Reality has a well-known leftist bias. If you want to convince people that inequality, high carbon emissions and austerity are good for them, you need to get them to abandon reality.
That's actually easier than you'd think.
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Reality is hard to know. Are 737 Maxes safe? Should you wear a mask? Are vaccines safe? Is your kid's distance ed any good?
These are all questions that can only be answered by mastering multiple disciplines, reviewing the literature, checking the math in the papers, etc.
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To know reality, we rely not on experts, but on expert PROCESSES: the regulatory truth-seeking exercises in which neutral experts hear competing claims from other experts and adjudicate them, showing their work and disqualifying themselves if they have conflicts.
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Maybe you can't evaluate microbiology claims, but you should be able to figure out whether the process they used to arrive at those claims was fair, neutral, transparent, and subject to review when new evidence emerges.
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If you want to make the truth unknowable, you don't start by convincing people of wrong things, you start by making it hard to know whether ANYTHING is true.
Look at Vladislav Surkov, who was Putin's long-serving disinformation guy.
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Surkov's signature move was boasting that he secretly funded SOME opposition groups, but never saying which ones were inauthentic and which ones were the true opposition.
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Whenever a opposition group came out with a claim about Putin, instead of arguing about the claim, people would argue about the group's authenticity. They didn't just disagree on what was true: they disagreed on how anyone could know if something WAS true.
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Writing in the @DeSmogBlog, Tom Perrett runs down the history of the Koch brothers' "academic philanthropy," showing it to be a series of shrewd investments in in Surkov-style disinformation.
Koch executives call this "investment in intellectual raw materials" that support its corporate goals. Koch investments in the Mercatus Center at GMU and the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State and elsewhere have paid off handsomely.
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A quarter-century of expensively purchased scholarship has created an epistemological chaos that support denial about economic fairness, the climate emergency, a public sphere, and other obvious facts that are now, incredibly, in doubt.
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Perrett: "Koch funding in academia and think tanks has broader implications for policy implementation, as state governments routinely rely on the state university systems to provide independent analyses of issues before the legislature and agencies...
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"And advocacy groups use academic findings to bolster lobbying and public campaigns."
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As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes - like space colonization - have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.
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I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor.
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Residents of 21 Utah cities have some of the fastest, cheapest broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/mo. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading *and* downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.
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Of course this is delivered via fiber optic. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable caps out at 50gb/s - fiber is *1,000* times faster:
When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.
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I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong - as a matter of law - to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright.
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Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
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Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:
The "Tragedy" hoax said that moving land from collective ownership "rescued" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who cared for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.
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But *unsubscribing* from Prime? That's a fucking *nightmare*. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave.
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