Some philosophers seem to have lost touch with reality.

Bruno Latour (RIP) was a proponent of the idea that everything is a social construction. This leads to stuff like:

“Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were. This means [...]

And consequently politics is misdirected.

I am mostly not going to provide evidence, I am going to let you try to contradict me with yours.

Homo economicus: the idea that a person’s behavior is guided by maximizing self-interest. Together with the assumption that transaction costs are negligible this leads to incorrect modeling of real behavior. [...]

I wrote this in reaction to the growing control of health care by Catholic organizations (41% or more of facilities in Washington State), most recently the merger of Virginia Mason and CHI Franciscan. Access to birth control healthcare is increasingly limited. Inaccessible and illegal are indistinguishable.

Kuttner on TAP reports that Oberlin college has outsourced [...]

Copyright and patent law were instituted as a way to reward and incentivize people who contribute to the public good – literature, music, art, artifice, technology advances, medicines, and on and on.

It was well intentioned but it has failed. There are works lost to the public because the copyright holder (who may be long [...]

from an email threada about self-driving cars, I wrote a couple of short pieces on AI.

On the main point: a custom road designed for cars that can navigate it is called a railroad.

Now about AI:

AI today is neither A nor I

Sunday, October 9, 2022

12:40 PM

AI has been just 10 [...]

This is going to be very offensive to some people. I hope so.

Let’s do a thought experiment. These can be very illuminating. Einstein used them to good effect.

The boss of Nestle has said that water should be a commodity to be bought and sold. They have a near monopoly on distribution, including Perrier [...]

War activists, like peace activists, push for an agenda.  We don’t think of them as activists because they rotate in and out of government positions, receive huge amounts of funding, have access to big media, and get meetings with top officials just by asking — without having to generate a protest first.

– War [...]

We already know, Mr. Anderson, that humans are weak creatures. They are, after all, susceptible to poisoning from mere chemical compounds that a superior being such as a machine would routinely ignore.

Now, before I continue to share this revelation, some background is in order. There is, of course, a certain political faction in American [...]

I haven’t been known, Mister Anderson, to have the highest opinion of the logical reason capability of humans in general. But sometimes, Republicans have a way of dashing even my lowest expectations. I submit as evidence this story from Kaiser Health News:

One of my favorite sayings is, “never send a human to do a machine’s job.” However, I may be forced to admit that I must make an exception for Senator Elizabeth Warren–presuming, of course, that Warren is not actually herself a machine. We’ve been watching Warren for some time now, but in compiling her dossier we somehow missed her mockery of Larry Summers in 2009:

I wrote some about this earlier, but humans are not known for their attentions spans, so here’s a follow-up. At the Great Orange Satan, Joan McCarter has a video of a tea-flavored town hall with Congressman Robert Pittenger (R-NC), wherein he expresses his disagreement with the tactic of shutting down the entire government just to “defund ObamaCare.” Needless to say, his audience is not pleased.

This is a fascinating post, written by the guy who was the first speaker at the first-ever meeting of the Tea Party Caucus of the Republican House. It provides insight into why the fringes of what calls itself the conservative movement is suddenly frothing at the proverbial mouth to hold the federal budget hostage to a silly demand to “defund ObamaCare.”

David Dayen, a frighteningly intelligent individual and one of the netroots’ resident experts on mortgage fraud and housing policy, has 20 questions about President Obama’s agenda on housing policy. They’re all notable and excellent, yes, but allow me to highlight a few for your erudition:

What happened to jobs? The pubic wants government to do something about jobs and getting the economy moving, and in DC the only thing is this weird argument about … anything but jobs and getting the economy moving! “Fiscal cliff?” What about jobs? Fixing the economy will fix the debt, not the other way around.

[...]

The Romney campaign has turned to a strategy of swamping the public with flat-out, blatant lies, one after another, again and again, endlessly and lavishly repeated. They do this because they are making a calculation that it will work! So what is going on? And can democracy survive this assault?

The Growing List Of [...]

The New York Times contains another elite-columnist attack on our Social Security and Medicare systems today. This time it’s in the form of an op-ed by Bill Keller. Recently and regularly, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Tom Friedman have also gone after the things We, [...]

The Romney campaign has released an astonishingly deceptive new ad, containing a blatant, flat-out lie. The new ad actually edits together snippets of words and sentences to make it sound as if President Obama said something he did not say, and then attacks him for saying it. How will America’s news media respond? [...]

“Coca-Cola argues that there is not a scientific link between obesity and sugary drinks.”

OK I’ve had it with this shit. I’m at Netroots Nation and really busy, but can someone start a petition campaign to just fucking pull this company’s corporate charter? There is no reason We, the People should tolerate this. [...]