I don't think that hearing conservatives out changes politics at all, as if it's some kind of political version of Schrödinger's cat. And respecting conservatives viewpoints doesn't give them a seat at the table, because they have one whether you want them to or not. I'm not interested in respecting conservatives as some kind of quid pro quo. I don't expect liberals will get something in return for "respect". The primary value is egotisical. Talking to people with different political views expands *my* world; it expands my appreciation for what motivates people; it makes me question my ideological commitments and my opinions. And it's just way more interesting and refreshing to hear people express views that are different from the boring predictable opinions I find on lefty-Twitter.

Democracy means that people with very different goals and priorities are trying to find a way to live together. It means living alongside people you fundamentally disagree with and even hate. Nobody gets to decide that 'Republicans will be removed from office', as Reid proposed. They're here, they win seats in congress, it's a fact of life, get used to it. In the meantime, it doesn't hurt not to be parochial.

I did.

Good luck using conservatives to expand your viewpoint when they aren’t even honest with you about what they hope their suggested policies will even do.

I believe the GOP senators who said they didn't read the tax bill before they voted for it.

I don't know why you and Reid seem to think I'm attributing reason to conservatives. I'm intrigued to know why conservatives think how they think. But the reasons why people think what they think aren't necessarily reasonable or rational.

The reasons the business right thinks what they think are reasonable and rational, they’re just irrationally presenting an unreasonable fictional version of those reasons because the real reasonable rational reasons are unpopular rationalizations among reasonable people.

Maybe because you read them and take them at face value.

Yup. I don't think we really disagree here.

Edit: that's actually exactly what I think.

So whydya act all annoyed when I don't take conservatives seriously and want them removed from power? I get you are pessimistic, but why do you constantly show resistance to people who want to remove these people pushing for indefensible policy?

You can be sarcastic all you want. I think we've shown unequivocally that your defense of conservatism was unsustainable, and you had no backbone in defending your views, basically crumpling down to the position "I like reading the lies because it gives me the false impression of expanding my understanding".

As I said, since you're a self-declared man of action, I leave it to you to figure out how to impeach every Republican in the federal government from office. You'll face quite a bit of resistance, because Republicans are not going to stop voting Republican, because, after all, they disagree with you about how the country should be run, and they'll push back against you. But no: if you think you can implement one-party rule I think you should do it.

I would've been fine if Obama was elected dictator in 2008 and could've done whatever he wanted for 16 years, or whatever. I trust him. I'm sure he would've been a benevolent dictator. But it doesn't matter that I'd be ok with that, because it's not the country we live in. We live in a country that elected a GOP government in 2016, because that's what people wanted.

Don't you want to know why??

I'm not going to respond to these bushleague quips that I'm "defending" conservatism. We already rode that carousel.

"Wanting to remove Republicans from power is the same as wanting a dictatorship" - someone who actually said that once, surprisingly

Look, i think you should definitely vote Democrat. I plan to. I just don't know what you're going to do about all those evangelical redneck gun-toting anti-PC shareholders of FANG stocks who will vote Republican.

Jon (or anyone else): you have any idea how Cambridge Analytica collected all this Facebook data? Did they do it web scraping? Or did they take advantage of the Facebook API to automate collecting data? Aside from selling the data, it doesn't seem like Facebook really did anything wrong here, and that it's a gross exaggeration to call what happened a "breach", since it didn't involve a compromise of Facebook's security. Most of the articles I've been reading about this story are written by people who know even less about software than I do.

Found it:



https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/facebook-cambridge-analytica/555866/

Cambridge Analytica set up dev accounts under various nom de guerre and published content, like personality tests, which people shared. Then they used Facebook's standard API to extract in-depth behavioral information about those users and their friends. You're correct that it wasn't a breach; everything at Facebook worked exactly as designed.

That's what Facebook did wrong here, by the way. They existed.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/15/austin-package-bombs/

Oh hey, looks like someone's putting package unabombs on the doorsteps of people in Texas.

Barf.

What's worse is I saw a comment saying it was "Adam Smith". I don't know how much crank that person smoked but Adam Smith did not say the driving force of economic growth is innovation..

Who let this get into the final draft of this article? Am I reading a live journal?

Dunno, I thought it was a pretty pisspoor article too, I was more interested in the information therein.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/us/austin-bombings-police-motive.html

There was a 4th bomb, if you're curious to read a better-written article.

The editor in me couldn't let that go without comment.

Seems bad. Difficult to place into a political narrative that makes the violence meaningful, which makes it seem more nihilistic (and menacing). It doesn't seem very important that Trump isn't tweeting about it.

Yeah, I don't see the reason to tie it back into Trump, either.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeVF1UjiwTSNRpXBTB2sOCtP4f8LRMIDCbJ9lXemFoDz--NhQ/viewanalytics

So, /r/neoliberal on Reddit did a survey. Turns out, the demographics supporting neoliberalism are exactly who you'd expect: privileged, educated urban white guys who are rabidly pro-Clinton. They're basically people nodding along with Clinton and have no problems with what she says. Silicon Valley Randians.

The world is so basic and uninteresting sometimes.

https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation

So..

Uh... they did this survey over reddit in a subreddit that's primarily devoted to "neoliberal memes"? Again, reddit users are a specific demographic that I suspect skews male pretty hard (and likely white as well). I don't think this is particularly meaningful or representative.

I was gonna say...


I would be surprised if there is a statistically significant difference between the respondents to this survey and any other subreddit.

True. NVM.

https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-donald-trump-data-firm-cambridge-analytica

**** Russia, this is the real election meddling. This is why I call so many American political beliefs "artificial", as well.

And you can't put all of the blame on Citizen's United/SuperPAC laws. This kinda stuff is as American as apple pie. Conspirators work very hard people to con people into their beliefs.

I didn't follow the discussion here, but this has been bothering me since I noticed it. I know you were trying to make a point unrelated to physics, but I think this is a pretty bad example and is unnecessarily negative toward Stephen Hawking, because:

1. Stephen Hawking absolutely has earned his fame among physicists. His work is foundational in black hole thermodynamics and is an indispensable tool in any theory of quantum gravity.
2. The public may 'overrate' Hawking, if we are going to start 'ranking' physicists. But the same public also overrates any number of other physicists who have communicated popular accounts of physics, like Neil deGrasse Tyson. They even overrate Albert Einstein. It could be that Hawking was overrated because he was in a wheelchair, or maybe it's just that he wrote some best-selling books? It's certainly possible that his image as a disabled person earned the attention of the public long enough for it to create interest in his books, but I'm pretty sure we can say the exact same thing about Einstein's crazy hair.

For example, how many people who cite Einstein's principle of relativity (merely to use it as a cheap rhetorical device) actually know a damned thing about space-time physics? And yet initially, the public may well have read about relativity (but misinterpreted it) in a popular physics book written by Einstein himself.

Here's what a leading quantum gravity theorist has to say about the subject of black hole thermodynamics:

[quote=Steve Carlip]
Thanks to the work of Hawking and Bekenstein, we have known for 25 years that black holes are thermal objects, with characteristic temperatures, entropies, and radiation spectra. But we still do not really understand why black holes behave this way -- we don't know what microscopic quantum states are responsible for the "statistical mechanics" that leads to these thermodynamic properties. This problem serves as a key test for any attempt to quantize gravity: a model that cannot reproduce the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for a black hole in terms of microscopic quantum gravitational states is unlikely to be right.

An important focus of my recent work here has been an attempt to understand how much of the statistical mechanics of black holes can be determined purely from general symmetries, independent of the details of quantum gravity. I have shown that a symmetry mechanism is at least plausible. (Here and here are some papers, and here is a review.) This idea would help explain one of the mysteries of this field, sometimes called the problem of universality: the fact that very different approaches to quantum gravity, with different starting points and different underlying degrees of freedom, all seem to give the same answer. This overview won the 2007 Gravity Research Foundation essay prize; here is a less technical summary.

Another interesting issue is whether "quasinormal modes" -- the damped oscillations of a disturbed black hole -- can tell us anything about black hole quantum mechanics. I've written two papers on this subject, one on (2+1)-dimensional black holes and another on the higher-dimensional black holes that are understood in string theory.
[/quote]

Source: http://carlip.physics.ucdavis.edu/

In other words, in a subject where we have hardly any clue at all as to how to proceed, we have Stephen Hawking to thank for providing one of the few tests at our disposal to rule out bogus theories. And Hawking (with Penrose) did it by proceeding along very general principles of symmetry, at a time when everybody else was simply looking for exact solutions to Einstein's equations (whereas Hawking and Penrose showed the existence of singularities under very general conditions).

I know you meant "overrated by the public", but the thing is that the public is notoriously bad at rating scientists anyway, even before you take disability into account. And within science, the idea of having such ratings becomes harder and harder to justify, since unless you're somebody like Richard Feynman, it's really hard to argue which of two scientists are "better", when their contributions are to entirely different subfields!

Anyway I know you were trying to make some other point, and this is just a minor quibble in context.

Stephen Hawking was a talented theoretical physicist and very important, as you pointed out, in some areas. AFAIK, none of it has been important outside of that subfield, and doesn't seem to have any wider implications. There have been plenty of able-bodied physicsts, with work as important as his, as talented as Stephen Hawking that nobody can name.

That's not to say he didn't overcome many important challenges with his disabilities. He quite clearly did, and that in itself is worth acknowledging. But despite that, people tend to overestimate his importance in physics due to some kind of visibility bias, that, since he's talked about, his work must matter, when in physics he's more of a footnote than a header. But later on, he basically stopped doing even that work, and became mostly a dilettante offering his opinion on a bunch of crap that he had no business talking about. Which seems to be a common trend among ~science popularizing physicists~. It all feeds back into American mythology on genius, that a has-been theoretical physicist should have any opinion on e.g. AI about which anyone should give a damn.

But more to the point, people love having people with "pet disabilities". While there's often some shred of good intention in these kinds of things, think more deeply about these kinds of things:


Special Needs Oregon Student Wins Prom Queen Crown in Landslide

What's really going on in this kind of thing? I don't think it's a bad thing that this happens. But what I'm asking for is an investigation of motives: why do people do it? The intent of prom king/prom queen is to elect people who are popular, it's by its nature a very shallow, vain affair. So I think it's the case there's an inversion of morality going on. In judging popularity contests as bad, people then say: we aren't going to vote for the popular kids, let's instead vote for what's not that! In doing so, people are seeking a type of transcendence from everyday, practical morality. Everybody who made the vote is given total permission to judge themselves as a moral person, transcendent to the fakeness of human society.

This orgiastic feeling of transcendent morality is a self-deception. It takes disability and uses it to fuel one's own ego, and can sometimes come out of a resentful place.

But more to the point: what would an actually moral action look like here? How many people do you think maintained friendships or include her in activities outside of prom? How many show her attention or friendship on a daily basis? How many follow up after they graduated? I would be shocked to find out any of these people maintain any contact or support after that night. And most likely, Katie will go on for much of her life starved for these sorts of intimate relationships.

If any of these people had devotion to making Katie's life better, then there's a way to do that: show her love and respect on a consistent schedule, and stay committed to it.

How many people do you think did that? Lol. Ain't nobody got time for that.

And that's why I find much of the way we talk about disabilities morally repugnant. Not because electing someone with disabilities prom queen is in itself bad, but because it stands in contrast to how little anyone gives a **** about them any other time.

Actual morality takes time and effort. It's hard. You don't become a moral person by making a person the center of attention for a few hours. If you want to do something that actually matters for people with disabilities, go donate time.

In metaphor: the relationship the public has to disability is the relationship a ****boy has to Tinder dates. There's no commitment, just the need to get something off.

Much of the talk about Stephen Hawking feeds into that need people have to feel transcendentally moral. If people actually respected Hawking as a physicist, they wouldn't have to pretend his work is more relevant than it actually is: which is to say, outside of a pretty narrow subfield in one area of physics, not very relevant. From my understanding a typical Master's level physicists won't have seen a single bit of his work. His popularity was undeniably fueled in part by his spectacle. But more to the point: ideally, people wouldn't class him differently as a physicist because of his disability. But that seems to be the case. People ought to think more about their understanding of disability and their relationships with people who have disabilities a bit more.

On a side note, much of the talk about disabilities is really offensive. E.G. whenever people talk about how "pure" and "innocent" they are. Or how "inspirational" they are (a peculiar choice of word: are you inspired to become disabled so you can overcome it, or are you inspired to appreciate not being disabled?) Infantilizing language is bad.

This is an example of how to speak about disability:


Not directed at anyone here, of course. Just at culture in general.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your point, Reid, but you know what people mean when they say that. They just mean it's inspiring how the person has overcome adversity. That it may inspire them to attempt to overcome adversity. Not that it would inspire them to try to overcome a disability they don't possess.

That's bull**** Reid. Stephen Hawking is not a footnote at all in cosmology and quantum gravity. You clearly don't know much about 20th century astrophysics, or else you wouldn't be making such ignorant and insufferable condescending comments just because you resent the fact that his disability made him an icon among the general public. The fact that the general public is ignorant about the work of most physicists doesn't diminish the groundbreaking contributions of Hawking and Penrose.

Is Feynman overrated because people don't pay attention to Julian Schwinger? Or is Einstein overrated because people don't pay attention to Minkowski, Gauss, or Maxwell? Probably, but who cares? Science is cumulative, and some people become icons, and others don't. It's based on arbitrary things like charisma (in the case of Feynman), or even disability (Hawking). But to somehow resent this or to diminish the contributions of the ones that capture the public imagination, well, this is just petty and wrong.

But speaking of footnotes, it's actually Hawking's disability that will be a footnote. In the 24th century when people study cosmology, when Hawking's work continues to be referenced, very few people will care that he was in a wheelchair, whereas the contributions bearing his name will keep their currency. About the only thing that could make his work a footnote would be if his theoretical contributions were completely overturned or contradicted by new theory or experiment to the point of being useless, which hasn't happened yet.

Calm down, boy.