, they stopped doing some of the really stupid things Mao had them doing and began the process of reverting to form.
China is traditional empire and a geopolitical island. They are their own worst enemy with respect to their living standards.
What the US really did was help make the process of recovery quick by buying all that crap. It's the same trick we did for all the willing nations on that end of the world.
Play in our markets… you'll wind up lifting yourself.
Want to do it all by yourself? Perhaps you should read about some of the few things on which all economists agree. Let us know when you change your mind.
Larry,
An ally in what way?
I'm honestly curious if he's found a Republican he finds palatable. We can ask, ya know. He actually does respond to people on Twitter.
As for the rest of how he helps*, remember that some of his employees are Democrats. Some of them go on to create other companies and related jobs. You'd have to watch the people in his orbit to see all that, though. There is a lot more going on around him that what people see in his tweets.
Isn't that what Musk himself is doing?
Maybe… so I'd appreciate it if the 'Left' quit pissing him off for no good reason other than signaling the correctness of their moral stand. His people are opening the next frontier for us. Please let them.
his stated reason for supporting Republicans is diametrically opposite to the reality of what Republicans are
You DO see the flaw in that thinking… don't you?
People can reasonably disagree about what Republicans are.
My PERSONAL opinion is your opinion about them is reasonably good, but I don't agree with the position that there are no good Republicans.
For now, I'd rather they didn't govern and were given time for this fever to burn out. Lots of time. That means Progressives who do NOT have a sufficiently large voter bloc to govern MUST make use of willing allies no matter the stench.
*Don't worry folks. Let's just not ask him to run for office, hmm?
Duncan, one last point, then I'll leave you alone on this.
Musk started as the scion of a wealthy family. He no more depended on a loan for starting collateral than did, say, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.
I have no idea what games company you're talking about, which, given that I'm a pretty avid gamer, may tell you something about his "success" there.
PayPal, as I said, was a losing proposition when he sold it. That's why he sold it. It took people who knew what quality control was to make it profitable.
Tesla was doing well enough, they just needed venture capital. He contributed nothing to the company but money and bluster - and, eventually, a corporate culture that was toxic in both the metaphorical and literal senses (there's a reason Tesla Corp is rated as worse for then environment than freaking ExxonMobil by an MIT group, and why the NLRB is after them for various violations of labor law including union-busting).
And are you under the impression he does any of the design work for SpaceX? All he does is make grandiose promises that can't be fulfilled, much as he does with Tesla.
And that's as far as I'm going with this. I spend too much time arguing with Elon's fanbase as it is. All I can say is, he's not taking you to prom no matter how hard you stan.
Alfred Differ:
We can ask, ya know. He actually does respond to people on Twitter.
I'm not on Twitter.
As for the rest of how he helps*, remember that some of his employees are Democrats. Some of them go on to create other companies and related jobs.
>
How is that affected by anything any of us say here? Or even on Twitter?
"Isn't that what Musk himself is doing?"
Maybe… so I'd appreciate it if the 'Left' quit pissing him off for no good reason other than signaling the correctness of their moral stand. His people are opening the next frontier for us. Please let them.
I'm confused about what you lambasted us about earlier. Again, nothing we say here affects what his company is doing. You may be talking about something I'm unaware of, but from what I've seen, "the left" responds to his support for authoritarians and bullies. You're saying just let it go because he's doing good work? What good will that do anyone if he helps Republicans undermine democracy and our rights?
"his stated reason for supporting Republicans is diametrically opposite to the reality of what Republicans are"
You DO see the flaw in that thinking… don't you?
People can reasonably disagree about what Republicans are.
Individual Republicans maybe, but the party has told us what it is. They're the party of white grievance and white Christian nationalism. They're the party of cheating, threats, and violence as a means to holding onto power.
My PERSONAL opinion is your opinion about them is reasonably good, but I don't agree with the position that there are no good Republicans.
"There Are No Good Republicans" is hyperbole, but the germ of truth is that any Republican in the House or Senate is a vote for Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell respectively controlling the agenda. In that sense, even good Republicans are bad (in the same way that "Even bad sex is good"). Susan Collins, for example, may not be a white Christian nationalist, but she helped give us a supreme court majority to the right of Roberts.
For now, I'd rather they didn't govern and were given time for this fever to burn out. Lots of time. That means Progressives who do NOT have a sufficiently large voter bloc to govern MUST make use of willing allies no matter the stench.
So again, how is a wealthy and influential individual who directly opposes that goal an ally?
When I first began corresponding with Dave Sim, he was making some seemingly-irrational arguments. Like a 20-page essay in the form of anecdotes and stories whose thesis was that women were irrational because they only think in anecdotes and stories. My unease went beyond disagreement with the gist of his arguments. It felt like he was insulting the intelligence of his fans, making fools of anyone who actually took his side. I often wondered if it was a test--if he was trying to separate the reflexive fanboys from any claims to critical thinking. For a time, I actually believed that calling him out on his inconsistencies was the answer he would respect.
In hindsight, no, that's not what he was up to. He was convinced that he was right and that anyone who argued differently was possessed by a demon trying to undermine his faith in God. I'm not kidding.
But when Elon Musk says something so irrational as that an aversion to divisiveness and hate is a reason to support the party who runs on divisiveness and hate--I smell the same rat. Maybe it's a test. And even if it's not, my sense of integrity still means something.
Wow, this has got to gall old Vlad...
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1099876370/ukraine-russia-poland-border-return
Even Bill Maher said tonight of Elon Musk,
"One side doesn't believe in the emergency of climate change or democracy. You're not going to get me onto that side.
I mean Elon Musk, this week...I'm a fan in many ways, but when he said, 'Now, I'm going to vote Republican'? I've got to part company there.
[shows Musk's tweet]
I can't go there with him. Because of what I just said. Because of where the big issues are."
I can appreciate what Musk has accomplished, but his recent turn to the dark side is just bizarre. It's as weird as his petulant "pedo guy" comment but the stakes now are much higher.
Vote Republican? Why not just encourage people to drink bleach - it's almost like a cleansing.
His other idiotic comment recently is that the human population is too low. WTF? Stand on Zanzibar anyone? There seem to be other people arguing publicly against falling population levels and I find it infuriating. We're drowning in the waste products of industrial civilization and pushing every other lifeform to the brink of extinction and we don't even have 8 billion yet. This moron is saying the earth could support twice that number and there just isn't room for that sort of dimwit myopia.
Jon S
You are just so far off the truth - I have not noticed that before - I will keep that in mind when reading any future posts from you
@gerold
Paraguayan War:
Started by the spanish ascendency dictator Solano Lopez of Paraguay, a devoted fan of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Solano ordered his troops to invade much bigger Brasil in a bid to get access to the sea (vide Questão do Prata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platine_Wars).
Paraguay mobilized an army of 300 000 troops. It took the combined efforts of Argentina Brasil e Uruguay to stop Paraguay.
The Paraguayan elite before the war disdained the Guarani: "Prior to the war, indigenous people occupied very little space in the minds of the Paraguayan elite. Paraguayan president Carlos Antonio Lopez even modified the country's constitution in 1844 to remove any mention of Paraguay's Hispano-Guarani character"
ALso: "When the thirty-seven-year-old Solano López succeeded to the presidency in 1862, he inherited his father’s ambitions for the country but little of his patience. The younger López had spent the previous decade as war minister, the man charged with modernizing the military. Thanks to his obsessive efforts, the Paraguayan armed forces could boast some strikingly modern features: a flotilla of steamers, several new artillery pieces, Congreve rockets, an ample supply and medical corps, and a world-class fortress at Humaitá, along the Paraguay River, that European observers likened to Sebastopol. Solano López also hired British engineers and specialists to train his troops, which now numbered in the tens of thousands.13
This militarization helped solidify the nationalism of the average Paraguay- ans, who now saw their earlier xenophobia receive official sanction.14 Patri- otic festivals, celebrations of the president’s birthday, and anti-Argentine and anti-Brazilian diatribes in the state newspapers (some of which were written in Guaraní) helped reinforce national pride even as they conveyed the dan- gerous idea that Paraguay had to defend itself or be overwhelmed: ¡Viva la república del Paraguay! ¡Independencia o muerte!" Kraay, Hendrik (2004). I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Sounds familiar?
It's almoast like the same alien mind as infected these men thru the ages. The same discourse, the same rhetoric... million of dead in their wake.
gerold:
There seem to be other people arguing publicly against falling population levels and I find it infuriating.
They mean the white population is falling.
Now that democratic fires have lit,
and sacred bangers have been bit,
Australia has a new government.
(... and not before time.!)
"My mother dreamt of a better life for me, and I hope my journey in life inspires Australians to reach for the stars"
- Anthony Albanese, PM elect
Alfred, you may want to rethink a statement here:
"Maybe… so I'd appreciate it if the 'Left' quit pissing him off for no good reason other than signaling the correctness of their moral stand."
Musk union-busting, business cheating, market manipulation, sexual abuse, and now open embrace of fascism is not the "left pissing him off." These are the actions of someone that abuses his power. These things make Musk *dangerous* in the same way that the Koch brothers are dangerous.
Are the "left" supposed to ignore abuse like this in the name of getting electric cars a couple of years earlier than otherwise? Getting reusable launch ten years ahead of schedule?
You are arguing that a Great Man is allowed to break rules that the rest of us must follow.
Luís Salgueiro the same syndrome happened many times, e.g. Croesus of Lydia whose flashy army convinced him he could conquer the vast Persian Empire... and Alexander who succeeded. It illustrates my point that pyramid-shaped societies lack mechanisms to question disastrous delusional errors of leaders.
Like Vlad P.
Dr Brin:
It illustrates my point that pyramid-shaped societies lack mechanisms to question disastrous delusional errors of leaders.
As Orwell told us, they eventually run into reality, usually on a battlefield.
onward
onward
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