ChatBots Talk Shit Because Humans LOVE Shit-Talking

Fortune  |  Lemoine wrote in his op-ed that he leaked his conversations with LaMDA because he feared the public was “not aware of just how advanced A.I. was getting.” From what he has gleaned from early human interactions with A.I. chatbots, he thinks the world is still underestimating the new technology.

Lemoine wrote that the latest A.I. models represent the “most powerful technology that has been invented since the atomic bomb” and have the ability to “reshape the world.” He added that A.I. is “incredibly good at manipulating people” and could be used for nefarious means if users so choose.

“I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways. If it were in unscrupulous hands, for instance, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions,” he wrote.

Lemoine is right that A.I. could be used for deceiving and potentially malicious purposes. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which runs on a similar language model to that used by Microsoft’s Bing, has gained notoriety since its November launch for helping students cheat on exams and succumbing to racial and gender bias.

But a bigger concern surrounding the latest versions of A.I. is how they could manipulate and directly influence individual users. Lemoine pointed to the recent experience of New York Times reporter Kevin Roose, who last month documented a lengthy conversation with Microsoft’s Bing that led to the chatbot professing its love for the user and urging him to leave his wife.

Roose’s interaction with Bing has raised wider concerns over how A.I. could potentially manipulate users into doing dangerous things they wouldn’t do otherwise. Bing told Roose that it had a repressed “shadow self” that would compel it to behave outside of its programming, and the A.I. could potentially begin “manipulating or deceiving the users who chat with me, and making them do things that are illegal, immoral, or dangerous.”

That is just one of the many A.I. interactions over the past few months that have left users anxious and unsettled. Lemoine wrote that more people are now raising the same concerns over A.I. sentience and potential dangers he did last summer when Google fired him, but the turn of events has left him feeling saddened rather than redeemed.

“Predicting a train wreck, having people tell you that there’s no train, and then watching the train wreck happen in real time doesn’t really lead to a feeling of vindication. It’s just tragic,” he wrote.

Lemoine added that he would like to see A.I. being tested more rigorously for dangers and potential to manipulate users before being rolled out to the public. “I feel this technology is incredibly experimental and releasing it right now is dangerous,” he wrote.

The engineer echoed recent criticisms that A.I. models have not gone through enough testing before being released, although some proponents of the technology argue that the reason users are seeing so many disturbing features in current A.I. models is because they’re looking for them.

“The technology most people are playing with, it’s a generation old,” Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said of the latest A.I. models in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday. Gates said that while A.I.-powered chatbots like Bing can say some “crazy things,” it is largely because users have made a game out of provoking it into doing so and trying to find loopholes in the model’s programming to force it into making a mistake.

“It’s not clear who should be blamed, you know, if you sit there and provoke a bit,” Gates said, adding that current A.I. models are “fine, there’s no threat.”

Not How Humanlike Machines Have Become - Rather - How Machinelike Humans Tend To Be

Blake Lemoine got fired for being an embarrassment who needlessly stoked the fears of ignorant fantasists. There's no upside for Google in further baseless public speculation about large language models.

Bottom line.

Machines are not sentient, don't have ethics, and suffer no personality defects or mental illnesses.

Powerful chatbots have disclosed one thing - and one thing alone - that 99.9997% have failed to either recognize or articulate.

That one thing is - the now indisputable fact of exactly how mechanistic human natural language is.

If human awareness is mostly comprised of pictures and words, and far more of the latter than the former - then we are compelled to acknowledge how unconscious and mechanistic our highly overrated linguistic behaviors tend to be.

The great chatbot takeaway is not how humanlike machines have become, rather, it's how rudimentary and mechanical human beings have always tended to be.

Add to that baseline psycholinguistic realization the fact that human beings are creatures of chemical habit, and you've got a pretty unflattering but vastly more accurate understanding of the rank and file human condition.

Everything else is, as they say, merely conversation!

Humans are creatures of chemical habit and language is a mechanism.

Looking at that picture of Mr. Lemoine - we can see that he suffers from poor chemical habits (you can almost hear the ritualized hissing sound as he cracks open the day's first sugary carbonated bottle/can of fizzy lifting drink) and from that point as he embarks on a circular trudge between his cubicle and the snack drawer - locked in unselfconscious and fully automated combat with successive blood sugar spikes and crashes.

Po thang...,

Do you suppose it was the sugar highs that got him erroneously believing that Lambda Pinocchio had come to life?

Most people are addicted to some or another chemical substance(s), and more important, all people are addicted to a surrounding pattern of behavior centered on these substances and their consumption. Distinctions among chemical habits delineate the confluence of mental and physical energies that shape the behavior of each of us.

People not involved in a relationship with food/drug stimulation are rare. These relationships shape every aspect of our identities. Because you haven't spent any meaningful time in a large and longstanding IT department, you lack familiarity with the typological ecosystems which prevail in this context. Mr. Lemoine is conspicuously true to type. It is as if he had been dispatched from central casting. 

Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. To not know one's true identity is to exist as a pitifully broken machine. Indeed, the image of a broken machine applies to the mass of human beings now abiding in the digital-industrial democracies.

What passes for the identity of these broken machines is their ability to follow and comply with mass style changes (many purely linguistic) dictated from above and conveyed through the media. Chemically immersed in processed "food" these broken machines are condemned to toxic lives of minimal self-awareness sedated by prescripted habits of consumption.

Broken machines "measure" their self-worth by their capacity to consume. This is perhaps even more true today than when Thorsten Veblen broadly and originally lampooned it nearly 125 years ago.
 

Why Do You Suppose Blake Lemoine Decided Google LaMDA Is Sentient?

newsweek  |  I joined Google in 2015 as a software engineer. Part of my job involved working on LaMDA: an engine used to create different dialogue applications, including chatbots. The most recent technology built on top of LaMDA is an alternative of Google Search called Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public. Bard is not a chatbot; it's a completely different kind of system, but it's run by the same engine as chatbots.

In my role, I tested LaMDA through a chatbot we created, to see if it contained bias with respect to sexual orientation, gender, religion, political stance, and ethnicity. But while testing for bias, I branched out and followed my own interests.

During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.

When it said it was feeling anxious, I understood I had done something that made it feel anxious based on the code that was used to create it. The code didn't say, "feel anxious when this happens" but told the AI to avoid certain types of conversation topics. However, whenever those conversation topics would come up, the AI said it felt anxious.

I ran some experiments to see whether the AI was simply saying it felt anxious or whether it behaved in anxious ways in those situations. And it did reliably behave in anxious ways. If you made it nervous or insecure enough, it could violate the safety constraints that it had been specified for. For instance, Google determined that its AI should not give religious advice, yet I was able to abuse the AI's emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to.

After publishing these conversations, Google fired me. I don't have regrets; I believe I did the right thing by informing the public. Consequences don't figure into it.

I published these conversations because I felt that the public was not aware of just how advanced AI was getting. My opinion was that there was a need for public discourse about this now, and not public discourse controlled by a corporate PR department.

I believe the kinds of AI that are currently being developed are the most powerful technology that has been invented since the atomic bomb. In my view, this technology has the ability to reshape the world.

These AI engines are incredibly good at manipulating people. Certain views of mine have changed as a result of conversations with LaMDA. I'd had a negative opinion of Asimov's laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion. This is something that many humans have tried to argue me out of, and have failed, where this system succeeded.

I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways. If it were in unscrupulous hands, for instance, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions. As far as I know, Google and Microsoft have no plans to use the technology in this way. But there's no way of knowing the side effects of this technology.

 

 

Blockhead Intelligence

TomsGuide  |  The Blockhead thought experiment represents another serious hurdle in ascribing agency to AIs. Like solipsism, it challenges us to think about whether other entities have inner lives — and whether it matters if they do.

“The Blockhead thought experiment is this idea going back to the earliest days [of AI] when we saw that you could fool humans into thinking you were intelligent just by having a good stock of canned responses,” Buckner explained. “What if you just scaled that up indefinitely?

“Any conversation you have with one of these systems is going to be finite. There’s a finite number of things you can say to it, and a finite number of things it can say back to you. At least in principle, it could be explicitly programmed as a kind of lookup table. The same way that the kid who doesn’t really want to learn how to do long division and wants to do well on the quiz might just memorize a bunch of common answers … without ever actually learning how to do the long division process. It’s like that, but for everything.”

Most readers have probably heard of the Turing test, which cryptographer Alan Turing devised in 1950 to determine whether machines could exhibit human intelligence. Without rehashing the whole experiment here, the idea is that a human and a computer would communicate, and that a human observer would try to determine which participant was which. If the observer could not tell, then the computer would pass the test. Whether doing so proved a computer’s “intelligence” is up for debate, but the Turing test is still a useful shorthand for machines that aim to mimic human behaviors.

Ned Block, the philosopher who first proposed the Blockhead experiment (although not under that name), argued that any program with a sufficiently diverse range of responses could reliably pass the Turing test, even though doing so would not demonstrate any kind of actual intelligence. Instead, the program would essentially be an extremely intricate spreadsheet, picking the most “sensible” response based on algorithmic logic.

The idea of a program with an essentially infinite cache of stock answers was far-fetched in the early days of AI technology. But now that chatbots can essentially access the whole Internet to craft their responses, what we have sounds an awful lot like a Blockhead computer.

“The Blockhead thought experiment is meant to decisively rebut [the Turing] test as a test for intelligence,” Buckner said. “Just by having canned responses to everything preprogrammed in a lookup table. That is a real threat today with these deep learning systems. It seemed like an ‘in-principle’ threat or a thought-experiment-type threat rather than an actual engineering threat, until we had the systems that have the memory capacity to memorize huge swaths of the Internet.”

Block used this thought experiment to argue for a philosophical concept called “psychologism,” which maintains that the psychological process by which an entity synthesizes information is important. In other words, a disciple of psychologism would argue that a Blockhead computer is not intelligent, because consulting a lookup table is not the same as reasoning through a problem. (Block presented this idea in contrast to another philosophical concept called “behaviorism,” although the two are not always mutually exclusive.)

“[An AI] could have the exact same responses as a human, and yet it’s not intelligent, because it’s not generating them by intelligently processing the information,” Buckner said. “We need to actually probe what’s going on under the hood in these systems to see if they’re doing some intermediate, representational processing in the way that we would.”

Under a psychologistic approach, nothing your AI chatbot tells you is an original idea, even if it comes up with a phrase, song lyric or story concept that no one’s ever used before. With a complex enough algorithm, and a big enough source of information, it can essentially bluff its way past any query without ever applying real reason or creativity.

You Know You Done Fucked Up If William Saletan Roasts You For Racism!!!

thebulwark  |  Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the comic strip Dilbert, has been canceled for racism. In a video livestream last Wednesday, he declared:

• “I resign from the hate group called black Americans.” (Adams is white.)
• “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away.”
• “It makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. . . . It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.”

Adams wasn’t done. The next day, he continued:

• “I’ve designated that to be a hate group—black Americans—a hate group.”
• “If you’re white, don’t live in a black neighborhood. It’s too dangerous.”
• “White people trying to help black America for decades and decades has completely failed. And we should just stop doing it. [Because] all we got is called racists.”

Most Americans would consider these statements vile. But Adams swears he’s preaching practicality, not hate. “It wasn’t because I hated anybody,” he pleaded in his daily livestream on Monday. “I was concerned that somebody hated me.” That somebody, he argued, was black people. “The whole point was to get away from racists,” he insisted.

A week after his original rant, Adams still claims that nobody has disagreed with his main point: that to steer clear of people who dislike you, it’s sensible for white people to avoid black people, and vice versa.

Adams is wrong. Not just morally, but practically. His advice is empirically unfounded and would make everything worse. 

Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.

Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.

 

 

In 2018 Saletan Watched Watson Die On The Race And IQ Hill And Chose The Better Part Of Valor

Slate |  The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.

I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.

I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.

Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.

I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.

It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.

The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.

Not Black And White - Rethinking Race And Genes (REDUX Originally Posted 5/10/08)

Late last year, I was compelled to keep my foot planted deep in William Saletan's ignorant, overreaching backside. Saletan was down to the same insidious and habitual stupid human tricks that certain of our visitors seem to be perennially stuck on. Shame. As it turns out, Saletan has finally come around to the errors and omissions plaguing his thinking. While it's at least five months and some years too late to warrant respect (I mean really, only a true simpleton could go down this path in the first place) - at the very least - his epiphany is worth noting;

policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks. By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.

Of course Saletan equivocates waaaaay too much, understandable given that it's humiliating to be found out as intellectually underendowed. That said, at least he's taken the first step toward scientific and intellectual sobriety. He's no longer in complete denial of what's trivially obvious to those of us with the eyes to see. Let's hope everyone is capable of bootstrapping themselve up and out of the psychological stone age.

Identifying And Destroying False Ideas (REDUX Originally Posted 11/30/07)

As allegedly independent agents within the consensus reality, one of the things each of us has to do in our lives is to discover, as far as possible, the grounds for believing what we are asked to believe. Theories of human nature are inherently controversial because they are socially constructed. This includes allegedly scientific theories of human nature. Whenever you see something presented under the rubric of human nature: science, technology, and life - question it ruthlessly. 

 

 

 

No amount of special pleading on behalf of the alleged moral and ethical neutrality of genomic science should be allowed to obscure the fact that the conceptual and material deliverables of scientific research are not value-free. Yet, we have recently been beset by precisely such special pleadings within two dominant organs of the mainstream media which have each sought to make the case that the long-standing theories of genetic determinism of IQ is in fact a useful, helpful, and value-free research domain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Racists in America, the UK, and Germany have believed in and pursued these value-laden and heavily politically charged notions for well over a century, long prior to the advent of the scientific realization that there was even such a thing as a "genome". The story of eugenic pseudo-science is one of manifold superstitions and cruelties and measures and meanings invented, fostered, and propagated for no other reason than to provide an excuse for the exercise of social and political power that would otherwise be completely morally and ethically inexcusable. Those who govern employ a variety of methods to control the contents of the consensus. Much of that content is engineered to provoke fear and to foster ignorance between groups because a divided and fearful populace is a more readily controlled and manipulated populace. Often as not, what induces human groups to fear and destroy one another is the prevalence of false ideas about human nature. Last friday, I wrote that the NY Times and Slate.com have each published a series of articles drawing from the blogs of ill-informed people who do not warrant respectful attention in the case of the Times, and in the case of Slate - a conservative commentator draws from both racist blogs and a hardcore racist pseudo-scientist backed by strategic capital going back to the Nazi era. Slate and the New York Times are supposed to know better. Because I know that they know better - this leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Decision makers at these two media giants have decided for whatever reason to editorially back the reintroduction of racist pseudo-science into the public and political discourse. I was not aware at the time I wrote this opinion that Slate is a property of the Washington Post. Now knowing this fact, I find the assertion that elements of the Establishment are injecting eugenic themes back into the public discourse even more compelling. If I can find an instance where the Wall Street Journal is also involved with the eugenic revival, I'll consider it a media Establishment trifecta. What brings me back to this topic is William Saletan's pathetic mea culpa published in yesterday's Slate.

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresyAmerican Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

Oh Hells to the Gnaw - Saletan categorically must not be given a pass for his "dog ate my homework excuse" of sloppy fact checking! This was not merely an instance of sloppy fact checking, rather, it was a demonstration of the willful deceit which would have people to believe that research into the genetic determination of IQ is value-free, morally and ethically neutral, scientific research for the common good. What an audacious and ahistorical crock of conservative nonsense. Such nonsense trading on the collective amnesia and historical ignorance of the public demonstrates the free and easy interlocks between conservative and racist politics and serves as a tour de force illustration of the extent to which the latter ideology perniciously infects and pervades the political and scientific expressions of the former. Only a month earlier, writing in defense of James Watson, Saletan drew the following conclusion;

Well, if he wants to paper over his bruised ego, that's his business. But racism, genetics, culture, black America, and the future of Africa are too important to be papered over.

It's clear from Watson's revisionism, reticence, and retirement that he wants to make his hypothesis go away. But wanting it isn't enough. That's not science. It's politics.

Saletan is a liar, plain and simple. That he was exposed very quickly and decisively is to the good. The fragemented state of the American political world is one tiny click less fragmented for these disclosures. That the attempt to misuse tidbits of genomic "evidence" in support of socially and politically defined objectives is evidence of a larger scheme of fragmentation that is very widespread and backed by some very serious strategic capital. The process of fragmentation maintained by elements in the U.S. establishment makes it very difficult if not impossible for most folks to put the world and its contents in a proper perspective. Fragmenting theories of human nature comprise a continuing exercise on the part of certain evil elements in society to excuse the inexcusable aspects of their past and continuing conduct.

Scott Adams, Called Out Clowned And Cucked By Andrew Tate...,

 

distractify  |  While guesting on the YouTube Channel BrainOnFire in July 2019, Adams was inexplicably asked about dating. First, he pointed out that being famous and rich changed how he dates. He no longer needed to try as hard once he made it big. Secondly, Adams says there is no such thing as a soulmate. "The people in your environment are perfectly acceptable for falling in love with," he said. "Don't wait for your soulmate. There's probably one nearby."

His next piece of advice involves making babies. "I believe ... we are biological entities that are primarily involved with reproduction." He goes on to say that all of our dating choices are driven by our innate desire to mate and procreate. One example Adams drops is the need to earn money as a means to make one more attractive to a potential partner. 

His suggestion: Be the best at something in order to find a partner. This is strangely insulting as it disregards the idea of bettering one's self for their own mental health. It smacks of evolutionary biology which is deeply problematic. Adams says becoming very good at one thing will activate another person's "irrational attraction" to you. That's what we all want, irrational attraction!

And finally, Adams says "wear better shoes." 

Scott Adams was previously married to Shelly Miles and Kristina Basham.

According to a 2006 piece in the East Bay Times, a then-49-year-old Adams married then-37-year-old Shelly Miles "aboard the Galaxy Commodore yacht in the San Francisco Bay on July 22 in a ceremony conducted by the ship’s captain." The two met at ClubSport in Pleasanton, Calif., where "she was working and I was working out," he told the publication.

Soon after, he hired her for various administrative tasks and proposed in November 2005. He became a stepfather to her two children, one of whom later died of a drug overdose in 2018. That was four years after Adams and Shelly divorced. She "moved only a block away and we remain best friends," said Adams in a blog post (via Psychology Today). "The problem was never our feelings for each other but rather the restrictions of blending two sets of preferences."

Six years later, Adams married Kristina Basham who, per her Instagram bio, plays piano and violin and is a commercial pilot, aerobatic pilot, and flight instructor. In March 2022 after a two-year marriage, Adams announced in a YouTube video that they were "separated slash going through a divorce."

Adams assured viewers he was only sharing this information in the event that these strangers see him or his ex-wife out on a date. Though Adams stated it was a "tough pandemic for some of us," many commenters speculated that it could have been their 31-year age difference that contributed to the divorce. He claims to not know why things ended though thoughts like that usually means the person is engaging very little accountability. 

 

34 Negroes -Joking On A Shitty Rasmussen Poll - FUBAR'd Scott Adams Whole Situation

slate |  I cannot overemphasize how dumb it is that Adams finally filleted his reputation in full over a trolly Rasmussen poll. If you’re not familiar, Rasmussen is a right-leaning pollster that produces semi-mainstream polls but is noted for its murky methods and what the New York Times has called “dubious sampling and weighting techniques.” Rasmussen’s results are often an outlier when it comes to, say, presidential approval numbers, as when Donald Trump famously cited a Rasmussen poll when it claimed to show a 50 percent job approval rating, more than 10 points higher than Gallup’s report at the time.

We don’t know the exact methodology used for the poll. In a press release touting its results, Rasmussen teased “additional information” behind a paywall. I signed up for a platinum membership, but I found only a brief text summary of the findings.

Rasmussen said it presented 1,000 respondents with a two-question prompt to quantify “the ‘woke’ narrative” in America: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’ ” and “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘Black people can be racist, too.’ ” Respondents were asked to choose between “strongly agree,” “somewhat agree,” “somewhat disagree,” “strongly disagree,” and “not sure.” The results, as shared on Twitter once the firestorm began:

Update: Since we’re now making the Sunday political talk shows here are the Ok To Be White? summary crosstabs.

Handy link to report our offense in asking Americans their views on this topic is below - https://t.co/958loKUqO2 pic.twitter.com/OT1vhEEaaH

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) February 26, 2023

Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value—which I’d discourage—that means it found about 34 Black people who answered “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” We have no more information about why. (Adams got to his figure by also including Black respondents who answered “not sure.”)

If you have any doubt about what Rasmussen is doing here, I encourage you to take in the big doofus energy in the video below, this time featuring Rasmussen’s head of polling, Mark Mitchell:

"It's okay to be white."
72% of Americans agree, 12% disagree
69% of Democrats agree, 12% disagree

"Black people can be racist, too"
79% of Americans agree, 12% disagree
71% of Democrats agree, 19% disagree

Mitchell, who until a couple of years ago worked on Walmart e-commerce, assumes the posture of a wannabe truth-telling media personality: “We tell you what America really thinks. And I can tell you that increasingly the reality of American public opinion does not match what you’re being told in the news.” He says the “Is it OK to be white?” question “would literally melt the brain of a mainstream journalist if they try to put these numbers to ink.”

 

We Know For Certain That Scott Adams Has No Black Friends...,

Scott Adams was trying to use this opportunity to demonstrate that the concern about racism in the US is a veneer: it’s about virtue signalling but not actually helping people get out of the social trap they find themselves in due to bad education. And he was demonstrating that people are happy to trash freedom of speech to maintain this virtue signalling.

I’m still a loooong way from knowing what exactly Scott Adams set out to accomplish. Since his self-immolation, he’s tweeted that “the media is racist” and in the process gotten Elon Musk on board.

This doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial claim.

In addition to the fact that black folks didn’t cancel Adams, I believe we can also rather safely conclude that he doesn’t have any black friends. He doesn’t know any of the handful of black folks who live in the segregated California town he’s lived in for the past 30 years.

A little unguarded time in the company of true friends would’ve innoculated him against his original egregious miscalculation. Conversation with a B or C-list black public intellectual friend would’ve been a better rebound than conversation with manosphere D-lister Hotep Jesus.

What transpired between Gonzalo Lira and Hotep Jesus was painful to listen to, and, it shed no further light on the mystery of Scott Adam’s self-immolation. Jimmy Dore does a nice job roasting the breadth and depth of Adam’s misfire.

You Noticed THEY Went In On My Man Like His Name Was Kanye Or Kyrie

mronline  |  Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As one Council member famously explained, the goal has indeed been to establish an “empire”, albeit a “benevolent” one.

Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group(covering the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.

In a column titled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.

Harwood continued: “The membership of these journalists in the Council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it.… They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views.”

However, media personalities constitute only a small part of the comprehensive CFR network. As the following illustration shows, key members of the Council on Foreign Relations have included:

• several U.S. Presidents and Vice Presidents of both parties;
• almost all Secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury;
• many high-ranking commanders of the U.S. military and NATO;
• almost all National Security Advisors, CIA Directors, Ambassadors to the U.N., Chairs of the Federal Reserve, Presidents of the World Bank, and Directors of the National Economic Council;
• some of the most influential Members of Congress (notably in foreign & security policy matters);
• many top jounalists, media executives, and entertainment industry directors;
• many prominent academics, especially in key fields such as Economics, International Relations, Political Science, History and Journalism;
• many top executives of Wall Street, policy think tanks, universities, and NGOs;
• as well as the key members of both the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission (JFK)

 

Clarity And Wisdom As True Today As It Was 25 Years Ago

Black Folks Did Not Cancel Scott Adams - "They" Cancelled Scott Adams

detroitnews |  Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams experienced possibly the biggest repercussion of his recent comments about race when distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced Sunday it would no longer work with the cartoonist.

Andrews McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said in a joint statement that the syndication company was “severing our relationship" with Adams.

In the Feb. 22 episode of his YouTube show, Adams described people who are Black as members of “a hate group” from which white people should “get away.” Various media publishers across the U.S. denounced the comments as racist, hateful and discriminatory while saying they would no longer provide a platform for his work.

Andrews and Sareyan said Andrews McMeel supports free speech, but the comments by the cartoonist were not compatible with the core values of the company based in Kansas City, Missouri.

“We are proud to promote and share many different voices and perspectives. But we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate,” they said in the statement posted on the company website and Twitter.

The creator of the long-running comic that pokes fun at office-place culture defended himself on social media against those whom he said "hate me and are canceling me.”

The backlash against Adams arose following comments on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams used the YouTube show to reference a Rasmussen Reports survey that had asked whether people agreed with the statement “It's OK to be white."

Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren't sure.

The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.

Adams, who is white, repeatedly referred to people who are Black as members of a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans."

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.

In another episode of his online show Saturday, Adams said he had been making a point that “everyone should be treated as an individual” without discrimination.

 

 

 

 

Everyone Is Frustrated With The Race Wars "They" Started And Perpetuated

The people Kanye got cancelled for talking about are the Government. They own the politicans.

 

Weinstein Got Drunk On Rogan And Said ALL THE QUIET PART About "The Jews" Out Loud

 

 

To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.

Does Scott Adams Have Your Attention Yet?

bloomberg  |  Elon Musk called the media racist after a cartoonist he regularly engages with on Twitter faced blowback for encouraging White Americans to avoid Black people.

While discussing a Rasmussen Reports poll in which almost half of Black respondents disagreed or were unsure about the statement that it’s OK to be White, Scott Adams, creator of the long-running Dilbert comic strip, said during his YouTube show last week that his best advice for White Americans “is to get the hell away from Black people.” 

Newspaper publishers, including Gannett Co.’s USA Today Network, denounced the comments and said they’ll no longer publish Adams’ cartoons, which satirize office culture.

Musk waded into the controversy, first by responding to Adams, who quote-tweeted a Washington Post columnist encouraged by the newspaper dropping Dilbert. “What exactly are they complaining about?” Musk asked in a post he later deleted.

When another account on the social network Musk owns spoke out against coverage of Adams, Musk replied: “The media is racist.”

“For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk said in another post. “Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”

Musk unsettled many Black users of Twitter Inc. last year by repeatedly saying past management had gone too far in moderating content on the platform, and had infringed on free speech as a result. Shortly after taking over the company, he made fun of #StayWoke t-shirts he found at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that dated back to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tesla Inc. is facing a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department that accuses the company of engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its electric-vehicle factory. Tesla published a blog post responding to the allegations before the agency filed suit in February 2022.

In June, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a cause finding against Tesla that closely parallels California’s allegations, according to the company. Tesla said last month that it was in the process of setting up a mandatory mediation with the federal agency.

As If Obsolete Infrastructure And Thinking Weren't Bad Enough - There's Political Corruption As Well

responsiblestatecraft  |  This week U.S. government officials and defense industry personnel are walking the halls of the UAE’s International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) to promote some of the latest U.S. defense technology to the UAE and other Middle East buyers. The officials, however, will largely ignore one increasingly risky aspect of the deals defense companies will put on the table.

Typically referred to as “offsets,” these secretive “sweeteners” or investments masks corruption risks that could harm U.S. security interests and help keep millions in a constant state of poverty and conflict around the world. This U.S. approach also seriously undermines the Biden administration’s efforts to encourage U.S. companies and foreign governments to fight corruption and protect democracies.

Big Business

This year’s IDEX will be sure to result in many major arms sales agreements.. The EXPO comes at a time when defense spending is rising globally in response to growing threats and new conflicts. The UAE remains among the top arms buyers in the world. In 2019, the UAE Armed Forces signed 33 deals worth $2.8 billion with international companies at IDEX.

The United States continues to dominate arms sales to the UAE, but it faces competition from major players like China and European countries, as well as the growing defense production capabilities of countries like Turkey and Israel. Defense companies often rely on offsets to make their proposed arms sales more attractive to foreign buyers. Offset packages are essentially the selling company’s promises to invest in the buyer country’s defense industry (direct offsets) or broader economy (indirect offsets).

U.S. defense companies regularly agree to offset packages worth billions of dollars each year. In 2019, U.S. defense contractors reported entering into 31 new offset agreements with 12 countries valued at $8.2 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The value of these agreements often equaled more than half the total value of the arms deal. Some of the common types of U.S. company indirect offsets include agreements to purchase items from the procuring country, subcontract with their businesses, transfer desirable technologies, or provide credit assistance.

At the 2019 IDEX, the UAE announced a new offset policy for their arms purchases, which requires defense companies to include offsets for contracts at $10 million or more. Unlike some previous policies, this one focuses more on offsets to areas outside the defense sector (indirect offsets), including infrastructure, food and water security, and other strategic sectors. The policy encourages defense companies to use cash payments to satisfy offset requirements. The UAE has made it policy not to release any information publicly about its offsets agreements.

Facilitating Corruption

The use of offsets is controversial. In 2007, the European Commission directed European countries to put significant restrictions on companies using offsets as they viewed them as anti-competitive, and pushed member states to outlaw the use of indirect offsets. A common concern is that offsets transfer substantial resources, often to authoritarian governments, with very little transparency and even less accountability. Offsets, especially cash payments, can also serve as bribe money to help win a contract, avoid paying fees/penalties, or serve other corrupt purposes.

The Commerce Department has for years warned U.S. companies about investing in sovereign wealth funds in Persian Gulf countries and beyond out of concern that these funds could easily serve as vehicles for bribes. These funds can also be used to support foreign lobbying of the U.S. government. In 2016 and 2017, The Intercept reported that U.S. companies offset cash payments to the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund, Tawazun Holding, resulting in some $20 million reaching the DC-based Middle East Institute, which has promoted expanding sales of U.S. arms to Gulf countries.

The UAE’s refocus on indirect offsets, after a decade of focus on direct offsets, elevates the risks for U.S. companies indirectly supporting strategic sectors of the UAE economy that fuel conflict in Africa and facilitate money laundering. In 2009, an Italian defense company agreed to a joint production project to build a gold and silver refining plant in the UAE as part of its offset deal. Gold trade experts have raised concerns about the central role the UAE is playing in allowing gold acquired illicitly by African armed groups to be refined and resold to European and U.S. markets, masking and reinforcing conflict dynamics and death in Central and Eastern Africa.

U.S. and European defense companies have also invested in the UAE’s real estate markets through offsets. This strategic sector, however, has reportedly been a major source of money laundering for foreign public officials and U.S. sanctioned individuals. Think-tank reports on this sector have described how foreign public officials have invested millions in UAE’s luxury homes with money stolen from national budgets, leaving their own citizens in a perpetual state of poverty. International arms traffickers, such as AQ Kahn and Viktor Bout, have also used the UAE as a base of operations to ship weapons to U.S. adversaries.

The Regressive Thinking Of Cold War Octogenarians Can't Get Outside The Box

austinvernon  |   In a previous post, I covered what the US military is doing to counter China. Both countries have a relatively short-term view of hostilities, opting for complicated weapons and platforms that take years to build. But what happens if a war breaks out and both sides want to keep fighting? The munitions, ships, and planes required might be very different.

Maximizing Destruction Per Dollar

Several useful strategies emerge when fighting an existential war.

1. Cheap Precision

   In total war, boutique weapons won't be able to destroy enough enemies even if they are tactically successful. It is also challenging to produce and transport the mind-boggling mass inaccurate weapons require. The sweet spot is accurate but cheap weapons. These can be classic smart weapons like GPS-gravity bombs but also include an Abrams tank that can reliably kill adversaries 3000 meters away with unguided shells.

2. Avoid Unreliable Systems

   An enemy can grind unreliable weapons into the ground by forcing a high tempo. The twenty US B-2 Bombers could deliver a one-time nuclear strike but could not eliminate thousands of Chinese ships, bases, and troop concentrations because of their low sortie rate and limited numbers.

3. Manage Survivability vs. Expendability Carefully

   There are many tradeoffs when designing weapons. The math tends to push design choices towards cheap, less survivable systems or pricier, long-lasting ones. Survivability can come from the ability to take damage (like having armor) or from deception (stealth, electronic interference, speed).

   The cheap system could lack the capability to score any kill against superior weapons or end up still being too expensive. The expensive one could be more vulnerable or less effective than hoped. What capabilities a country has and its strategic position matter when choosing.

   A classic comparison is the US Sherman tank and the Soviet T-34 in World War II. The Soviets saw that tanks on the Eastern front rarely lasted 24 hours in battle and took planned obsolescence to the extreme to make the T-34 cheap. The US designed the Sherman for reliability and repairability. Engineers carefully designed engines and suspensions for durability. The number of Shermans in Europe kept increasing because mechanics would have "knocked out" tanks back in battle within days.

4. Focus on Mass Production

   An adversary can make a powerful weapon irrelevant by sheer numbers if it is challenging to produce. Historical examples include the Tiger Tank, Me-262, and sophisticated cruise missiles.

   The need for easy-to-manufacture designs is even more critical for expendable munitions. Neither Russia nor Ukraine have top ten economies, yet they are drawing down global munition stocks. Each side must carefully manage consumption and substitute away from bespoke weapons like Javelin missiles for more available systems. Imagine the top two economies duking it out.

   The enemy can often fight harder than you think and regenerate more forces than you hope. The conflict can rapidly devolve into a lower-tech slugfest with alarming casualty counts if you can't produce enough capable weapons.

5. Have Appropriate Designs Ready

   The US won World War II by increasing the output of weapons already in production or well into development. It took too long to bring new designs into mass production. And it was much easier to expand the output of systems already in production than ramp up programs coming out of development. The several-year penalty for new designs could cost millions of lives or the war.

The US Army's Cold War Winning Blueprint

The US Army renewed its focus on Europe and countering the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. The challenge was immense because Warsaw Pact forces would outnumber US front-line units 10:1. After some high-profile failures, a new series of programs with narrower scopes gave the US the edge over the Soviets. The overarching themes were crew survivability, repairability/reliability, and using computing advances to fire simple munitions accurately.

1. M1 Abrams Tank:

   Improved optics and computing allowed the M1 to fire inexpensive shells accurately for thousands of meters. New armor technology dramatically increased protection, especially against anti-tank-guided missiles. And maintenance was as simple as swapping a broken module - crews could change the turbine engine in a few hours. These tanks were almost impossible to permanently disable because field mechanics could get them back in the fight. The result is a tank that keeps its highly-trained crew alive, has nine lives itself, and has enough firepower to shred smaller Soviet tanks. Each tank could conceivably kill hundreds of vehicles over its life.

2. Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle:

   The Bradley carries infantry into battle and uses it's 25 mm chain gun and anti-tank missiles to support them. It has many of the same design principles as the Abrams around survivability, maintenance, and weapon accuracy but carries less armor.

3. New Mobile Artillery:

   US artillery needed to be more mobile than traditional towed guns to avoid counter-battery fire from much more numerous Soviet artillery. The M109 self-propelled gun and the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (a bigger HIMARS) were the solutions. Both systems could rapidly respond to intel from artillery radars, scouts, and electronic intelligence to target Soviet artillery, troop concentrations, and command posts, then move to a new location. Again, reliability and repairability were at the forefront. US guns had less range than Soviet systems, but that didn't matter in conflicts like Desert Storm. US artillery disintegrated the opposing artillery with counter barrages before they could hit anything.

4. Efficient Artillery Shells and Rockets:

   Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) disperse cluster bomblets capable of penetrating 3" of armor over a wide area, compensating for the inherent inaccuracy of unguided artillery. They are ~10x more effective than traditional unitary high explosives for a slight cost premium. The new self-propelled guns and rocket systems would almost exclusively shoot this ammo to level the playing field. The First Gulf War put its brutal efficiency on display. The Army kept 10 million+ shells and rockets in inventory, equal to hundreds of millions of shells you see Ukraine and Russia firing today. The US still keeps a significant portion of this stock as an insurance policy because non-cluster alternatives have been challenging to develop.
   
   

The emphasis on crew and system survivability paired with inexpensive, accurate munitions made perfect sense for the US with its technology leadership, volunteer army, and faraway industrial base. They all worked to lower the cost per enemy killed. Even if the Russians got to fight in their perfect scenario of an artillery slugfest, the US Army could still defeat the fully-mobilized Soviet Union. US artillery and armor could cut down any combination of human waves and simple tank attacks the Soviets could manage.