Neoliberalism has also significantly ramped up the amount of political power and influence that business has, making its alliance with the far right more potentially destructive than it otherwise would be. If all politicians are chasing approval by and tying themselves in knots trying to please business interests, then when business interests fall in with fascists, the government follows immediately.
It’s definitely a special challenge and you need the right gear, but wow can it be rewarding. Waking up in the middle of the night and going out of the tent to see a full blizzard was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had. The absolute silence was incredible.
I do a lot of 4 season camping, and invested in a nice canvas tent. It was expensive for a tent, but still like 1/8 the price of this thing. Plus, my wife and I can get it up in 10 minutes and it’s survived for years in 60 mph winds, days of straight rain, snow, and 100° heat without a problem and it’s got 8’ of headroom. What a fucking scam this is. Perfect for the Tesla crowd.
He’s also oddly ahead of his time in his fixation on “wokeness” as what he mostly means by “the left.”
Sea water can’t corrode steel beams!
Yep, this is all correct.
I’m not sure I understand the question. The claim isn’t that 2100 is going to be worse than 2500, but rather just that a certain amount of warming is already “in the pipeline” because the Earth’s energy balance hasn’t equilibrated to the GHGs already in the atmosphere. Even if we went carbon negative today, we’d still experience some amount of warming unless the removal rate was so high that it could bring the CO2 levels down on a time scale that’s smaller than the “catch up” time for the baked-in warming we’ve already got coming (which is on the order of decades).
This is part of why people don’t take carbon capture and sequestration by itself seriously as a solution: unless we can effectively run the whole fossil fuel industrial complex in reverse–removing and sequestering CO2 at the same rate we’re now emitting it–even a negative emission rate at this point isn’t going to be enough to dodge the serious warming we have coming. And the technology to go that negative that quickly simply does not exist, nor is it even close to existing. This plan is better (and by a fair margin) than anything else suggested so far, but it still doesn’t get us anywhere near “silver bullet” territory.
Hey it happens to all grill-havers from time to time. It can be especially tough on camera or in public.
This is indeed extremely promising. Enhanced weathering is one of the few geoengineering (broadly construed) approaches with some potential. The big problem, as you alluded to, is the production and distribution chain. I haven’t read the study yet, but most global-scale approaches to this would require and an extraction and distribution industry similar in size and intensity to the fossil fuel industry. Not only is that challenging to spin up overnight, but it’s again hard to do in a way that isn’t itself so carbon intensive that it wipes out most of the gains. If our leaders weren’t cowards, they’d nationalize all fossil fuel industry companies and tell them “you’re extracting and distributing this stuff now,” but alas.
I wonder if Corbyn’s Labour run had happened today if things might have gone differently. I think a lot of people have now seen how nonsensically and indiscriminately the “antisemitic” label gets used, and that the tactic is getting much less effective.
The fact that it’s treated that way is just evidence that none of the AI bros have actually read “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It’s like the first fucking line of the paper.
"… I would literally just eat a whole block of cheese with my hands… often while sitting on the floor… in the dark…
Sounds fucking rad to be honest.
Yeah, this is just as insane as the people who think GPT is conscious. I’ve been trying to give a nuanced take down thread (also an academic, with a background in philosophy of science rather than the science itself). I think this resonates with people here because they’re so sick of the California Ideology narrative that we are nothing but digital computers, and that if we throw enough money and processing power at something like GPT, we’ll have built a person.
Great example! Failure modes are really important. Brains and dwarf fortresses might both be computers, but their different physical instations give them different ways to break down. Sometimes that’s not important, but sometimes it’s very important indeed. Those are the sorts of things that get obscures by these dogmatic all-or-nothing arguments.
I’m just cautioning against taking things too far in the other direction: I genuinely don’t think it’s right to say “your brain isn’t a computer,” and I definitely think it’s wrong to say that it doesn’t process information. It’s easy to slide from a critique of the computational theory of mind (either as it’s presented academically by people like Pinker or popularly by Silicon Valley) into the opposite–but equally wrong–kind of position that brains are doing something wholly different. They’re different in some respects, but there are also very significant similarities. We shouldn’t lose sight of either, and it’s important to be very careful when talking about this stuff.
Just as an example:
That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.
It strikes me as totally wrong to say that this process is free of computation. The computation that’s going on here has interesting differences from what goes on in a ball-catching robot powered by a digital computer, but it is computation.
After all, when a calculator computes the answer to a math problem the physical structure of the calculator doesn’t change
What counts as “physical structure?” I can make an adding machine out of wood and steel balls that computes the answer to math problems by shuffling levers and balls around. A digital computer calculates the answer by changing voltages in a complicated set of circuits (and maybe flipping some little magnetic bits of stuff if it has a hard drive). Brains do it by (among other things) changing connections between neurons and the allocation of chemicals. Those are all physical changes. Are they relevantly similar physical changes? Again, that depends deeply on what you think is important enough to be worth tracking and what can be abstracted away, which is a value judgement. One of the Big Lies of tech bro narrative is that science is somehow value free. It isn’t. The choice of model, the choice of what to model, and the choice of what predictive projects we think are worth pursuing are all deeply evaluative choices.
You are not just a record of memories. You are also your home, your friends and family, what you ate for breakfast, how much sleep you got, how much exercise you’re getting on a regular basis, your general pain and comfort levels, all sorts of things that exist outside of your brain. Your brain is not you.
Embodied cognition. I don’t see this as implying that what we’re doing isn’t computation (or information processing) in some sense. It’s just that the way we’re doing it is deeply, deeply different from how even neural networks instantiated on digital computers do it (among other things, our information processing is smeared out across the environment). That doesn’t make it not computation in the same way that not having a cover and a mass in grams makes a PDF copy of Moby Dick not a book. There are functional, abstract similarities between PDFs and physical books that make them the same “kinds of things” in certain senses, but very different kinds of things in other senses.
Whether they’re going to count as relevantly similar depends on which bundles of features you think are important or worth tracking, which in turn depends on what kinds of predictions you want to make or what you want to do. The fight about whether brains are “really” computers or not obscures the deeply value-laden and perspectival nature of a judgement like that. The danger doesn’t lie in adopting the metaphor, but rather in failing to recognize it as a metaphor–or, to put it another way, in uncritically accepting the tech-bro framing of only those features that our brains have in common with digital computers as being things worth tracking, with the rest being “incidental.”
I identify as an anarchist. I see it both as an aspirational goal–a stateless, classless, non-hierarchical society, which I think we all agree on as the ultimate objective–and as tactical guide in the face of overwhelming capitalism. Self-organized mutual aid and voluntary affinity groups can and do get shit done, even in the absence of any kind of widespread socialist (or even leftist) movement or power structure. Most of the anarchists I know in real life are more focused on actually trying to make the world better than on sectarian struggle, but I think the ones who care more about purity and less about praxis are more numerous and vociferous online. The good ones are out doing shit, not making Instagram series. The same is true for most MLs I’ve met: maybe the difference in philosophy will matter at some point way down the road when revolution is in progress, but that’s so far in the future that it almost doesn’t bear thinking about, much less starting a fight over. For now, we all have exactly the same goals.