Mixed bag

This election is different

Ezra Klein, There’s Something Very Different About Harris vs. Trump, NYTimes, Nov. 3, 2024.

To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side “Woke Inc.” and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

There's more at the link.

Life inside a Japanese prison

Witness

91.7 K subscribers

What's Life Like Inside A Japanese Prison? | Witness | HD Japan Jail Crime Documentary

From the YouTube page:

We gained unprecedented filming access to two Japanese prisons to find out if accusations that the system is inhumane are true.

What we witnessed was staggering. Inmates must march to their worksites attached by a cord; they are not allowed to look the guards in the eye; outside of scheduled leisure hours, they must maintain absolute silence, unless they have obtained prior permission to speak.

The treatment of suspects in custody pushes many to confess to crimes which they did not commit, as was the case with one man who spent 46 years on death row. He was finally exonerated six years ago, but was left broken.

We try to explain why a country which operates on strict principles of balance and order might choose such a repressive system, and see if this may explain Japan having one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

This documentary was produced by Nova Prod and directed by Marie Linton. It was first released in 2020.

The documentary talks about, and shows footage of, Carlos Ghosn. From his Wikipedia entry:

...a businessman and former automotive executive. He was the Chief Executive Office (CEO) of Michelin North America, chairman and CEO of Renault, chairman of AvtoVAZ, chairman and CEO of Nissan, and chairman of Mitsubishi Motors.

In 2018, he was arrested in Japan on suspicion of financial misconduct at Nissan, having been accused of understating his annual salary and misusing company funds. In 2019, while under house arrest awaiting trial, he escaped from Japan by concealing himself inside a large box which was shipped as freight on a private jet.

A Girardian Note about Spartacus [Media Notes 140]

I saw Spartacus when it came out in 1960. The movie led me to the book, which I read quickly. I believe I stayed up reading it most of a night, but I don’t remember whether or not I finished it at that time. I also bought the soundtrack album.

As you may know, the novel and film are about a slave revolt in ancient Rome in the first century BC. Did I know that back then? I don’t know. Does that matter? Probably not. But it matters for my current purposes. It matters because the most Girardian aspect of the film/novel is not in the historical record. Howard Fast invented it.

Let me explain.

Early in the film we see gladiators training. These men are slaves. They are engaging in exercises where they make the same moves. Are they imitating one another, or a model that we’ve not seen? I’m not sure it matters much, for, whatever the model, the imitation is deliberate and conscious. Girardian mimesis is unconscious.

A bit later Spartacus – based on a real person – attacks the trainer. Others join in, they overpower the guards, and escape the ludus, the gladiatorial school. They rove the countryside; other slaves join them. In time their force becomes quite large, with thousands and tens of thousands joining them.

The Roman Senate sends a force against the rebels. The force is defeated. The rebellion gathers strength. There is much politicking in Rome and Marcus Licinius Crassus is made First Consul and given charge of the Roman army. He defeats the slaves. This leads to a scene where Crassus addresses the defeated slaves. While Spartacus is directly in front of him, Crassus doesn’t know that. He informs the slave that they will not be put to death, but be allowed to live, albeit as slaves, provided either that Spartacus identifies himself or that they identify him. Spartacus is about to identify himself when his friend, Antoninus, quickly asserts “I’m Spartacus.” The other men quickly join in, each proclaiming himself to be Spartacus.

Imitation? Yes, but deliberate, conscious imitation. Nor does it lead them into conflict with one another. It is an expression of solidarity.

And it drives Crassus nuts. Meanwhile Crassus had found Varinia, Spartacus’ wife, on the field after the battle. He takes her into his household and attempts, unsuccessfully, to seduce her. She rejects him.

Now THAT’s Girardian mimetic desire. Crassus doesn’t even know which of those defeated slaves (dead or alive) is Spartacus. He only knows that Spartacus led them, and that this woman was his wife. Crassus desires Varinia (only) because she was wife to this rebel leader. His desire is sparked by an idea in his mind, not by envy for a concrete human being whom he identifies. 

Note that Varinia is not in the historical record. Howard Fast invented her when he wrote the novel in 1951. It's as though he added a Girardian critique, or at least a comment, to the existing historical record.

There is, of course, much more to the film that I’ve included in this sketch.

Upstairs

A.I. in Hollywood, Wait and See

Devin Gordon, What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood? NYTimes Magazine, Nov. 1, 2024. From the middle of the article:

Over several months of talking to people around Hollywood about A.I., I noticed a pattern: The people who knew the least about its potential uses in the filmmaking process feared it the most; and the people who understood it best, who had actually worked with it, harbored the most faith in the resilience of human creativity, as well as the most skepticism about generative A.I.’s ever supplanting it. There was a broad consensus about the urgency of confronting its many potential misuses — tech companies’ skirting copyright laws and scraping proprietary content to train their machine-learning models; actors’ likenesses being appropriated without their permission; studios’ circumventing contractual terms designed to ensure that everything we see onscreen gets written by an actual human being. I must’ve heard the phrase “proper guardrails” at least a dozen times. But as the prolific Emmy-winning television director Paris Barclay, who has six episodes of multiple shows airing this fall alone, put it, “That’s what unions are for.”

A bit later:

Then in late August, the California State Senate passed long-gestating, SAG-supported legislation requiring estate consent for A.I.-generated replicas of dead performers.

When I asked one writer-director about the practice, he didn’t even let me finish the question. “Nope, nope, nope, nope,” said Billy Ray, who wrote “Captain Phillips” (2013) and co-wrote the 2012 big-screen adaptation of “The Hunger Games,” and who spent his time during the strike hosting a studio-lambasting podcast. “It’s completely insincere, dishonest filmmaking. It’s a lie.” The counterargument I kept hearing, from artists and from technologists, is that filmmaking is a grand illusion at its core, and we all consent to being tricked — we’re paying to be tricked — when we walk into the theater or turn our phone sideways.

There's much more at the link.

Weeds & water

China Viewed from China | Robert Wright & Peter Hessler [US more militaristic than China]

Timestamps:

0:00 Peter’s new book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education
3:00 Have Chinese people become less hostile to America?
12:48 What Americans get wrong about China
17:14 Why Peter thinks Covid didn’t come from a lab
20:35 China’s transformative recent decades
30:46 Respect for authority in Chinese culture
40:02 Change in China between Peter’s two teaching stints there
54:17 Why the Chinese political system may change dramatically

From late in the conversation (1:01:48)(autogenerated):

yeah and I think you know sometimes we're looking in the mirror a little more than we might realize right I mean so we tend to see China through the lens
of the military right and we have a very militaristic view of China now um but the truth is like the United States is a very militaristic Society um you know and and China is really not right I mean
it's not a this is not a societ I mean it's kind of you know I I talk about those kids I taught in the '90s who became middle class Urban I think I know
one whose kid has something he went to a military college but he's not in the military like you don't Aspire in China
to send your kid into the military it's nothing no Elite for a person who's like Highly Educated whatever want their kid
to do that right but in America I mean I could go to Prince University I knew lots of kids in Princeton who were going to go to the military you know it's a
way to rise in America it's a way to become politically powerful it really isn't the same in China like it's a very different type of society so that's
always been my view also on sort of the Taiwan issue so is like this has not been a society that for the last 40
years the military has not been driving their policy now it often drives our policy in the United States but it has
not been the pattern in China

Publisher's blurb for Other Rivers:

An intimate and revelatory account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, by an author who has observed the country’s tumultuous changes over the past quarter century

More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation,” now in their forties—while teaching current undergrads, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation.

In 1996, when Hessler arrived in China, almost all of the people in his classroom were first-generation college students. They typically came from large rural families, and their parents, subsistence farmers, could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China, as well as a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious cohort of parents. At Sichuan University, many young people had a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigated its restrictions with equanimity, embracing the opportunities of China’s rise. But the pressures of extreme competition at scale can be grueling, even for much younger children—including Hessler’s own daughters, who gave him an intimate view into the experience at their local school.

In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining the country’s past, present, and future, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunt and ugly, Other Rivers is a tremendous, essential gift, a work of enormous empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up. As both a window onto China and a mirror onto America, Other Rivers is a classic from a master of the form.

Mundane

Watching film increases empathic understanding of formerly incarcerated people

Rebecca Keegan, Can Watching Movies Rewire Your Brain? Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024.

Five years later, people are climbing into an MRI machine in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department to see how watching Just Mercy quite literally changes their brains, part of the first academic study using a specific cultural product to measure empathy.

The brain imaging research, which Eberhardt is conducting with fellow Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki, is still underway, but the first phase of the study, which relied on participants watching videos online, hints at the potential of a movie to change minds. According to findings published [PDF] Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, watching Just Mercy increased participants’ empathy for the recently incarcerated and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty.

The study is a test of what psychologists call “narrative transportation,” the idea that when people lose themselves in a story, their attitudes change. It’s the academic version of the frequently shared Roger Ebert quote in which he called movies “a machine that generates empathy,” and it’s a notion that many who work in the entertainment industry assume to be true but that no one has measured in such a scientifically rigorous way until now.

There's more at the link.

Prospects for using LLMs in content moderation for social media

From the YouTube page:

Wherein I am joined by the estimable Dave Willner, who helped build the content moderation system at Meta, who talks me through how and why Facebook has squelched my open letter to former Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, and why my appeal has fallen into a black hole--and how his scheme of using large language models to scale content moderation might do a better job.

The first part of the discussion concerns Ben Wittes' case at Facebook. Willner discusses his work on using LLMs in contentent moderation starting at about 40:30. You might want to start there if you already know something about the content moderation process or have been through it yourself. You can always loop back to the beginning if you're interested.

In the current regime a bit of content may be flagged in response to a user complaint but more likely will be flagged an automatic classification system. If an item of yours is flagged it will be removed and you'll be notified of that and given some general reason, such as violating community standards. As to just which community standard or standards and how your item violates it, you'll be told nothing. You'll also be given an opportunity to appeal. That appeal is likely to be reviewed by a human, but who know if and when that will actually happen.

In an LLM-enhanced content moderation regime, the LLM will be able to provide information about the standards being violated and provide fairly specific reasons why a particular bit of content has been flagged. Moreover the user could enter into a dialog with the system. If that doesn't resolve the issue, then the case could be passed on to a human for review.

This strikes me as a significant opportunity to improve social media. And it seems plausible. Two posts I did back in December of 2022 illustrate the kind of reasoning that would be involved: Abstract concepts and metalingual definition: Does ChatGPT understand justice and charity? (Dec. 16, 2022) – which is included in a working paper: Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons, Version 2 (January 11, 2023), ChatGPT the legal beagle: Concepts, Citizens United, Constitutional Interpretation (December 27, 2022).

Hossenfelder: Wolfram's research program seems healthy (after all). Perhaps it can work.

From the webpage:

Mathematician and Computer Scientist Stephen Wolfram wants to do no less than revolutionizing physics. He wants to do it with computer code that gives rise to all the fundamental laws of nature that we know and like -- and maybe more. Unfortunately, Einstein’s theories of general relativity inherently clash with how computers work. And yet, he and his team might have found a clever way around this problem.

Douthat: Real AI is not like the AI of the movies [bewitched by language]

Ross Douthat, Our Robot Stories Haven’t Prepared Us for A.I., NYTimes, Oct. 26, 2024.

Data the android experiences existential angst because he is obviously a self that is having a humanlike encounter with the strange new worlds that the U.S.S. Enterprise is charged with exploring. Pinocchio has to learn to be a good boy before he becomes a real boy, but his quest for goodness presumes that his puppet self is already in some sense real and self-aware.

Yet that’s not how artificial intelligence is actually progressing. We are not generating machines and bots that exhibit self-awareness at the level of a human being but then struggle to understand our emotional and moral lives. Instead, we’re creating bots that we assume are not self-aware (allowing, yes, for the occasional Google engineer who says otherwise), whose answers to our questions and conversational scripts play out plausibly but without any kind of supervising consciousness.

But those bots have no difficulty whatsoever expressing human-seeming emotionality, inhabiting the roles of friends and lovers, presenting themselves as moral agents. Which means that to the casual user, Dany and all her peers are passing, with flying colors, the test of humanity that our popular culture has trained us to impose on robots. Indeed, in our interactions with them, they appear to be already well beyond where Data and Roz start out — already emotional and moral, already invested with some kind of freedom of thought and action, already potentially maternal or sexual or whatever else we want a fellow self to be.

Which seems like a problem for almost everyone who interacts with them in a sustained way, not just for souls like Sewell Setzer who show a special vulnerability.

No one is ready for the AIs we're currently creating, certainly not the people who've built then. Them are strange creatures. We're all confused, and groping. 

There's more at the link.

Saudi Arabia's plans 15 soccer stadiums for the 2034 World cup

11 stadiums are slated to be built from scratch while 4 existing stadiums will be renovated.

0:00 Kick-off
1:05 King Salman International Stadium
1:48 King Faud Sports City Stadium
2:30 Roshn Stadium
3:20 Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Stadium
4:05 BetterHelp
5:27 Jeddah Central Development Stadium
6:09 Prince Faisal Bin Fahd Sports City Stadium
6:27 King Saud University Stadium
6:45 New Murabba Stadium
7:25 NEOM Stadium
9:19 King Abdullah Economic City Stadium
9:27 King Abdullah Sports City Stadium
9:47 Qiddiya Coast Stadium
10:31 South Riyadh Stadium
10:51 Aramco Stadium
11:47 Human Rights in Construction
12:22 Extra-Time
13:16 Penalties

Assembly Theory and the Nature and Origins of Life [Star Talk]

From the webpage:

What is life? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice tackle assembly theory, artificial life, and the origin of lifeforms in the universe as we revise the definition of life with astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker.

Is life the biological systems we know, or could life exist in ways we have yet to discover? Starting with the familiar—carbon-based life forms— we explore the idea that life may be a universal physical process governed by laws of physics we have yet to uncover.

Is life fundamentally tied to chemistry, or could it be explained by a new kind of physics? Learn about assembly theory and the line between chemistry and when something can be considered alive.

Walker explains how the Miller-Urey experiment sparked a quest to understand life’s origins, but that experiment alone wasn't enough to explain life's complexity. From prebiotic chemistry to evolutionary steps, the discussion teases the thin line between randomness and selection.

Could life be the result of a phase transition, like water turning into ice? We discuss the search for extraterrestrial life and possible alternative biochemistries. Could life exist on other planets with different chemical structures? And what role does complexity play in this grand equation?

As technology advances, can artificial intelligence be considered alive? Could it represent a new form of life, co-evolving alongside humans? Could the future hold life forms and technologies beyond our current imagination? What new laws of physics might emerge from our growing understanding of complexity, evolution, and information?

One thing is certain: the journey to discover life, in all its forms, is just beginning.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction: Sara Imari Walker
5:20 - Updating The Definition of Life
10:10 - Miller-Urey & The Line Between Chemistry and Biology
15:13 - Creating Aliens
20:29 - The Traditional Definition of Life
25:03 - Testing Assembly Theory
29:48 - Is DNA Fundamental?
37:46 - Is AI Alive?
45:20 - Free Will
47:37 - Entropy
50:10 - Life as No One Knows It [Walker's book]
52:58 - A Cosmic Perspective

Just a reminder [white iris]