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I Am Deleting the Blog

slatestarcodex.com

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#981

Post by zozbot234 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #980
lliamander wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've seen anyone right-of-center have anything really bad to say about Scott. I doubt any of those outlets (Breitbart, etc.) would want to do that to him. This may itself be reason for some people to distrust Scott, except that he's probably done more to bring people to a moderate or left-of-center position on some topics than all the people shouting "racist!" combined.

I think this is just because the right is on the cultural defensive right now. Most people are really bad people; they don't process liberal principles intended to protect the powerless (on any dimension) as anything but a hollow tool, to be used when they're being protected and ignored (to the extent possible) when they want to crush their enemies. That is to say, those who are culturally out of power _need_ to act…

> In the GWB years of an ascendant cultural right, Scott would have likely faced the same threats from the right as he does from the left, over different issues.

The rationalist/secularist/etc. community was around back then, and that didn't really happen. I agree that a limited incumbent effect does apply, but it seems quite clear that liberal norms and principles really do get more respect on the (non-extreme) right than they do on the left.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#983

Post by Palptine »

zozbot234 wrote: post #875
Palptine wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?

Just curious, but what "error" did the original tweeter make? Did anyone really expect the model to accurately reconstruct the original photo starting from a pixelated mess? That makes no sense to anyone with even a passing knowledge of ML. You're always going to get craploads of bias and variance (i.e. blatant inaccuracy, over and above the bias) in such a setting, even starting from "ideal, unbiased" data. The prob…

Yeah I get your point. But I guess for this model you can kinda have a concept of the "ideal" training set, where all high frequency features appear at the same rate as in real world.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#984

Post by lliamander »

wutbrodo wrote: post #980
lliamander wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've seen anyone right-of-center have anything really bad to say about Scott. I doubt any of those outlets (Breitbart, etc.) would want to do that to him. This may itself be reason for some people to distrust Scott, except that he's probably done more to bring people to a moderate or left-of-center position on some topics than all the people shouting "racist!" combined.

I think this is just because the right is on the cultural defensive right now. Most people are really bad people; they don't process liberal principles intended to protect the powerless (on any dimension) as anything but a hollow tool, to be used when they're being protected and ignored (to the extent possible) when they want to crush their enemies. That is to say, those who are culturally out of power _need_ to act…

> In the GWB years of an ascendant cultural right, Scott would have likely faced the same threats from the right as he does from the left, over different issues.

I agree with your general point about power, but I disagree where cultural power has been historically. Consider, when was the last time the NYT was not the paper of record?

If anything, the cultural right is far more powerful now than it has ever been - at least since Barry Goldwater. And it still isn't on top, but that seems to be the current trajectory.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#985

Post by vl »

tinyhouse wrote: post #578
gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him an…

>will request FB to fire him... (which thankfully won't happen)

Corporations don't fire this fast, give it couple weeks and he will move to other position "for personal reasons", where he will rest-and-vest for the few months, before finally being let go.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#986

Post by occamsrazorwit »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #855
kopochameleon wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly in https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/women-gaming-stream... from today they seem to possibly withhold discoverable legal names: > (The streamers did not provide their legal names to The New York Times. In years past, women gamers who have spoken out against the industry using their legal names have been subjected to further harassment, hacking and doxxing.)

One wonders what criteria the Times must be using to determine that it's worth putting Scott at credible risk for further harassment but not women gamers. Is the Times really more sympathetic to gamers than psychiatrists or bloggers? That seems like an unlikely policy, but what else could explain it? I'm stumped.

I'm surprised no one brought up the possible explanation that those female gamers are anonymous while Slate Star Codex is pseudonymous, not anonymous. If you read his post carefully, he mentions that his identity is actually public knowledge. His main concern is with NYT drawing attention to this, making him a public figure and making it "too easy". His entire thing is protecting pseudonymity, not anonymity.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#987

Post by spats1990 »

norswap wrote: post #364
shalmanese wrote: post #61

I had no idea The Last Psychiatrist stopped writing because he got doxxed. I enjoyed his blog and was sad it stopped updating.

psst: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/ Might or might not be the same guy, but it's close enough to not matter.

That isn't TLP, it's one of TLP's millennial disciples. They mentioned working as a trainee doc in the ER but TLP was a psychiatrist at a large university hospital.

Also I don't think TLP quit because he was doxxed necessarily. If that were the case, he wouldn't have kept paying the site hosting fees all this time. I think he decided the blog had become too much about his identity as a sort of minor messiah figure in the eyes of his readers, which is sort of against the founding principles of the blog itself. The character or voice he created for the blog was gaining too much power. Having his real name revealed was only a secondary concern.

He probably still writes somewhere though... probably, he's a well-respected/beloved voice on some obscure phpBB board or similar (real TLP heads will know he used to read/post on Metafilter back in the day.)

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#988

Post by norswap »

recursive wrote: post #953
norswap wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

psst: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/ Might or might not be the same guy, but it's close enough to not matter.

Trying to make sense of this reminds me of reading monad tutorials. To dense with references (self- and otherwise) and analogy for me to make sense of. It's definitely possible I'm just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?

The style is one of the appeal (without being the totality of it - I definitely would like the straigth version as well).

Personally for instance, I read "Shame & Society" once, found it fascinating, but couldn't really pinpoint what I had learned, so I re-read it and took notes, as well as try to summarize and articulate the big points and how they related.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#990

Post by phkahler »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #865
phkahler wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Tim Ferris said it well: "The point is this: you don’t need to do anything wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audience." And that is why we need to abolish anonymity on the internet and ensure traceability. If people can trace threats and harassment, it either won't happen or can be reported.

That's a lot of trust in the government. It's also the exact opposite of what the whole blog post is about, preserving anonymity.

>> That's a lot of trust in the government.

I'd prefer to keep them out of it. I'd prefer technical solutions that ensure we can find out where packets, email, or phone calls come from.

>> It's also the exact opposite of what the whole blog post is about, preserving anonymity.

I imagine a world where you can be annoymous, just not by default. A blogger might use a pseudonym, but refuse incoming comments lacking tracability.

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