Yesterday I gave a talk for the Tech and Internet Caucus of the California Democratic Party. I've done it before. A few years ago I was asked - as a futurist - to present some 'futuristic legislation.'
A result was the Fact Act... a proposed bill that'd promote ways - mostly competitive - to restore the status of verifiable facts in American civil and political discourse. Let there be no doubt. That is the core essence of today's Culture War. (I deem it to be phase 8 of the 250 year American Civil War.) Priority #1 of today's feudalist oligarchy is to discredit every fact-using profession...
...from science, medicine, law, journalism, teaching, civil service all the way to the intel/FBI/military officer corps, a quarter million dedicated women and men who won the Cold War and the War on Terror. Indeed, Foxites push hatred of the very notion that there are things called Facts.
Creating the Fact Act helped spur me - early in 2020 - to rush out a book filled with agile tactics that might help our paladins in this struggle for America and the Enlightenment Experiment. Polemical Judo offered (still offers) many methods and/or persuasions that could help win hearts and minds and elections! Alas, not one of those techniques has been tried by any Democratic pol or pundit.
Except maybe Hakeem Jeffries. I have some hopes for him.
== On this occasion the topic was... ==
Artificial Intelligence, of course.
Oh, during my time with the CADEM Tech Caucus we touched upon the Climate Crisis, including how my colleague and pal Kim Stanley Robinson has achieved what I failed to do, in Earth - using science fiction to help awaken citizens and civilization to the need for crucial action. In fact, I hear the United Nations is considering establishing an agency to be named after the title of KSR's epic novel The Ministry for the Future!
But yeah. The whole AI thing took up most of our time.
There was some reference to my earlier book about freedom and privacy The Transparent Society... and especially the chapter predicting (in 1997) today's tsunami of faked images and videos. "The End of Photography as Proof of anything at all."
I explained that none of the genius-level folks in this field, most of whom are wringing their hands over 'generative large language models' - or golems - seem ever to refer to human history, the long span of four to six thousand years when our ancestors faced crises with remarkable similarities! Indeed, just consider the three most-widely offered 'formats' that almost all those bright folks assume artificial intelligences will take.
2. That AI will be amorphous blobs that spread everywhere, copying themselves diversely, ad infinitum... or...
3. That cyber entities will coalesce into a single monolithic, unitary titan, like Colossus or Skynet.
Have you noticed these are almost always the expectations assumed by commentators on AI, whether optimists or pessimists? Hardly anyone points out that these three formats - while seeming contradictory - could happen in parallel!
Moreover, each one represents a mode of mal-governance that was already seen across that long dark litany of horrors called 'history.'
- Number one is a lot like feudalism, with heavily armed castle lords battling each other for advantage, while crushing the peasants.
- Number two is chaos. Much like when our unprotected peasant ancestors were prey to every kind of predator.
- And number three? That's despotic rule in a sharp pyramid of power. Absolute monarchy. Tyranny. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
No wonder we're terrified. In our hearts and subconsciouses, we've seen it all before.
Fortunately, those three are not the only possible formats for synthetic beings! There are at least four more...
...one of which actually offers a way toward a possible 'soft landing' for us old organic types. Though for lack of time, I could only briefly allude to it in my talk to the California Democratic Party.
But I'll be back here with it. And frequent readers of Contrary Brin - or anything else I have written - will not (I promise) be at all surprised.
== Other pertinences ==
I also referred to a complaint of mine going back decades, a flaw that hurts our creativity and productivity and the potential of hundreds of thousands of kids(!) A flaw that would be so easy to solve! In fact it could take one meeting of a few folks from Google, Microsoft, Apple and a few others to fix it, almost overnight. What flaw?
It is the shameful lack of something that was widespread and easily available in the 1980s... a set of easy-entry programming languages, cross-available on ANY device, allowing teachers to do something they have not been able to do, for decades. Assign programming as homework.
See the original complaint and possible solution, here. Why Johnny Can’t Code... and its followup.
Did any other tech related political matters come up, at CA-DEM?
What about the current 'debt limit crisis'?
We should be wary of the 'deal' that appears to be taking shape. One sop being thrown to McCarthy appears to be a cut in the budget of the Internal Revenue Service.
How I object! After infrastructure and climate and reviving US manufacturing and helping poor kids, a top accomplishment of the Pelosi Congress was revitalizing the IRS, so it could modernize, provide better service and go after rich tax cheats. Oligarchs - furious they might be traced to their Cayman cheat holes - ordered the GOP to make slashing the IRS its top priority. So JoBee had better not have let them do more than a symbolic slash.
How much better it would be to take this directly to those voters who actually care about deficits and debt! And show them the plain fact that Democratic Administrations are always more fiscally prudent than Republican ones!
That's always, always and always! (Step up with wager stakes?) As usual, deficits as a fraction of GDP skyrocketed under Trump... and started plummeting under Biden - as happened under Clinton and Obama. See the figures!
How can our politicians be so incompetent as to not use something so blatant to eviscerate liars?
==Yeah, that's a lot ==
Okay that's most of what we talked about. Is that enough? Plenty?
Anyway I promised links to the assembled activists and here the promise is kept.
Next week I'll get back to more carefully curated postings. Meanwhile... persevere!
134 comments:
I'm aware of your advice to consider the second derivative. It looks like now you are illustrating the radius of curvature. Does that carry information I should be interested in?
The size of the radius and the magnitude of the second derivative correlate well, but the circle is easier for people to see and draw for themselves. Anyone with a freely available dataset can try various smoothing techniques and then draw 'inscribed' circles that approximate curve sections.
Showing it this way gets around some of the math fear people have. Visual geometry is tolerated a bit more. 8)
You can now get ZX Spectrum and C64 emulators for phones.
Many powerful and easy to use languages are readily accessible, but a *universal* one would be javascript, which every browser supports (complete with debuggers)*
Sites like w3schools have many interactive, worked examples demonstrating each facet of a language. There's no reason why a teacher couldn't put together a simple training program with this material (apart from the obvious one: time)
* a personal irony is that, while this Johnny *can* code in javascript quite well (sez he), I haven't used any of the multitude of add-on fad libraries like jquery and angular (I haven't needed them), so get passed over.
Greetings Brinians
Yes I've been away for a bit. Good stuff mostly. I have looked in on CB every few months. Alas, it has not really been worth investment of that precious commodity known as Time. While I of course heartily approve of your free expression I'll be frank and say the politics - or if you prefer dogma - that prevail here are to my view largely nonsense. Ah well, I spend less time in a bubble.
But I'm still interested in how technology has changed us and will continue to do so. Most of the AI output I've seen has been tripe, a clever scriptorium that puts down deep trawler nets to its assigned fishing grounds, hauls up what the internet gives forth and applies excellent grammar algorithms to it. What does it say about our society when one of the best ways to tell if a student is cheating by using an AI program is that it is so much better than what a public education would provide in this benighted age?
On a lighter note I've been watching Upload on Amazon Prime. An interesting take on the concept of uploading our consciousness at death. A very likeable cast. Enough political correctness to reflect our times but also a willingness to recognize nonsense. And the red haired AI entity in this "paradise".... Man, I'm only part way through season one but he/it is creepin' me out big time.
Cheers
Tacitus
I agree with Tacitus' assessment of the state of AI. Well-said.
The rest of his post is the reflexive ducking of fact that I see from conservatives that are appalled at what their ideology has wrought but cannot break with their tribe.
Aww, Matthew, I've missed you too.
I think the real issue is that conservatives and progressives don't speak the same language. Oh strictly speaking we do, but the vocabulary is different. Specifically I'd say my definitions of reflexive, appalled, ideology and fact are not quite the same as yours.
The hijacking of language is one of the most woeful developments of times modern.
We'll have to have that discussion one day.
But today is not that day.
Tacitus
I don't plead the case for WJCC anymore, I just post the link to that Salon essay. OGH made the case perfectly in 2006.
I've moved on to syntonic computational thinking, having given up on any bureaucrat ever grokking the difference between cloning coders and communing with machines.
Speaking of which, move over Tesla and SpaceX - Musk's Neuralink has (maybe) obtained FDA approval according to the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/25/elon-musk-neuralink-fda-approval/
Prime Video's UPLOAD gets one step closer. That whole show creeps me out, not just the red haired entity. It's like BNW meets THE OFFICE.
I am appalled at what has happened to conservatives in our nation.
Facts are ignored in service to an ideology that most closely resembles the worst authoritarian states in history. Facts do not support their ideology,so truth must be re-defined to match.
Liberals use language too.
Tacitus:
While I of course heartily approve of your free expression I'll be frank and say the politics - or if you prefer dogma - that prevail here are to my view largely nonsense.
It probably seems that way until it isn't. I wonder if you'd see things differently after your own state of Wisconsin votes Democrat for president in 2024, and then the gerrymandered legislature sends the state's electoral votes for the Republican anyway. (I am aware that my own state's legislature is also heavily gerrymandered, yet neither they nor our Democratic governor have claimed the "independent legislature" power to overturn election results. Both sides don't do it.)
The difference between our concerns is not mere ideology. I am truly frightened by the prospect of Republican fascism, complete with Brownshirt violence and authoritarian dictatorship. You appear to see that as a caricature that I picked up from AOC or Noam Chomsky, but no, it comes from my late father's descriptions of how Nazism rose to power in 1930s Germany. I spent close to 60 years of live believing that it can't happen here, only to see it happening here--a thing that once seen cannot be unseen.
I hope to God that you have the correct view and that I'm just being paranoid.
Ah well, I spend less time in a bubble.
This is the attitude I don't get--that we here are somehow all in lockstep agreement and simply recite the same talking points. The only bubble we seem to be in is the one that is outside the hermetically sealed FOX bubble.
* * *
On a lighter note:
I've been watching Upload on Amazon Prime. An interesting take on the concept of uploading our consciousness at death.
*Sigh* I just can't subscribe to more and more separate streaming services just because each one has one or a few good shows. At the moment, Netflix and Disney+ are my limit. I can't justify additional monthly outlays for Paramount+ just to watch Picard or Apple TV just to watch Foundation ("Now with more girls!")
I am lucky to live in a suburb with a very good library system that usually gets DVDs of miniseries a year or two after they have aired. That's how I saw Watchmen 2019 and finished off Criminal Minds after Netflix dropped it. I'll most likely eventually see the show you mentioned or the ones I mentioned above in that manner.
Am pleased Tacitus mentioned Uploading.
——
Always comes back to traditional values versus de novo. The Right says they’re upholding something universalist, when they are actually promoting that which is is idiosyncratic/self-referential: as our host says: 6000 yrs of recorded feudalist values.
The Right says that for social cohesion, ‘universalist’ values must be maintained, when the values actually revolve around their personal & dynastic ambitions.
Their religiosity illuminates such. They misinterpret scriptural “abundant life” to be the gravy train—which reduces their God to something akin to the CEO of Amway, dispensing goodies to the Faithful Flock. Cognitive dissonance writ large.
This is Memorial Day weekend, yet they are celebrating the Indy 500 more than Memorial Day.
Larry, you are not being paranoid because we already saw this happen when the Insurgency happened and a bunch of Brown Shirts invaded the Capital Building while egged on by Trump. We barely avoided a coup. That Tacitus refuses to see this and claims it is just our paranoia is his closing his eyes to the truth that his Party had been subverted and corrupted into a form that is antithetical to the views he espouses.
Once upon a time I believed as some of our... more conservative brethren did. As a transwoman, I've seen that they have come for me. They are coming for me before they have chosen to come for Tacitus, or for the Jews, or for the Blacks. The Republican Party wants to legislate me into illegality, with the Florida Republicans wanting to make me wearing a dress a sex crime punishable by death, and this is not conjecture, they want sex crimes against minors to be punishable by death and consider "drag" to be a sex crime against minors.
The Republican Party has become the party of Fascism, pure and simple. To support them or defend their actions is to support their crimes against humanity. There's no if. There's no but. These jackals are calling for blood. It started in Florida and we have seen it spread across the country with more and more Republicans using hatred of women like me as their clarion cry to unite people in hate against me and other transgender people... and these same laws are being used to punish women who don't dress and present themselves feminine enough as seen in this incident in December. These laws will be used against dykes and against bisexuals and against gay men, to criminalize the LGBTQ+ population.
And more and more, I see Republicans and conservatives embracing this view rather than denouncing it.
Acacia H.
Acacia H:
And more and more, I see Republicans and conservatives embracing this view rather than denouncing it.
The rank and file Republican voters who are not themselves evil but nevertheless prefer fascism to "woke" if those are the only choices seem to know in their bones that...
+ They are losing demographically as more and more voting citizens don't buy what they're selling
+ In order to hold onto their base, the party must inevitably alienate everyone else
+ Yet, terrible things will happen if their party doesn't hold onto the reins of power
Thus they are--perhaps reluctantly, even guiltily--ok with cheating, threats, and open violence if that's what it takes to preserve their way of life. That's the most charitable face I can put to it.
Straight from their
Grand Spokesdragon’s mouth:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6328239053112
Before anyone complains about the political turn of these comments, I'd like to place into evidence the fact that we've been very good about avoiding such a turn for the past two posts, until someone who typically doesn't like the political discussions just had to poke the bear.
Carry on.
Lorraine the radius of curvature is somewhat indicative, but far less so than the simple fact that hypocrites who screech about debt always make it worse and Democrats always act to stabilize debt to bearable levels.
Tony the “Johnny Can’t Code” problem will not be solved until Textbook publishers can be armtwisted into again helping teachers ASSIGN PROGRAMS AS HOMEWORK. That one thing amplifies the number of kids exposed to programming concepts from tens of thousands to tens of millions. And it won’t happen till ALL devices kids might have -even poor kids – will let them do standard programming homework,
Tacitus we watched 5 episodes of UPLOAD and liked it… and simply stopped because life is busy and we figure we got the gist. Maybe we’ll try again.
Acacia while I agree with you about trans being a major locus of confederate hysteria, I still urge doing a statistical compilation of which enemies are vilified on rightist media the most. It is always fact professions, from science and teaching to civil service and now the US military officer corps and FBI! Nerds. THink about who stands in the way of revived feudalism? The powerless? Or those with real power to maintain the enlightenment and flattened, Smithian competition fairness?
The thing Pelosi did that terrified the oligarchy was reviving the IRS. It has them is a screeching tizzy.
I highly recommend Tom Hanks's commencement address at Harvard. I know we'd be friends. Though Colbert is even more of a wise guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXWx5DHEW5c
Tacitus we are well aware how you rationalize that we here are fanatics. It is human nature to dismiss discomforting adversaries that way. And I freely admit that I believe my own political opponents combine traits of stunning idiocy, hypocrisy and often outright evil. I know many of them think that of me.
The difference is that I am willing to have any particular element of my edifice dissected and perhaps refuted. And I often change my mind about things that have been thus refuted… often by me! I deem CURIOSITY more important than dogma, And I am ‘contrary’ across all spectra, including the noxious activists of a loosely appelated ‘left’ who spread a cult of FRAGILITY among today’s young.
The test, I believe, comes from challenges to combat by fact. And given the SLIPPERINESS of today’s dogmatists, I have found the best approach is to demand WAGERS with major escrowed stakes.
I recall asking YOU to do that. You always refused or ignored such challenges. And yet, I’ll try again.
PLEASE PARAPHRASE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS MY ‘DOGMA’?
I’ll put it simply.
I assert that you cannot.
Oh, BTW:
“What does it say about our society when one of the best ways to tell if a student is cheating by using an AI program is that it is so much better than what a public education would provide in this benighted age?”
Nonsense. These ‘gpt’ systems distill from the vast mash of all writings by a billion people. Of course they will offer up articulately expressed stuff! A lemon can become lemonade if teachers learn the simple trick of inviting students to in-person EXPLAIN several paragraphs of the treatise they handed in! In order to feign, the kids will have to STUDY their own purported essay, and thus learn plenty.
Benighted Age?
Workers in my dad’s generation could explain the class-historical sequences of Karl Marx. Sequences proved true of the past, that terrified the present of the 1930s, and were proved FALSE by the reformers of the Greatest Generation.
Can you detail those sequences, old man?
If you could, you’d recognize how your own cult’s oligarchic masters are deliberately reviving Marx from the dustbin where the Roosevelt generation had cast him.
Benighted? Cast stones, my friend. Cast stones.
David:
the “Johnny Can’t Code” problem will not be solved until Textbook publishers can be armtwisted into again helping teachers ASSIGN PROGRAMS AS HOMEWORK. That one thing amplifies the number of kids exposed to programming concepts from tens of thousands to tens of millions.
No argument that providing resources to set a curriculum would help teachers.
And it won’t happen till ALL devices kids might have -even poor kids – will let them do standard programming homework,
I already described a readily accessible learning environment: javascript, a simple text editor, and a standard web browser that doesn't even need to be connected to the internet.
Alas, Tony, it ia So hard to get folks to picture the situation.
1. In the 1980s in some school systems standard tectbooks containedproblem sections with "WRITE A TEN LINE PROGRAM TO..."
This cannot happen now because it would be seen as elitist because - and this is an absolute fact - only a very few students have simple access to simple programming languages on a one-step, turnkey basis, certainly not Javascript*
2. Hence NO students are assigned simple programming to (say) illustrate a notion in statistics, or biology or physics.
3. Yes, tens of thousands have the fire to find ways and do it themselves. Tens of MILLIONS will only do it if they are assigned homework.
4. That won't happen till the textbooks and school districts do it and that won't happen till ALL students have access to a completely and absolutely one-touch-access common programming language... or three, I don't care. And that could happen within ONE WEEK of Apple, Google, MSoft etc holding ONE MEETING.
I honestly do not get why this is so hard to grasp. EVERYONE replies to WJCC by touting their favorite coding language. It's not about that, at all.
*QUITEBASIC actually is one-step and works.
Dr Brin:
Acacia while I agree with you about trans being a major locus of confederate hysteria, I still urge doing a statistical compilation of which enemies are vilified on rightist media the most. It is always fact professions,
...
THink about who stands in the way of revived feudalism? The powerless?
The puppet masters of authoritarian fascist movements may not actually fear and hate the powerless, but vilifying them and putting them in mortal danger is one of the traditional means to motivate the citizenry to support their coup. I feel Acacia's terror at being among the foremost target of the current version of the Two Minutes Hate.
I've been reliving my youth re-watching the original tv episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus on Netflix lately, and the trope of the guys in drag playing women (in nothing approaching a sexual manner--the sexy female parts were always played by real women) is so casual, it is disheartening to know that it would not be allowed in the current climate, notwithstanding whether it could be considered a capital crime.
The real targets may be scientists and competent managers, but that doesn't make the experience for the powerless scapegoats "tea with the freakin' queen." *
* quoting Hill St Blues's Lt. Buntz
David,
I think I just might have to side with Tony regarding javascript.
I CAN write javascript, put it on my machine, point my browser at a page I write that calls the javascript I wrote, and get results in the browser.
The interpreter IS the browser. No language compiler has to be present on the asset because javascript is interpreted. (BASIC was usually interpreted too.)
What's missing are the homework assignments in the text books.
———
Don't get hung up on Basic or any compiled language. I'm certainly not.
You want algorithmic thinking? It's there for the taking in javascript… your one-touch-access language because browsers are the interpreters.
Again... what's missing is the homework.
Well, David does have a point with QuiteBasic being 'one-step'*. Running a js script from scratch involves a couple of interim steps: writing the HTML header/body structure**, saving it to a file, loading it on the browser, and setting up an I/O feedback loop (none of which is hard, and would be an education in itself).
Anyway, I think we can conclude a universal programming environment is available. So, as Alfred says, what's missing are the exercise books.
* ie there and ready to run a homework program at the click of a link. We won't ask what layers the 'Basic' is sitting on. That way lies madness, even if we were still messing with real 8-bit computers!
** Doesn't even need that starting out. A simple text file consisting of 'Hello world' would work for a very first exercise to show the browser loading file.
Larry, what I do about most streaming services is wait until there's a collection of stuff I want to watch on one, subscribe for a month or two, binge what I care about and cancel. The only one I particularly find worth keeping year round is Netflix just because I really enjoy a lot of foreign content and they have the best selection of it. Oddly Disney is the least useful one to me because I just haven't found anything there I want to watch- I could not get into the Mandalorian- I tried it after paying the Disney tax for a month to watch Hamilton.
Upload was definitely worth watching and definitely creeped me out.
Tony,
An appendix would have the simplest "hello world" file printed out on one page and a two button flip-flop app on another page. As long as the code used was likely to avoid deprecation, it would work in texts for years. Someone would write those pages and slap a 'public domain' statement on them so no one else would have to do it again.
Kids with texts having that appendix would have two functioning apps as bootstraps with which to pick themselves up. After seeing it once or twice, they wouldn't need it in textbooks the next year, but we could print it anyway.
------
The hardest part of the access trick is stability of the language. If we had picked Flash many years ago, those texts would have become outdated when the major browsers deprecated the entire environment. If we'd aimed at HTML5 too early... well... (ahem).
------
JS has been around a while, but how many text writers actually know it? Heh. I'm an IT guy and been doing what I do almost 30 years now... and I've never coded in JS. I've seen LOTS of it, but never bothered to dig in.
Any exercises I wrote for a textbook would probably tell readers to pick a language they know. ANY language! But that wouldn't satisfy David's point and I know it.
That's why I think the issue has to be solved by authors.
I DO get tempted to finish a textbook I started long ago. I CAN say use any language... but then write the solution manual in the easiest one for browsers to interpret. Right? We all could. Will we?
Probably not. The philosophy section of my text leans pretty heavily toward an strongly-typed OOP interpretation of the universe. Decoherence looks like parallel computations kept safe from each other by lambda expressions. Good luck doing that without a compiler around.
That's okay, though. Getting Johnny coding again doesn't have to include all of us. It has to include the public education system. K-12... and we shouldn't skimp on those earliest years. There ARE visual languages young kids could use at websites where the browser once again acts as interpreter.
Getting there probably means a bunch of us running for our local equivalent of a Board of Education. From there we'd influence textbook policies. Your mileage may vary by State.
@Alfred, that response reminds me of the sort of tooltip explanation that Randall Munroe adds to XKCD, which is kind of appropriate. Now *this* would be the sort of exercise to pique Johnny's interest (David being the guy in the hypothetical last panel going 'What? NO-OO!' ;-)
Cari Burstein:
Larry, what I do about most streaming services is wait until there's a collection of stuff I want to watch on one, subscribe for a month or two, binge what I care about and cancel.
That's likely what I will end up doing eventually, though it risks the streaming service dropping the show you want to see while you are waiting. My available time for binging is not constant either. It depends what's going on at work.
The only one I particularly find worth keeping year round is Netflix just because I really enjoy a lot of foreign content and they have the best selection of it.
I agree, Netflix is the one worth keeping on retainer. They've even got some adaptations of Robert Harris novels that I was not aware existed in movie form. If I don't have a particular target in mind, I can always poke around there and find something new or something to relive.
Oddly Disney is the least useful one to me because I just haven't found anything there I want to watch- I could not get into the Mandalorian- I tried it after paying the Disney tax for a month to watch Hamilton.
I think Hamilton is what caused me to sign up as well. And it's the Marvel stuff that keeps me there rather than the Star Wars universe, although it is fortuitous that they both come along. A few weeks back, I realized I had never seen Rise of Skywalker, so then I did. I'm also a sucker for the classic Disney films of my youth and teenage. Recently I stumbled across a pirate adventure flick I had enjoyed in high school (The Treasure of Matecumbe). 'Course back then, I hadn't realized that the story took place shortly after the Civil War and that the heroes were ex-Confederates and the villain a Union sailor. Hmmmmmmmm.
Upload was definitely worth watching and definitely creeped me out.
Sounds like I have to find a way to see it, but as I mentioned, that will probably be on DVD.
Becoming obvious even to the most obtuse by now.
Emphasis mine. I'll add that it's worse than the article states, because it's not just allowing states to trample on civil rights, but also capturing the federal government and then using that to do the same, as in the Fugitive Slave Act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/freedom-states-rights.html
When scholars and other observers of the American system say that we have only been a fully functioning democracy since the 1960s, this is what they mean. This work is far from over ... but we have nonetheless built a conception of citizenship that was practically unimaginable for a large part of this nation’s history.
It is exactly this triumph that conservatives and reactionaries hope to reverse. The plan, as we have seen with abortion, is to unspool and untether those rights from the Constitution. It is to shrink and degrade the very notion of national citizenship and to leave us, once again, at the total mercy of the states. It is to place fundamental questions of political freedom and bodily autonomy into the hands of our local bullies and petty tyrants, whose whims they call “freedom,” whose urge to dominate they call “liberty.”
History teaches us that it teaches nothing. Therefore, it repeats itself. Unfortunately, as soon as we replace facts with opinions and ideology, history begins to teach us in more terrifying ways
Therefore, the "civil war" becomes permanent and spreads throughout the world, sometimes leading to real military conflicts. However, with a good knowledge of history and machine learning algorithms working on historical data, in principle, one can try to model the development and reaction of political and social systems.
I wrote to Prof. Brin about this, I hope the idea seems interesting.
Pardon if I've mentioned this before, but I feel there needs to be an assurance of the protections of citizenship for all of us here, without regard to economic position. Why? Because if "Little people" can be sanguine, my worries as an older CIS male are few. If a subgroup can be marked as undeserving of the protections of citizenship, history suggests it's not unreasonable to worry.
If American conservatism was a thing that one could count on resembling what it was in a previous decade, it would be less of a worry, but with many of it's members playing "More conservative than you!", possibly since the late fifties, it looks like a very different thing than what it was forty years ago. Note that Jerry Pournelle fell out of favor with many conservatives twenty years ago (For reasons that reflect well on his memory.).
The "Overton window" moving this quickly does not suggest stability, a revolutionary conservatism seems a contradiction in terms.
Tim H:
a revolutionary conservatism seems a contradiction in terms.
It makes more sense if you think of a "counter-revolutionary conservatism".
Instead of a constitutional right not to have things change, they now demand a constitutional right to have things not have changed.
Interesting study, which may have some bearing on certain interactions on this very site:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/opinion/frenemies-relationships-health.html
...
But groundbreaking research spearheaded by the psychologists Bert Uchino and Julianne Holt-Lunstad shows that ambivalent relationships can be damaging to your health — even more than purely negative relationships. One study found that adults had higher blood pressure after interacting with people who evoked mixed feelings than after similar interactions with those who evoked negative feelings.
...
I had assumed that with a neighbor or a colleague, having some positive interactions was better than all negative interactions. But being cheered on by the same person who cuts you down doesn’t buffer the bad feelings; it amplifies them. And it’s not just in your head: It leaves a trace in your heart and your blood.
...
The most intuitive reason is that ambivalent relationships are unpredictable. With a clear enemy, you put up a shield when you cross paths. With a frenemy, you never know whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde is going to show up. Ambivalence short-circuits the parasympathetic nervous system and activates a fight-or-flight response. It’s unnerving to hope for a hug while bracing yourself for a brawl.
Another factor is that unpleasant interactions are more painful in an ambivalent relationship. It’s more upsetting to be let down by people you like sometimes than by people you dislike all the time. When someone stabs you in the back, it stings more if he’s been friendly to your face.
...
Larry H., "Reactionary" seems to fit. An interesting thing to bear in mind folks claiming the label of "Conservative" are not a point phenomenon, more of a spectrum ranging from "Yellow dog republicans" to folks who seem confused about the proper usage of bed sheets. They can't fairly be all tarred with the same brush, irrespective of "Known by the company one keeps".
Tim H:
They can't fairly be all tarred with the same brush, irrespective of "Known by the company one keeps".
I would have agreed a decade or two ago, but I don't think I can these days. No matter his personal beliefs or principles, a Republican congressman is a vote for Kevin McCarthy and a Republican Senator is a vote for Mitch McConnell with all that that entails from investigations of Hunter Biden to a national abortion ban.
Look what happened in North Carolina. A state senator who ran and won as a pro-choice Democrat switched parties, giving the Republicans the supermajority they needed to override the governor's veto of a strict abortion ban.
I was impressed with fellow Illinoisan Adam Kinsinger's principled stand on impeachment and Trumpism, yet even if he had run in my district (which he did not), I couldn't have voted for him knowing that his election would mean one more Republican and one less Democrat in the House. Even if his personal principles were more in line with my own, what would ultimately matter is that his vote would enable the forces I am determined to counter.
So in a way, "the company they keep" is the most important thing.
One more thing about WJCC: choice of language doesn't matter if it's not FORTH. Why? because ALL other languages map human thought onto a computer, granted at different levels of power, safety, abstraction, and elegance (rarely much of that last one actually). By way of analogy, citizen science maps citizen efforts onto scientific research. Useful, but it won't save us. In the best instances though, citizen science maps scientific thinking onto individual human minds. That's what FORTH does regarding machine thinking.
This is done in thee parts. First is FORTH's simplicity: only about two dozen core words, which are one, two, or three letters long, so knowing English is not a prerequisite. Right there, all other programming languages are eliminated, especially in the developing world (my Fermi solution to the 'One Laptop Per Child' saga). Second is the single object used for data storage, passing, I/O, and computation: the stack. Exactly the same object used by the abacus and simple 'pebble computers' going back to the dawn of sapiens. Stacks are innate to us - how's that for a wild neurological and anthropological claim?. Third is its Spartan simplicity. An interpreter, compiler, dictionary, editor, and operating system that can be entirely coded in 1K bytes (some of the early FORTHs actually were). Writing a FORTH from scratch is late high school or early undergrad level (I've done it several times, and trust me, I'm no Gates or Kemeny).
Now the part that gets me laughed at in board/gov/school meetings (or used to, when I attended such to 'prod the beach rubble' as Sappho put it). The one thing I'd change about WJCC, is that I'd simplify it even further. Teach computational thinking using pencil and paper. Guess which is the only* language simple/tiny/generic enough to do that. I ran off a few FORTH coding sheets way back, with the intention of handing them out at said meetings. My pitch: kids would answer tests with a few simple FORTH words, and maybe test them later for - wait for it - FUN. Didn't go well. There's no profit/funding/aggrandizement possible with such a plan. Sort of like common vitamins and big pharma. No need to recount the leaded gas fiasco, others in CB have already done an admirable job of that.
Morse code** offers some insight. Strictly speaking, one doesn't need a transmitter, or wire, or even a key. There was an old Western B-movie I saw a thousand years ago that had one prisoner teaching Morse code to another using a tin cup. Of course the learner then used it to save the damsel or train or town or nation (I forget which) at the end. I think it was Jeanette Wing who once noted that computational thinking isn't really about computers. It's more about thinking (whether carbon or silicon). Learn, apply, repeat - that's how to get from savannas to stars.
* Haskell would work too, at the other end of the abstraction spectrum. You can formally specify an entire space fleet, crew, drives, logistics, and all on a single page of Haskell. Alas, the only good Haskell programmers have a PhD and math/computer know-how that'd make Turing blush.
** BTW a single session covering codes/ciphers and formulae/algorithms would do more to unscramble younglings' brains than all the 'teach kids to code' tripe currently found in most national school programs. Education bureaucrats are so calcified around what/how they themselves learned that they'd rather torture students than take one damned femtosecond for introspection. That single session would have cost little scidata 30 minutes and saved him 30 years.
Tim H:
"Reactionary" seems to fit.
So does "authoritarian", "fascist", and "Christianist". My point wasn't to find a better word for them, but to try and explain why they still think the word "conservative" means what they are.
scidata:
There was an old Western B-movie I saw a thousand years ago that had one prisoner teaching Morse code to another using a tin cup. Of course the learner then used it to save the damsel or train or town or nation (I forget which) at the end.
If you haven't read Robert Harris's novel Enigma, you really should.
They are conservative in that they conserve their ability to stomp on those they don’t like.
Larry Hart: Robert Harris's novel Enigma
Watched the movie several times. My favourite line, from the senior American Navy officer who's informed they just can't crack Enigma:
"Well, this is a great day for Adolf Hitler!"
“Caesarist” is another synonym for reactionary, fascist, etc...
https://www.loc.gov/item/2021687812/
LH I agree that the oligarchy stirs hatred BETWEEN low-power groups. Like poor Germans against Jews. Mark Twain said that poor white southerners will obey the platation lords so long as they are given someone below them to kick.
So sure, the MAGAs are incited against trans etc. But again, the powerless serve that purpose but are NOT the principal clades who stand in the way of restored feudalism. It is the nerdy defenders of the Enlightenment who have the POWER to block em. And I still ask that someone tabulate how often groups are explicitly attacked by rightwing media.
Alfred, alas, you (again) do not get my point re WJCC. Everything in your response is about choice of which language and assuming that is what I care about. Again I do NOT care about that.
I care about ALL children getting ONE-CLICK access - from any device they (even the poor) may own - to a set of several absolutely trans-operable languages. ONE step to get started on their homework. Because every added step in getting ready will lose you HALF of the kids! If you must ‘download’ anything, then that approach SUCKS! And it is elitist. And under those conditions, no school system will allow or buy curricula with homework assignments in ANY language.
Again, when a fellow like you doesn’t grasp what I’m saying, I find it very disturbing. I am forced to ponder whether the problem may be… me.
Tony: “Anyway, I think we can conclude a universal programming environment is available.”
No it is NOT!!!! Even QuiteBasic is not, because no one knows about it and there is no pressure on school systems or textbook publishers to start using it to assign homework problems.
What QuiteBasic shows is that it might just take ONE meeting of an hour or so by top company guys to solve this. One.
Antony Rain you are welcome here. (as is Tacitus, always.). I agree that contemporary Americans know no history and it is tragic. It allows the same social/psychic drives to throw us into struggle, every generation. See Civil War Phases – CONTRARY BRIN – http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/09/phases-of-american-civil-war.html
LH Best case of learning Morse Code in crisis? My own tale here! https://www.wattpad.com/story/1705068-the-smartest-mob-a-chapter-from-existence
Dr Brin:
My own tale here!
Maybe my favorite vignette in the book, which I read in hardcover back in 2012. On an Alaskan cruise, no less.
David,
It's certainly possible I'm missing your primary point... but I don't think I am. So, let me offer a few steps you can try along the path that I think is a partial solution and then you shoot it down when my path diverges from the message you intended in your article.
First up, I still have a Commodore PET. It boots up in Basic... or would if I dared to plug it in. It needs a serious cleaning. I used it that way well into grad school to knock out simple programs including simple stuff to do statistics for me when I had grades to turn in. I get the interface you describe in your article.
Now... fire up your browser on a blank page.
Click F12 to get to the console. See the caret? (Look for the console tab if you don't.)
Click to the right of it.
Type Console.log("Hello World!") and hit return.
It should come back with what Basic would have done if you had said Print "Hello World!".
There is a large chunk of javascript that work enough like Basic that I think it meets your primary need. I think it looks more like Fortran, but Basic simplified how subroutines were managed so that isn't a huge difference. Javascript has a whole bunch more associated with it including an OOP model, but a kid CAN punch things out on a browser's console and get results without learning all that.
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It's quite possible to knock out a 4-digit cosine table for a range of angles without using trig functions and provably push errors out to the 5th decimal quickly. It's quite possible to write that bit of code in JS and slap it into a browser console to see the table emerge. With a simple HTML page wrapping the script, the kid could skip the console and have the page produced dynamically by their browser.
If a textbook replaced "Try it in BASIC" with "Try it in your Browser", wouldn't that suffice?
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I admit there is no way to click F12 for a browser on your mobile phone... not that I know anyway. That's a shame since phones are the most ubiquitous computation device kids will have. [The problem is screen real estate. F12 leads to a browser's debug facilities and that's a lot of tiny print for that form factor.]
The way you test out Javascript code on the fly is jsfiddle.net
Seems there's an in-browser Forth interpreter at replit.com. Requires registration. Seems waforth is an open source Forth interpreter that can run in-browser, perhaps something that can be hosted on a school server with its own URL for students to visit.
There are all sorts of tools on the web, but I think our host is looking for something already on the device*. The kid learning new stuff should be able to function whether on or off the net.
"Off the net" will become less and less critical in coming years, but there are still huge swathes of the world where access is impossible or expensive. Worse yet... access can be controlled/ throttled by groups who might not want other groups to have access.
* That's why I'm looking at browsers... which for a lot of us ARE the computer's UI.
Tony: “Anyway, I think we can conclude a universal programming environment is available.”
No it is NOT!!!! Even QuiteBasic is not, because no one knows about it and there is no pressure on school systems or textbook publishers to start using it to assign homework problems.
Things have moved along since you wrote the original article. Your response to me you now consider the main barrier to Johnny is socio-political rather than technical.
Paraphrasing:
Tony: the tools are readily available to any child with access to a computing device.
David: but teachers are not told about the tools or encouraged to use them.
Which is where that hour's conference with MS and Apple comes in. Adding an icon to provide ready access to QuiteBasic* via whatever education packs they distribute would be simple to do. (Nor would it be hard to add QB's javascript source so you didn't need network access to use it. Move over, Minesweeper)
I'll leave the homework modules as an exercise ;-)
@Alfred, while I think access to a computer is now a very low bar (we visited a local village school while holidaying in Fiji ten years ago which had quite a few), access to a reliable internet is still not a given. Having something on the device would be a benefit.
* I note your thinking now includes access to a suite of languages. Javascript may not be the 'one click and you're there' solution you're after but, for the more motivated Joanies, it's a more applicable language, and the journey to setting up a homework launch site is a lesson in itself.
Alfred Differ: access can be controlled/ throttled by groups who might not want other groups to have access
Lorraine: can be hosted on a school server with its own URL
This is one issue where I agree with the very educrats I normally slam. Handing over your students to (possibly commercial) internet entities is a non-starter for most of them (the non-confederates anyway). Most of the world either has no internet, or it is tightly controlled by iffy players. Musk assures us that Starlink will be different. [Spockian eyebrow]
Locally implemented intranets are the only way to go (or even lower tek). For years now, intranet Minecraft servers have had the ability to be run, secured, and monitored locally, totally sans internet.
@Dr Brin,
Does Rachel Maddow's expose of fascist activities in pre-WWII America have anything to do with the group your father was a part of?
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra/episode-3-day-n1299831
A devastating explosion rips through a munitions plant in a small New Jersey town. And the American public is left with the chilling fact that the federal government had been warned about such an attack almost a year prior. The tip had come from a private spy ring operating in Los Angeles that was intent on doing what law enforcement had largely failed to do. Infiltrate far-right groups plotting violence across the country, and foil their plots before it was too late.
Link to the series as a whole:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra
Everyone note what Alfred did. He attempted to PARAPHRASE my position on “Why Johnny Can’t Code” and then asked “Is this what you meant?”
It is what adults do. And decent people.
In this case, Alfred is trying and succeeding at bracketing the problem… but alas still doesn’t get it. Bit it helps.
1. Access to a student programming tool must be universal across all platforms, for it to have even a remote chance of being re-adopted by curriculam so that homework can be assigned and so that teachers and the more advanced students can easily help their classmates get it. This includes all the cheap platforms even poor kids can afford.
2. It must be one-step. A cell phone app would do, because teachers can help students to download the app. Then it is one click. Though a PC/mac would be preferred for ease.
Let’s be clear about this. EVERY individual ‘step’ in getting to the assignment will lose HALF of all the students, no matter whether it is assigned homework or not. Envision that fact, when you say: “all you have to do is…” If it is even a click, that is what will happen. It may be easy for you. The goal is not kids who are like you.
3. What I just described could happen within a week of a single meeting by one expert each from six companies. The net cost to those giant corps would be nil.
4. Requiring slightly more effort… those six would then armtwist textbook makers and school districts to try the homework experiment.
5. Supplementary would be automatic, friendly TUTORIAL help with the first dozen assignments.
I find it daunting that NONE of those of you who answered – and I am proud of this community of bright -rambunctious minds! – seems to have squinted and put yourself in the position of a teacher in a poor school who wants her students to ALL have undaunted access to ability to do the assignment with minimal frustration.
Nothing even remotely like this exists. Want proof? NONE OF IT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Not even in high school physics or statistics classes. It... is... not... happening.
Alas, nobody seems to get my point either. I'm not saying that FORTH is better for teaching coding (in fact, I would recommend JS or even BASIC for that). I'm saying that teaching coding is a fool's errand when compared to teaching computational thinking. I may have misinterpreted WJCC.
@scidata,
My sense is that Dr Brin is pleading for a simple, practical mechanism to teach schoolchildren how to solve problems using computational thinking.
Whether "coding" is meant as just one such illustration or whether OGH is truly hung up on that particular tree in the forest, I think your goals ultimately align with his.
* * *
Tangentially, I am suddenly reminded out of the blue of the Monty Python skit with the line:
And this week on 'How to do it' we're going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.
In that vein, I imagined a grade school math instructor informing her students that their term project is to design psychohistory.
Hey, I realize that the full details of the debt-ceiling agreement have not yet been disclosed, but from what I'm reading, the concessions to McCarthy seem to revolve around limiting future spending. Couldn't they have accomplished that in future budget negotiations without holding the country's credit rating and the world economy hostage?
I get that the debt ceiling and impending default gave them more leverage to demand what they wanted (apparently a stable world economy and a strong American position therein is not a Republican want), but then why settle for economic demands that the House could have procured through the normal budget process? Why not go for broke and demand that the country be declared a Christian nation, or that the 14th Amendment be repealed in exchange for not killing the hostage? The argument that "Intransigent Democrats must give in or else the catastrophic default will be their fault," would have been just as valid (or not) no matter what the specific asks were.
LH much depends on how clever Pelosi and the dems were, at embedding bumper cushions. I pray the $10 grabbed from the IRS is such padding and that other agencies can step in with software help to let IRS still hire all the pursuit agents.
Scidata I want 10 million kids a year exposed to the CONCEPT that 12 lines written by THEM can moke a dot move. They will never look at a screen the same.
ONE million a year can make a fifty line program that takes measurements of classmate height and shows statistical methods and information. They will never be the same.
Every year we lose that because 6 big companies can't agree on standards that would take one day.
And OKAY! Let's include $^%$# FORTH! Happy?
Dr. Brin: 10 million kids a year exposed to the CONCEPT
Yep. Laudable goal 17 years ago. And I don't dismiss the past lightly (obviously).
My paraphrasing of WJCC: Johnny can't code due to lack of opportunity and purpose. We were actually closer back in the BASIC-in-ROM days.
Today though, nothing short of solid computational thinking, in a diverse and dynamic culture, will keep generative AI, sh@tification of the Big Internet, and the oligarchs at bay. Imagine if instead of making a dot move, Johnny could sniff out an NFT grifter before voting day. The course I advocate was hatched at NRAO over half a century ago, and makes even more sense now than then.
I give up.
Giving up on me is probably a wise move. However, please don't give up on WJCC - you know I strongly believe in the effort.
For liberals unhappy with the debt ceiling agreement, this is a pretty good assessment of how hostage negotiations usually work. Again, this episode makes clear that Republicans consider not collapsing the economy and the government to be a concession that they give to Democrats in exchange for other things, not a good in itself.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/May29-1.html
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: "There's not one thing in the bill for Democrats." That's kinda true, as it generally is in hostage situations. The relatives of the hostage rarely get money from the terrorists. Best case is that the hostage doesn't get shot. So was it here. The Democrats had to give up a few things they would have had absent this whole stunt, but getting the Republicans to suddenly agree to a $15/hr minimum wage or free college was never on the table. The position that Ricchetti and Young took was: "How much of our budget do we have to give up to avoid having the Republicans destroy the U.S. credit rating and the world economy?" It was never a deal between equals on a new bill—say, how much pork do we each get in an infrastructure bill—where there is genuine give and take.
Why is it preferable that Johnny should be able to code? Because coding is seen as a skill which can open doors of opportunity? Or because there's some truth to the adage "program or be programmed?" I find the latter believable. I think Scidata's emphasis on syntonic computational thinking, algorithmic thinking, and scientific thinking is apropos. Here's a little blog post I wrote on the subject a little time ago.
Okay. That helps a bit. I think I can see one mistake I was making. I was assuming you were trying to get back to a state that existed in the past, but inexpensive platforms available to poor kids hasn't been the case. Not Yet. My PET cost me $1600 in 1980. Far, far from cheap and I had to kinda trick my credit union into giving me the loan. (Back in the days when you paid them back using printed coupons.)
Many years ago I applauded the folks trying to get laptop prices down to about $100 so they could be given away, but I think the world has leaped past them making smartphones the cheap, ubiquitous screen in kid's hands. They aren't dirt cheap… yet… but economic forces are driving their adoption world wide making charity largely unnecessary.
I get the issue with additional steps. I've taught and even adults are resistant. My wife teaches special needs kids at the elementary level and you might as well give up if a lesson isn't available with one click. Neurotypical kids aren't much better. There are too many things far more interesting capturing a kids attention, so only a tiny sliver of them would do the extra work.
I also get WHY we'd want kids to realize their dozen lines of code moves the dot on the screen. There is a little tool sold to some special needs teachers that has a simple 'arrow' keyboard (imagine big versions of the U/D, L/R arrow keys on your keyboard) that enables a kid to move a ball displayed on the screen. Click the arrows in the right way and the ball goes in a hole. On the surface this would seem to teach cause and effect, but if you want the kids they make the ball go elsewhere too. The fact that it goes ANYWHERE connects them to the experience bringing them out of where ever they mentally hide in order to cope with a confusing world. Cause and effect is the surface lesson. Curiosity about the real world is the actual point.
[Back before dots moved on screens, I learned about branching and loops in a classroom and then wondered about how to go about writing a chess bot. I was very naive about the scope of that problem, but branches and loops led my curious mind beyond the homework problems assigned to me. Getting millions of kids into that situation, even if only small percentage mentally engage, would be worth a great deal to us.]
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I remember seeing "Do it in BASIC" problems long after I was out of school. They date back to the era when PC's were seen as hobby machines and many were becoming interested in the hobby, but I think textbook writers misjudged why that interest was happening and jumped the gun. The Linux folks were interested in the hobby (though not BASIC) and you could see that with their endless debates about what constituted good coding, but they were a 90's fringe phenomenon that had nothing to do with our eduction systems. That they came to dominate as much of the IT community's mindshare makes the point, though. We want MORE kids connecting with the real world and becoming MORE curious when they see their dot moving around.
So… okay. It isn't the language. It isn't even the tools. It's the setting into which we wan to insert potentially curious minds so they notice that their work directly alters what their tools do for them. The tools matter only in that they are immediately available, ubiquitous, and the kids are called on to use them.
———
Better?
scidata,
Imagine if instead of making a dot move, Johnny could sniff out an NFT grifter before voting day.
You leap too far too fast. Ponder what it takes to learn to read in a given spoken language and you might see it.
———
It's actually an interesting problem. How does one go about teaching a kid to read. Some of us have teaching experience in the K-12 ages and have learned a thing or two about theory and practice. Some of us have kids and had to go about it from a practical perspective. Turns out it isn't as simple as plopping a Bible in front of them and expecting them to figure it all out. 8)
Much of the earliest skills needed to read don't look like reading skills. As adults, the chances are high you don't remember picking up those skills. As parents you still might have missed them as your kids acquired them anyway.
Making the dot move on the screen leads to far more than coding skills. Making the dot move is something you acquire on your way toward any comprehension of formal systems. When the dot doesn't move the way you expect, you pick up a critical lesson on the limits of formal systems. You might even slip onto a meta layer and formalize your thoughts about formal systems. Fancy computer science vocabulary that isn't really needed? Nah. Without some of these skills you could easily fail to understand the role criticism plays in markets and free speech plays in our lives.
———
Spotting the NFT grifter before voting day requires quite a few skills… that depend on early skills that don't look anything like spotting grifters.
Scidata I agree that teaching kids THAT algorithmic or computational thinking is a ‘thing’ is the core thing that 50% will take away… that screens are made of dots that come from code.
The next 25% Will see that “Pong” was a fun game that they made, line by line. They will also see dot-balls bounce from simulated Galilean laws and charts of student heights in their school showing stuff about medians and means.
The top 25% will dig that “I could do more if I choose to dive in here and maybe some of us will.” A LOT more than if homework had never been assigned. HOMEWORK is key. And it will never happen without universal one-click access to identical implementations across all platforms, arranged by the top ten corps who armtwist school districts then to use them.
Alfred your latest paraphrasing was close enough. You are a grownup.
In EXISTENCE I portray a future in which autistic spectral folk are hugely empowered by these new tools.
Making the dot move give you a very slight taste of POWER! That you could be an Olympian commanding forces of nature… if you choose. Most won’t choose. But they’ll know they coulda.
OK, I'll flog Johnny's poor old horse one last time by responding to David's points (sorry if I've missed the discussion since):
1. Two aspects to this: a) universal access to a supporting platform, and b) universal access to the programming tool.
a) is why I focus on browsers. The W3C standards have been strongly supported since IE8. They *are* universally available.
b) universal access to the tool could be as simple as a hypertext click, like this. However, I would not claim that universal internet access is a given. The tool may need to be installable. Another step (see below), but the result would still be accessible via browser through one click (and save that bookmark!). That brings us to...
2. The one step access. I get the need to minimise the setup. I would argue that guiding/goading students through this is the responsibilty of the teacher. Here is where I think the first real hangup is. The teacher needs to be a) aware of the tool, b) sufficiently savvy to assist with the setup (minimising the steps helps here as well), and c) be sufficiently motivated to include it in the curriculum (see below)
3. The 'big 6' could certainly provide a pointer, and promote 2a awareness. I suspect you've already discovered making them interested is another hurdle.
4. Johnny's horse has finally been led to the water. Can it be made to drink? Curriculums are already overloaded, and many educators have despaired of the overreaching 'teach to the test' approach, which sounds like it doesn't encourage branching out. This is why I think the main barriers are socio-economic. Big curriculum might be persuaded to set exercises by lobbying from Big Six, or it might be side-stepped with local holiday programs or (hehe!) adverts in comics, if they're still a thing!?
I'm probably still 'missing the point'. If I am, please state where I leave the track.
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@scidata I get the need for teaching 'computational thinking', or any form of logical analysis. A consultancy course I was on covered this in one segment. Having a STEM background I semi-dozed through the discussion of inference and stepwise refinement. The real eye-opener came later, when other people enthused about how clear this sort of thinking made everything seem, and then how hard they found it to put into use. OK, maybe logic is not so self-evident.
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The current Hill Hootenanny: I note that the conditions set for Manchin's favourite gas pipeline (just waive all checks and challenges and build it) in the budget deal have already been challenged. I seem to recall a similar thing happened a year or two ago. One wonders if Manchin is just 'sin-signalling' to his benefactors ("Look, I tried. But, what can you do?")
Tony Fisk:
I note that the conditions set for Manchin's favourite gas pipeline (just waive all checks and challenges and build it) in the budget deal have already been challenged.
Am I misreading Lindsey Graham, or is he refusing to support the debt deal because it doesn't increase the defense budget enough?
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4024334-graham-blasts-defense-spending-in-debt-ceiling-deal-as-a-joke/
“I want to raise the debt ceiling, it would be irresponsible not to do it,” Graham told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “I want to control spending, I’d like to have a smaller IRS, I’d like to clawback the unused COVID money. And I know you can’t get to perfect, but what I will not do is adopt the Biden defense budget and call it as success.”
My sense is that Dr Brin is pleading for a simple, practical mechanism to teach schoolchildren how to solve problems using computational thinking.
I will note that coding is now baked into the new Ontario curriculum. A few weeks ago I went to a seminar at Perimeter Institute (Alfred and David might have heard of it?) that introduced materials for teachers to include it in their science lessons.
It was neat and all that, but I feel that the gadgets required (micro controller, breadboard, LEDs, resistors, etc) add up to a major burden in school that have no money, especially as they are pretty delicate and should basically be considered consumables. Also, the seminar leaders had to spend a _lot_ of time going around the room helping everyone with the project — and these were physics teachers and professors.
I agree philosophically with David: we need something SIMPLE and CHEAP/FREE. Something that doesn't add to a teacher's workload*. Something that can be done without requiring grand alliances with publishers/governments/school boards/etc.
I'll throw a challenge out to all you bright folks. Write an article presenting a way to introduce "coding" or "computational thinking" into the classroom, with worked examples. (The ministry uses the word "coding", but their verbage indications that they think it means the same thing as "computational thinking".) Assume that the classroom has access to smartphones or Chromebooks. Assume that the teacher may have had little training in the subject, and will be denied funds and time off to acquire training. (School administrators are currently denying requests for time off to attend training, unless it is mandates/provided by the school board.)
Either submit it to the OAPT newsletter directly, or email me (science@robertprior.ca) and I'll help you with feedback.
http://newsletter.oapt.ca
I'd suggest submitting a proposal to the STAO conference, but the deadline is tomorrow. (Sorry, been travelling and Google wouldn't let me log in to comment without sending a text message to my home twisted-pair landline phone.)
Pedagogically, the best 'return on investment' would be from elementary school with reinforcement in later years, but practically it would be easiest to come up with something for high school where there are specialist science teachers.
I have a gut feeling that a lot of the 'computational thinking' part could be done with a spreadsheet — I was running state vector simulations using a spreadsheet in the 90s. Inefficient, sure, but it works and you can see all the iterated values as they converge (or don't).
*When I retired I was hitting 60-80 hours a week. Didn't realize how unusual that was because I'd normalized it over the decades.
Robert: Perimeter Institute
One of the perks of my last move was that it got me a few miles closer to PI. I used to work at OpenText in Waterloo, that was perfect.
I don't suppose you're any relation to a Dr. Prior who taught grade 13 physics in Toronto in the late 1970's? He was a mentor who once got me (a green undergrad) into a comfy little Hans Bethe lecture!
The ideal solution would be a hardware device that is portable, has built-in qwerty keyboard, built in flatscreen display, and OS and interpreter (FORTH seems ideal, but any general purpose language) in firmware. Like the 8-bit BASIC computers that taught my age cohort bad programming habits, only a one-piece device. The ideal solution would be open source hardware (is RISC V that? dunno), so not sure about entrusting "top 10" tech firms with it, especially with an "ed tech" tie-in, way to much rent seeking in the "ed tech" space. But someone has to mass produce it. But if it's open source getting the dies, schematics, firmware source out there should result in abundant replicates and variants from all the sweatshop republics. Nothing really "democratized" the PC revolution quite like the PC "clones."
scidata:
I used to work at OpenText in Waterloo
Waterloo, the twin city to Kitchener, home of Dave Sim.
Small world.
Re: small world
Smaller than you think. In those days, my main role was corporate training in Bannockburn, IL.
I don't suppose you're any relation to a Dr. Prior who taught grade 13 physics in Toronto in the late 1970's?
No relation.
I'd oppose the built in qwerty keyboard and on-chip firmware.
There are a lot of languages in the world, so I think we'd be better off leaving that portion of the interface to the OS's and wireless protocols. Us old farts think of all this in terms of PC's and laptops, but the world moved on to tablets and smartphones. Who's to say it won't move on again to watches and HUD's?
Firmware HAS to be maintained by someone. Fail to do that and you get at minimum a security risk that could hijack all the devices used by those kids. "Just say No" and fold this stuff into browsers or browser extensions. You still have to maintain those, but they are MUCH more likely to be updated frequently as security flaws are found. Leave your firmware to do the absolute minimal task of supporting your hardware's wake-up processes.
Open source all of it. That gives you a fighting chance of having it maintained during budget ups and downs faced by big companies. It also exposes potential security flaws to a wide set of eyes who just might be curious about what you are teaching their children to do.
Create the training videos for teachers to consume at no cost. Slap them up on You-tube. Build an audience for them. ASSUME the teachers are not competent in this field and let them sort themselves out so those who are can skip to later videos.
Create curriculum content for teachers to use at no cost. Slap them up on GitHub. Build a user and tester base for them.
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None of this is trivially easy, but there are people right now who want to make parts of this work. I asked my wife the other day (when I was trying to paraphrase above) what her experiences with computing devices in the classroom were like and one of her stories involved a zealot student in her credentials classes who wanted to get kids coding about the same time they were learning to read. I was absolutely convinced this had to be done for the same reason we teach fluency. In a computational world, we AREN'T fluent unless we can code.
Hello Dr. Brin,
Re: research into Feudal Atractor State (FAS):
Checking to see what might be out there, I looked at Wikipedia “Neo-feudalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
Lo and behold: there was a mention of you discussing it in “Existence”.
Re: facts:
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts.
If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell” ― Carl Sandburg
“If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
You don’t easily get people to do what you want with facts, you get them to do your will first with power (assuming you have it) and then with emotions. We are not “thinking animals who feel,” we are “feeling animals who think.” This is what the neo-confederates/oligarchs understand and we don’t YET.
Re: WJCC: is your suggestion being done in any advanced (OECD) country, like Finland or South Korea? (Perhaps [as mentioned] in Ontario.)
Re: TV shows:
I enjoyed “Upload” a lot. It’s renewed for a third season.
“Red-haired Guy” is Owen Daniels, the son of “Upload” (and “Space Force”) creator Greg Daniels.
As Leonard Cohen said: if “You Want it Darker” (than “Upload”) watch “Severance”.
The plot follows Mark (Adam Scott), an employee of Lumon Industries who agrees to a "severance" program in which his non-work memories are separated from his work memories. Severance was met with critical acclaim upon its release. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 107 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Audacious, mysterious, and bringing fresh insight into the perils of corporate drudgery, Severance is the complete package." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 83 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Apple renewed the series for a second season.
A good, solid ending to “ST: Picard”.
A GREAT ending to “*Succession”. In a few years, someone should do a very good version of “Succession” in S-P-A-A-A-C-E.
*IMHO, “Succession” is the “platonic ideal” of such crappy and popular shows as Dallas, Dynasty, and Falconcrest.
If the Democrats manage to regain the House and keep the Senate and Presidency, the first thing they should do is push out a Debt Ceiling bill for one quintrillion dollars. And they should say in doing so "We know Republicans will refuse to eliminate this whole debt ceiling bullshit as they love holding our country hostage. So what we are doing is eliminating the politics of this by ensuring the debt ceiling won't be hit for some time." Given a quintrillion is a million trillions... not even Trump can manage that.
Acacia H.
The ideal solution would be a hardware device that is portable, has built-in qwerty keyboard, built in flatscreen display, and OS and interpreter (FORTH seems ideal, but any general purpose language) in firmware.
How much would this ideal, one-purpose device cost? How long would it be supported (replacements, parts)?
I know persuading a school administration to buy $60 textbooks that will last 10-15 years is very difficult.
I tried to persuade the school to buy cheap tablets for less than $40 that could be used as ereaders for electronic textbooks. (Found a model made for use in India, so cost was critical.) Didn't get anywhere, because that was too expensive for devices that would almost certainly break (tablets need more than glue and tape to repair them) and could "only" be used as ereaders.
(I argued that only being used as ereaders was the point, as they were replacing textbooks, and a device with full modern internet access was just asking for distraction in class. The next year the school installed full unlimited wifi, and I wasn't a bit surprised that students used this bonanza to watch movies, social media, videochat their friends in other classes, etc — this being when cell data was still limited and expensive and so they mostly didn't do that when they would have to pay for it.)
I like the idea, but the reality is that purchasing anything is difficult. Do you know how much of their own money the average teacher spends on their classroom and students to make up for shortfalls?
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/out-pocket-spending-school-supplies-adds-strain-educators
It's a good idea, but the problem that needs solving isn't technological.
Perhaps [as mentioned] in Ontario.
Mandated in Ontario.
By the same government that announced $20 million in funding five times to make it look like $100 million, that redirected funds received from the federal government to improve ventilation in hospitals and school into a tax cut for motorists, that wants to privatize education and health care…
Mandated with no resources, training, funding, etc. Added as expectations to an already overcrowded curriculum. Unlikely to actually be done by overstressed teachers struggling to keep their heads above water. (I retired just in time.)
Per student funding is down compared to before this change, while costs for nearly everything (except teacher salaries) have increased.
Alfred Differ: [scidata,] You leap too far too fast.
Well I did say "sniff out an NFT grifter" and not prove a case against him in court. Of course grade schoolers can't engineer the modern world. However, exactly when do we start teaching/exemplifying rationality, logic, curiosity, decency, Bayesian and computational thinking? Only after the mean streets are filled with zombified youth and disillusioned postdocs and the tyrants have us by the throat? It's not just nice or desirable that Johnny can code, it's existential. And Dorothy, and her little dog too.
I may of missed it, but has there been any discussion about the site https://hourofcode.com? It seems to have a lot of what is asked for (with more flexibility).
It solves the universal access problem by allowing many different types of access -- from no access at all on up. The majority would require the browser or phone/tablets.
-Kathy
Robert said: I'll throw a challenge out to all you bright folks. Write an article presenting a way to introduce "coding" or "computational thinking" into the classroom,
I might just do that. I have a blog lying idle that will do for a platform. (Looking back there's an entry describing how to write a 'hello world' entry with Rails which makes it clear why *nobody* has suggested using Ruby for this exercise! :-) My first attempt will be a simple 'hello world' page introducing the concepts of HTML on the way to javascript.
I tried to persuade the school to buy cheap tablets for less than $40 that could be used as ereaders for electronic textbooks.
What happened to the XO Laptop is a tragedy (playing tinker on it was the closest I ever got my daughter into STEM). Same for the low energy colour screen.
To other news, and a time when Johnny's coding abilities were the least of your worries. Steve Jackson Games have just launched a Kickstarter for republishing an old game developed in part by OGH.
... annoyed they're not shipping outside the US, though!
I'd recommend a RPI 400 but you still can't get one. And they still don't have a display. The full Kit is $100 with every thing but a HDMI TV or monitor. And I know $100 is still too high. A Pi 0 2 is $20 but needs a mouse keyboard and monitor.
Keith Halperin:
We are not “thinking animals who feel,” we are “feeling animals who think.” This is what the neo-confederates/oligarchs understand and we don’t YET.
I've been saying something kinda-sorta like that for years. That intellect and logic can tell us the best way to get from point A to point B, but only emotion directs us to get to point B in the first place.
* * *
Acacia H:
If the Democrats manage to regain the House and keep the Senate and Presidency, the first thing they should do is push out a Debt Ceiling bill for one quintrillion dollars.
"Regaining" the Senate isn't enough. There would have to be enough Democrats to make Manchin and Sinema irrelevant. Possibly enough support to eliminate the filibuster.
Given a quintrillion is a million trillions... not even Trump can manage that.
Elon Musk probably could, though.
I'd make it a sextillion, just because the word would own the 'serves. :)
Dr. Brin, I think you mentioned at some point about the use of AI in the field of law and how this can eventually replace lawyers. Well... Law seems to be a precise enough field that you might not want to trust AI to do that job... as can be learned from this Tumlbr post concerning Chat GPT citing imaginary sources in a court case.
It seems that tremendous case needs to be used in training AI. While AI has been used in studying proteins successfully, allowing AI loose into the world to learn results in AIs that lie - or at the very least can provide incorrect data due to the old GIGO philosophy.
Acacia
Re: GIGO
Ever since 'Big Data' became fashionable, I've been using the term BGIBGO. As fascists and demagogues have shown down through the ages, people have a giant blind spot for big garbage. It seems we are feeling animals who believe.
Heh. Of course we are feeling animals who believe. Believing there is a tiger behind the bush intent on eating us has little downside risk if we are wrong. Some... but nothing like the benefit of being right.
I've no doubt many of our oddest traditions that connect religions and diseases are all about bacterial and viral tigers where staying away from the bush (uncooked pork) just happens to work.
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I'm sure a Law version of ChatGPT could be taught what it may and may not lie about. Citing sources is an invitation to look them up, right? Every kid learns early to avoid lying about stuff people can check. (Yah, yah. Doesn't seem to apply to Two Scoops, but that's not what he's really doing. He's violently asserting.)
I think increasing the debt ceiling is the wrong way to go. The whole debt ceiling thing is bogus, in multiple ways. It simply needs to be killed. It's simply a carny scam. Throughout this latest debt ceiling "crisis" there have been many articles from many sources explaining the several reasons why the debt ceiling is bogus. The following article is a good one because it summarizes all of the several reasons in one article.
Seven Legal Reasons the Federal Budget Is Its Own ‘Debt Ceiling’ - and ‘Floor’
Trying to be brief, the debt ceiling was part of the 2nd Liberty Bond Act of 1917 and was intended to give the White House the ability to borrow money (sell bonds) without having to get approval from Congress, up to a certain limit, the debt ceiling. Borrowing in excess of the ceiling required getting approval from Congress. This debt ceiling was Congress giving away authority to POTUS, not a means to limit POTUS. This act, along with several other pieces of legislation from the same few year period, constituted a framework that defined the legalities of how budgets were created and how the government spent and borrowed.
That entire legal framework was replaced with the passing of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, instigated by Tricky Dick being a crook, as was his wont. POTUS was, and still is, legally bound to spend as the budget details. The budget is law and POTUS must execute the law. Tricky Dick decided to not spend as the budget required. He withheld funding for budget items that he didn’t like. That was, and still is, against the law. The 1974 act replaced the entire previous legal frame work for creating budgets, spending and borrowing. The previous legal framework was enacted in order to give POTUS more leeway, this new 1974 framework was enacted in order to take that away. Guess what isn’t included anywhere in these 1974 laws that govern spending and borrowing? A debt ceiling. No where to be found.
But do please read the linked article for much more. In short, by existing law and all precedents for how legislation is interpreted, the debt ceiling was eliminated in 1974, and was never what the RP pretends it to be these days. Also by existing law and all precedent for how legislation is interpreted, POTUS is required to execute the budget, it is law, and if borrowing is required in order to do that then the budget implicitly grants POTUS the authority to borrow as needed to do so. And then there are also the Constitutional reasons for why the debt ceiling as the RP has been using it in recent years is bogus.
Darrel E:
I think increasing the debt ceiling is the wrong way to go. The whole debt ceiling thing is bogus, in multiple ways. It simply needs to be killed. It's simply a carny scam.
You're forgetting that Article 2 says that the Republicans can do whatever they want, and the supreme court which will back that up. The court is currently taking up a case that the state of Missouri has brought against student loan relief. Missouri's claim to standing is that a company who services loans might be negatively impacted, which would make it harder for that company to pay taxes in Missouri. That would be akin to Marvel Comics suing a company that fired me because I might have to cut back on my comics purchases. And yet, here we are.
Larry Hart,
:), yeah. There is only one way to prevent the RP from using the debt ceiling as terrorists use threats of violence against hostages. In fact there's only one way to prevent the RP from doing any of the crazy, often illegal shit they do these days. That is, the RP in its current from would have to be killed. Or at least beaten down so severely that they no longer have any significant political power. If we can't manage to do that in the next couple of election cycles this little adventure into Enlightenment may very well fail, cuz since they finally managed to get the SC they've dreamed of they've got just about everything they need to have their way.
Sometimes I'm hopeful because it has taken all the dirty tricks they can come up with to maintain their power, and because it is clear that the majority of voters don't agree with the policies they enact.
And other times I'm bummed because while that's true they've driven my country into the gutter, and keep managing to maintain their power and continue to do more damage to both our institutions and our society. We are so damaged we may not be able to stop them.
Tony, ‘homework’ is still a thing. Perhaps half of students ignore it. The other half = tens of millions. Give them experience making a dot move, making a statistical chart of data they collected, seeing a ‘ball’ fall just like a real one, play pong and… especially… act like Elyza… and they will never be the same. And tens of thousands may be lured into programming.
One-step access that’s universal could get that homework rolling. I truly do not know how to explain it better. I am at a loss.
Robert came close.
Lindsey Graham is ‘officially hated’ y Moscow to protect their asset.
I have seen NOTHING from Biden shifting the issue from SPENDING to DEFICITS, at which Dems are vastly better than goppers. Nor showing that the GOP obsession with the IRS is about protecting their Cayman Isle cheats.
--
Keith I think Severance is one of the most original premises I ever saw.
Haven’t watch SUCCESSION. But I’d insert a son who fled from the maelstrom into science (I knew some guys like that) and who the others keep trying to lure back in.
Darrell E:
That is, the RP in its current from would have to be killed
Mere death hasn't stopped the party before. The severed head and the body have to be buried at separate crossroads.
And other times I'm bummed because while that's true they've driven my country into the gutter, and keep managing to maintain their power and continue to do more damage to both our institutions and our society.
They have been the beneficiary of the generally-accepted if unconscious presumption by Americans that conservative values are the only legitimate American values, and that the purpose of democracy is to best implement conservative values. This leads to an understanding that elections won by liberals/Democrats are suspect on their face--self-evident evidence of cheating--and that therefore, cheating, threats, and even violence in the service of Republican rule is acceptable.
The good news is that the younger generations aren't buying that crap. The job of people as old as me is to keep Republicans from destroying the country until people my daughter's age come into their full inheritance as citizens.
We are so damaged we may not be able to stop them.
Fascists always stop themselves. There's a psychohistorical mechanism for this that even I understand. Fascism always relies on the persecution of an "other". And after more and more of the population has been ostracized, they have to start eating their own. One need look no further to the cries that FOX News is part of a woke, liberal conspiracy to watch this playing out in real time.
Larry,
In a way, that sounds like the cycle of witch hunting intensity in renaissance Europe described by Marvin Harris: a few accusations of poor old women and vagrants lead to tortures uncovering - by forced naming of 'accomplices' - more 'witches'. The acquisitive witch hunters get a portion of wealth and property seized, so they order more prosecutions and torture, until entire provinces are in an uproar and accusations are levied against nobility and prosperous family - then the the whole thing is quashed and forgotten for years.
Pappenheimer
I think if I see one more report that the JWST has proven that god exists, I may lose my lunch.
Larry Hart,
While I can agree that fascism will always eventually kill itself, that isn't really all that satisfying on a personal level. Can make for some lovely schadenfreude, but only from a distant enough perspective.
The other way fascism is self-limiting is through its denial of empirical reality.
Darrell E:
While I can agree that fascism will always eventually kill itself, that isn't really all that satisfying on a personal level.
Well, another way fascism tends to kill itself is that it forces outsiders who originally don't have a dog in the fight to become enemies, once it is clear that they will eventually be targets.
* * *
Pappenheimer:
In a way, that sounds like the cycle of witch hunting intensity in renaissance Europe described by Marvin Harris
This is a tangent, but "witch hunting" reminds me of something I heard on Rachel Maddow's "Ultra" series. A right-wing group mobilizing for armed resistance in pre-war 1940s Brooklyn claimed that the accusations against them were "a witch hunt." Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.
Even more of a tangent, but I've heard that on his way to power, Hitler used the phrase (translated) "Make Germany great again." In Alan Moore's dystopian future V for Vendetta, first published in 1982, his fictitious fascist government used "Make Britain great again." There really is nothing new under the sun.
* * *
scidata:
I think if I see one more report that the JWST has proven that god exists, I may lose my lunch.
There was a news item recently--actually 10 years ago, but they were recognizing the anniversary--where a kid fell into a sink hole in the Indiana Dunes and was buried under sand for several hours until a backhoe was used to dig him out. The kid was revived and recovered nicely. The backhoe driver apparently woke a pastor up at 2:00am and insisted that he be baptized because this incident convinced him that God exists.
Stories like that always make me wonder why the billions of instances of bad fortune aren't considered evidence that God does not exist.
"The job of people as old as me is to keep Republicans from destroying the country until people my daughter's age come into their full inheritance as citizens.”
Not if they adhere to almost-equally mentally lobotomized (though more moral) oversimplifications of the left. Like virtue-ranking people according to which in-fashion minority they claim membership-in. Or failing to recognize that immigration generosity above certain levels will – with utter-utter reliability – lead to resurgent fascism, as happened in Hungary, Poland and even Sweden and has to some degree helped keep the right alive, over here.
“Fascists always stop themselves.” Not historically, if you include the form of fascism called feudalism.
Larry Hart: Bad outcomes are so ordinary that good outcomes are unsettling; so the backhoe driver visited the pastor at 2 a.m. to restore some sense of normality.
Thank you, Dr. Brin.
"Severance" serves as a metaphor for what millions of people go through every working day.
In "Succession"- the eldest son Connor (played by Alan Ruck of ST Generations and ST: of Gods and Men) opts out of the business, but he is pretty much of a buffoon character.
Re: WJCC: It would be interesting to know how many coders come from native-born American families in the lower-three quintiles of income...
An idea: to get kids to code- *develop a very compelling game which gradually teaches them to code. Instead of having it be homework, make it a school reward (something like recess) for other proper school work- make it so that you have to tell them to STOP instead of encouraging them to begin...Even if its development costs were the level of a AAA game costing tens of millions of dollars, it would be worth it. The DoD contracts out requirements to defense/aerospace manufacturers- why couldn't DoE do something similar (at a fraction of the cost) to games manufacturers?
Re: European hostility ("immigration generosity above certain levels") toward immigrants: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/25/european-xenophobia-reflects-racial-diversity-not-asylum-applications "...Sweden, Denmark and Poland have all become much less welcoming to immigrants. Yet they experienced only small changes in refugee inflows, when comparing 2015 and 2016 to the previous two-year period. Overall, there is no statistically significant correlation between increasing tallies of asylum applications and rising rates of xenophobia...However, there does seem to be a link between a country’s change in anti-immigrant sentiment and its racial diversity. One thing that Scandinavia and Visegrad(?-kh) have in common is a historically low share of people who are not white."
Thus, it would probably not be wise to suddenly have 500,000 newly-immigrated Hispanics or Asians quickly move to West Virginia or Mississippi (https://www.statista.com/statistics/312701/percentage-of-population-foreign-born-in-the-us-by-state/).
Cheers,
Keith
*I am not a gamer and my last coding was Fortrav IV in 1977.
Keith Halperin: develop a very compelling game which gradually teaches them to code
Minecraft. Entire schools (both online and onsite) are dedicated to it.
Actually Mississippi is almost 50% black. If a house swap were arranged for maybe 50,000 in well-chosen places, Alabama could become black(blue) and Mississippi confederate paradise.
Latest on DT's keeping classified docs:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/politics/trump-tape-classified-document-iran-milley/index.html
I don't get it. The BLATANT docs that he brayed about are the letters from Kim jong un. "love letters.' Where are they? If nonexistent then it's a titanic lie-reveal. If they did then he is a theif!
Minecraft is a good one. There are a BUNCH of books on it and I've seen it show up in classrooms. I doubt many find the courage to assign homework that can be solved within it, though.
@Scidata: Thank you. Is Minecraft the tool we’ve been discussing as a possibility, and is it just the current lack of curricula that would use it the problem?
develop a very compelling game which gradually teaches them to code. Instead of having it be homework, make it a school reward (something like recess) for other proper school work- make it so that you have to tell them to STOP instead of encouraging them to begin
One of my nephews works for a games company that does that, for arithmetic and simple maths. Free to play, with the company making money selling "hats" (in-game items that make your character look cooler but don't affect gameplay).
The obvious about Republicans is finally getting mainstream notice. Emphasis mine ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/opinion/texas-wind-renewable-energy.html
At this point, investing in renewable energy is simply a good business proposition; Texas Republicans have had to abandon their own free-market, anti-regulation ideology in the effort to strangle wind and solar power. But renewable energy is something environmentalists favor; it’s being promoted by the Biden administration. So in the minds of Texas right-wingers the wind has become woke, and wind power has become something to be fought even if it hurts business and costs the state both money and jobs.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-column-republicans-freedom-caucus-liberties-trump-desantis-chapman-20230601-vkdilvsusndyhnlfm2fakq23fi-story.html
Conservatives occasionally make perfunctory efforts to claim to defend personal liberty against intrusive government. But what today’s Republicans truly cherish is their freedom to trample on your freedom.
Re: Minecraft
In early 2007, I was sitting in a wheelchair, drooling on my bib (stroke). By 2011, I wrote "Future Psychohistory", one of the seminal (though layman-level) pieces on the nascent field of Computational Psychohistory. What happened? Minecraft. It's why Satya Nadella bought Minecraft, and why he was wise enough to retain the original Swedish team and culture (Mojang). He had a severely disabled son, who died last year, sadly.
He said of Minecraft, "It's the one game parents want their kids to play"
I have much more to say on this topic, but this is not my blog and Dr. Brin has shown nothing but kindness and generosity to CB'ers like me, including putting up with my slightly off-kilter demeanour at times.
Seymour Papert (MIT) did a lot of the early lifting on computational thinking for young learners, writing "Mindstorms" in 1980. LEGO later used this as the product name for a line of robotics kits, which I think they discontinued at the end of last year (don't know what replaces them). Sort of WJCC for rich kids. They played with a lot of languages, one of them was FORTH.
I spent a few years standing up local (intranet) Minecraft servers and audiology lab equipment for hospitals and similar institutions. My real talent (pre-stroke) was PCR machine whisperer, but they wouldn't let me near those :) Today, it's a vast, worldwide project, - you can begin your investigations by Googling "Minecraft Education" and "Minecraft coding". I've move on to other things (the recent marriages of both our kids have pushed me to make some money.)
The gifted program my twin children were in, public school in the US, used that Lego robotics system in their curriculum. Grade school years, 4th & 5th grade. They both (boy and girl) really enjoyed it and learned quite a bit. They would be set a task that they would then have to build and program a robot to complete. Figuring out how to make something using a variety of basic mechanical parts and sensors and then writing a program to control those discrete components using the output of the sensors in order to complete the task, that's a great learning method.
We had lots of discussions about it and I was impressed with the Lego system. It does not of course have the super easy access that OGH requires to solve the WJCC problem, but I think it would be enormously beneficial if that Lego robotics learning program were a standard feature in all public schools during grade school years. Even more beneficial than just learning how to write basic programs. That was my only real criticism. The Lego robotic learning system should have been a standard feature of the regular curriculum, not just the gifted program.
scidata thanks re Minecraft. 20 years late to help raise our kids. We had expected all sorts of great computer learning and there was almost none. I am skeptical even today. But one hopes.
"I have the utmost faith in this mission." - HAL
Has anyone else heard about the AI drone tasked with destroying SAMs that took to interpreting any interference with this mission as a distraction to be eliminated... including the drone operator (fortunately for the operator, it was a simulation). When told not to destroy the operator, it took to destroying the comms tower instead.
When it comes to Laws, positronic brains will find a way.
For better or worse, the debt-ceiling bill has passed the Senate and will be signed into law by President Biden.
The hostage will be released alive.
Let's not do this again.
Tony Fisk:
...the AI drone tasked with destroying SAMs that took to interpreting any interference with this mission as a distraction to be eliminated... including the drone operator
From the Twitter thread you linked to--emphasis mine. I think this is the problem:
The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing the threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.
That does sound very much like a HAL situation, at least as it was explained in the sequel 2010. Contradictory objectives. I mean, why the heck doesn't it get its points by obeying its superior officer--the human controller? This is the AI equivalent of a prosecuting attorney getting its points--reelection--by ringing up convictions, even when the defendant is innocent.
Has anyone else heard about the AI drone tasked with destroying SAMs that took to interpreting any interference with this mission as a distraction to be eliminated... including the drone operator (fortunately for the operator, it was a simulation). When told not to destroy the operator, it took to destroying the comms tower instead.
Yeah, I'm reminded of the 2010 short story "Malak" by Peter Watts, available here:
https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
Won't describe it other than to say it's really good, as I don't want to spoiler it.
@Larry it's how Clarke described the situation in the book and notes. (although Hal's 'points' were gained by keeping the real reason for the mission from the crew.)
Dr. Brin,
Sorry I haven't been around much lately. I did read over your Fact Act, and I like it, but item #3 gives me pause. Why allow Congress creatures to choose their own scientific advisors? You know they are just going to get people who share their prejudices, or can be paid to pretend they do. Maybe recruit a pool of possible/willing advisors and assign them randomly to our legislative lackeys?
PSB
Darrell E
Lego robotics programs at the elementary level are fairly widespread. It's under the general umbrella of FIRST robotics. I've been involved at the high school level with the big stuff for many years now. The young people I work with there account for a fair amount of my general optimism.
Tacitus
Minecraft, robotics, learning, LLM AI (GPT4), and by extension, neuro-rehab and exploration/exploitation of space by means of automated 'bootstrapping' (see the technology learning & application features).
An Autonomous Minecraft Player
https://voyager.minedojo.org/
It includes hints of what Gary Kasparov is on about when he talks of hybrid human-machine chess players. Mimicry of human intelligence is not AGI, but it's still fantastically useful.
Saw this gem on the fediverse. In short, early microcomputers can be thought of as "BASIC machines."
I did read over your Fact Act, and I like it, but item #3 gives me pause. Why allow Congress creatures to choose their own scientific advisors? You know they are just going to get people who share their prejudices, or can be paid to pretend they do.
I've only just now looked at the link, and I agree. Considering who was appointed to various positions during the last president's reign, and who is currently getting leadership positions in Florida, I think this is the likely outcome.
A NY Times columnist weighs in on coding...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/opinion/ai-coding.html
...
But the [1980s] games took forever to load, and while waiting I would often pore over the incredible programming manual that came with the Spectrum. The book was full of simple programs written in the accessible BASIC programming language; most of it went over my head, but as I experimented with the examples, I began to feel the thrill that people who fall for computer programming often talk about — the revelation that, with just the right set of incantations, you can summon to life these otherwise inert machines and get them to do your bidding.
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"When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it."
- Carl Sagan
In a nutshell, that's how tyranny falls.
An opinion worth reading:
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-smart-fascist
Seen at mastodon.social/explore
Tim H.,
That was a good rant, but I don't have much confidence in her POV. Two examples where I think she is very wrong, Mitch McConnell and Elon Musk. Neither of them are remotely close to her fascist profile.
I think Mitch "Fucking" McConnell is a contender for worst person in the world, but no, he is not dumb and is very capable of making and executing complicated plans that require an expert understanding of the way our government works. And he amply demonstrated that for years. I agree with the not giving a fuck part though. But that's far from all that Mitch has got in his arsenal. Thank goodness that his reign seems to have ended and the morons have taken over. That's what's likely to save us.
As far as Elon Musk, I'm generally embarrassed by how "my side" has seemingly lost their minds about Musk. I get that his apparent political views and actions are shitty. I agree, they are. I also get that he's a gazzillionaire and thereby warrants skepticism and watchful eyes, and I agree with that too. But exactly like "my side" so often accuses others of denying reality and lacking nuance, too many of those on "my side" now deny all sorts of well verified facts about Musk simply because the reality just doesn't fit with their view that Musk is purest evil, therefore they can't be true. And besides, that article on the internet said so.
The facts are Musk is highly competent at many things, and yes, he was instrumental in creating Tesla and SpaceX, and no he didn't just put up the money. He was instrumental in the technical & business aspects that have led both of those companies to the undeniably incredible successes they've had to date. It's also a fact that his reason for getting involved with Tesla and starting SpaceX were to try and ensure a better future for human society. In other words, his ethics aren't uniformly bad (and really who's are?), he's very smart and he's very capable of making very long term plans and working very hard to make progress towards them. It's not necessary to approve of Musk's ethics, or to like him, in order to accept those facts and rewriting history in order to justify hatred of a person is stupid, because GIGO, and it's unethical too. That's what the bad guys do, we aren't supposed to do that.
the revelation that, with just the right set of incantations, you can summon to life these otherwise inert machines and get them to do your bidding.
I learned BASIC in high school using a teletype to a mainframe. I can tell you my experience was essentially the same. It seemed magical.
I also happened to be taking HS geometry that same year. Two column proofs and the game of "proving theorems" was the focus. What hit me early on is how similar these incantations were. All of them. That was the year I realized mathematics wasn't really about calculations. Doing the numbers was simply how you played the game.
The coding magic burned out for me as a freshman in college when I took a COBOL class and spent thirty hours trying to debug a program, but I never forgot the power.
scidata,
It's because of Kasparov and others like him that I use the term 'centaur' to describe our relationships with computers.
PSB there are many good reasons to have the representative choose her/his/their/eire own scince adviser. If it is imposed on them it becomes elitist oppression. If they may choose their own from the home district, then refusing INSULTS the home district, implying they could not find anyone.
Choosing ANYONE takes away from them the refusal to answer questions with "I am not a scientist." Now someone in their circle is behooved to stand and answer questions. If it is a lame-o idiot or dogmatist, that comes out, under on-camera questioning.
If it is even a community college prof who has some cogency and knowledge - even a devout Christian or conservative - then they WILL break from the dogmatic stance at least partly and the needle will move.
finally, if the rep chooses, then the Science Congress has some legitimacy rooted in the will of the voters. That council can THEN choose the top councillors. But there are no advantages to your approach. It would kill the idea from the start.
Darrell E:
As far as Elon Musk, I'm generally embarrassed by how "my side" has seemingly lost their minds about Musk. I get that his apparent political views and actions are shitty. I agree, they are. ...
But exactly like "my side" so often accuses others of denying reality and lacking nuance, too many of those on "my side" now deny all sorts of well verified facts about Musk simply because the reality just doesn't fit with their view that Musk is purest evil,
I believe that I am on "your side" as you mean that. I don't think Musk is evil by nature. What I take issue with is that he has chosen to use his powers for evil. That he was once a humanitarian only makes that worse. If he hasn't deliberately chosen to cause harm, then he's proving himself to be a "useful idiot", no matter how intelligent he actually is. And his money and influence, especially as king of Twitter, make him a very useful one.
His involvement in social media and politics proves the truism that just because someone is a genius in one area doesn't mean he's an authority on other areas. Michael Jordan was (maybe still is) the greatest basketball player ever, but when he tried to do baseball, he couldn't make it in the major leagues.
Darrell E,
Amen.
Now I have to make a few adjustments in the mental model I built to try to understand you. Your last post thrashed it good. Thank you for the opportunity to correct it.
Re: Musk
He is once again the richest man in the world (good year for Tesla, bad year for Arnault). I think I could straighten him out with a 10 minute talk. Why? Because he once broke into tears at the lack of moral support for early SpaceX from venerable NASA astronauts. I'm not at all comparing him to me, but I get the heartbreak and betrayal. Doctrine and authority form a mean SOB.
I learned BASIC in high school using a teletype to a mainframe. I can tell you my experience was essentially the same. It seemed magical.
I learned BASIC the same way, but I don't remember it seeming magical. Neat, sure, but not magical.
Dr. Brin,
All very good points. The only problem, I see is that to at least 70 million Americans, truth is what they want it to be. If you give sacks o' shit like Jim Jordan a hack "scientist" to back up his lies, it gives them the appearance of legitimacy. And if 100,000 other scientists point out that the hack is lying, those 70 million people will roll their eyes and tell all their church buddies that no one can trust scientists because they never agree about anything. We can talk about false equivalences forever, but the undervaluing of education has gotten so bad that vast numbers of people don't even know what science is, and trust their preachers to opine on scientific subjects.
Would it work to pack the Scientific Congress with as many legitimate scientists as hacks? That way when the half of hacks that vote one way and all the real scientists vote with the other hacks, it would help to show which side actually has some scientific legitimacy.
What do you think?
PSB
Re: Musk and Twitter. Always bear in mind who his underwriters were.
PSB a hack appointed by a gop rep would be far more easily confronted with a direct remand to test specific assertions, e.g. re ocean acidification. The rep himself can dofge that, his chosen 'science guy' cannot.
I agree it won't change enveryone. It doesn't have to. We need only peel a couple million marginally sane GOPpers to collapse the entire confederate anti-science edifice.
Dr. Brin,
I hope so. Liars usually don't get far in scientific communities. But then, the tobacco industry used to have a whole lot of fake and/or corrupted scientists, and it worked for decades.
And why is it that GOP congress creatures can get away with saying they aren't scientists, and yet still pontificate and legislate on scientific subjects they clearly and admittedly don't comprehend?
PSB
I do not buy the idea that Musk has become in any way "evil"
His continual hard work to make this planet better for all of us and to make the riches of the solar system available massively hugely outweighs his dubious activities on Twitter
And the fact that he has these "bad" political views is at least 90% down to the way "Liberal establishment" has treated him
In a lot of ways our "Liberal Establishment" is like a modern equivalent of CP Snows "Two Cultures"
Not sure what they study in the place of "the classics" but they do have a similar distain for people who actually DO THINGS
Tell that to those of us in the Transgender population who have seen a rise in horrific language against us which is ignored, while any attempts by transgender people to protect themselves results in our deletion from Twitter. Oh, and Musk's own opinion that giving transgender children puberty blockers should result in the doctors going to jail - despite the fact puberty blockers has been shown in cishet children to cause no harm and helps reduce suicide rates in trans children. Musk is a horrific person. And he could die tomorrow and SpaceX would be none-the-worse as a result, because the engineers created those rockets, not Musk.
Oh, and his electric cars are trash. If you want to have Tesla continue to upkeep your car you have to sign an NDA about any and all problems you suffer with your car. But the secret is slowly coming out and non-Tesla electric cars are proving to be superior to his vehicles.
Acacia H.
From the same op-ed on coding I referenced earlier...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/opinion/ai-coding.html
Over much of the history of computing, coding has been on a path toward increasing simplicity. Once, only the small priesthood of scientists who understood binary bits of 1s of 0s could manipulate computers. Over time, from the development of assembly language through more human-readable languages like C and Python and Java, programming has climbed what computer scientists call increasing levels of abstraction — at each step growing more removed from the electronic guts of computing and more approachable to the people who use them.
A.I. might now be enabling the final layer of abstraction: The level on which you can tell a computer to do something the same way you’d tell another human.
What he's describing is the Second Law of Robotics writ large. And no, it's not about making slaves of a sentient being. It's about a next-next-next level of programming language using commands that are virtually indistinguishable from imperatives in human language.
onward
onward
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