moldbug

Well! If you know SCC, you must love the Box Chevy Phantom! And Chalkie! And I'm sure you've seen the famous Cabrini-Green thread:

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...

And you must have loved this discussion of "Jared," "Brent," and their fellow Occupy bombers:

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/bombers-pussies.ht...

Extremely low? Compared to what? What it should be? What should be your odds of being shot in a major city, anyway? San Francisco is extremely safer than Englewood, and earlier this year my wife and kids still found themselves in the middle of some kind of Norteno-Sureno shootout. They didn't get hit, though! So no harm, no foul.

Alarmist, certainly. Certainly alarmist compared to your normal Chicago sources of information, which as I recall insisted that the beaches on a certain day last summer were closed due to "temperatures in the '90s:"

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2011/06/wall-of-lies-crumb...

It's a fact that I'm not a blue-collar fellow and I don't have a blue-collar job or a blue-collar family. And no, I don't think that if I were posting comments on SCC, I'd be quite as cavalier in referring to "the animal," "mutts," etc. It does get the point across, however.

One little bird (presumably a Chicago cop):

By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of the "victims" dead so far.

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-s...

Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues:

The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction. See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen. But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!

God I love the Internets...

The program itself is more interesting than the gimmicky app:

http://www.archive.org/stream/officialsouvenir00goldrich#pag...

Imagine a San Francisco where you not only can't buy crack at UN Plaza, there is no UN Plaza. Scary!

Sure. I wasn't harshing on PT - I'm a huge fan like all decent and reasonable people :-) In fact I'd be careful about attributing any kind of controversial position to him, but I must say defining thorium fission as "cleantech" is pretty clever - talk about dirt!

The latter?

"Moderate" is always relative to standard industry practice. If patent trolling isn't standard industry practice quite yet, it's fast getting there. "Don't be evil" is a lot harder when evil is the norm.

Don't miss Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, far and away the best introduction to a cynical interpretation of WWII.

When I first heard about the setuid patent, I thought it was pretty cool. That was, I don't know, 1989.

I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear that patents were the true and final nemesis of my chosen profession. By "clear," I mean "obvious to anyone not in denial." Of course there's a lot of denial.

By 1999 I worked for a company that routinely filed what we called "linked list... on a phone!" patents. Unwired Planet - the geniuses behind WAP. In fact, I think there never would have been a WAP Forum if we hadn't muscled Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson with our HDML patents. (These crap patents probably provide most of the remaining market capitalization of UP's remnant, Openwave.)

Across this continuum, I have heard a continuous strand of discourse denying that there's a pit at the end of this tunnel. This discourse relies existentially on the belief that just because people could be evil, doesn't mean they will be evil. Which is true, but only in the short run. Facilis descensus Averni.

I find it distressing that even PT has succumbed to this Orwellian use of the word "clean." CO2 isn't dirt.

The human instinct for hygiene is one of our most basic. When, as a calculated public-relations maneuver, you connect a scientific hypothesis (such as a climate model) to this instinct, you'd better make damn sure you're doing the right thing in every way, shape or form. I hope those models are well validated.

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.

You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)

This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.

The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.

Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.

So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here?

Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.

Do you really find it difficult to get from the Enlightenment beliefs that all men are born equally free, equally good and equally talented, to Cabrini-Green?

If all men were equally noble, a social system that treats all men as nobles - that is, by making them financially independent and (pretty much) free of external government - would create a "vertical community" full of noblemen. Indeed this very thought is found in all sorts of 19th-century reformers (and 18th and 20th). Google "and above this ridge new peaks will rise."

Instead, every time the experiment is tried - in both the modern and antique worlds - we get Cabrini-Green or something like it. The epitome not of nobility, but of ignobility.

Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat. (Actually, this is true of most of the non-poor as well.) Whether this compulsion is implemented by an overseer with a whip, or by impersonal economic forces, is not terribly meaningful on an individual basis.

"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine, not "value systems" in the same sense as "left" versus "right" or "revolutionary" and "conservative." For instance, Christianity contains both the Anabaptist republic of Thomas Muenzer and the Spanish Inquisition. These can be classified as left and right extremes just as easily as Stalin and Hitler.

Left-right polarity is also seen in historical Islam (9/11 is not a product of Islam, but of Western revolutionary nationalism with a thin Islamic veneer), as well as even more divergent histories (eg, classical Korea). I have no doubt that if there are intelligent, gregarious aliens anywhere in the galaxy, they divide themselves into revolutionaries and conservatives.

There are only three ways of ruling a country. Aristotle, who had access to the histories of hundreds if not thousands of classical city-states whose annals are now of course lost, described them: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy.

Monarchy is the null hypothesis. The vast majority of historical governments have been primarily monarchical, often with some admixture of aristocracy. Pure aristocracy is much rarer. Democracy is difficult to even define (most nominal democracies, certainly including ours, are in fact aristocratic), extremely rare if it does exist, and commonly associated (as in the Greek case) with national if not civilizational decay in the near future.

An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.

(Or if you'd prefer to think in terms of Cabrini-Green, it's really not difficult to imagine what Elizabethan intellectuals would make of Cabrini-Green.)

Obviously, this historiographic practice accords with the basic scientific principle of judging an experiment by criteria established in advance.

It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this. Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values. Note that libertarianism is an Enlightenment ideology too, just an older one (19th-century liberalism).

We know these things, so what are we doing about them? Replacing projects with Section 8? That would be fine if the problem was architecture, not Enlightenment ideology. If you read that cop thread you'll see what they think of Section 8. Here's what the Atlantic thinks:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american...

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

If the results bear out the critics, not the proponents, what on earth are we doing when we persist with the experiment? Was it really an experiment at all? Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought.

It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in:

http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html

Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.”

Or read Riis' How The Other Half Lives:

http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog

You can even find an unbiased view of Southern slavery (admittedly milder than Louis XIV's Caribbean version):

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_sla...

You won't find anything like:

It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times...

Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accomplish this, it'll stay a tired, stale clone of the 20th.

SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?

There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels - Count Zero I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing") have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the reality:

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...

Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?

The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human beings understood much better before the Enlightenment. You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...

The first half of your first sentence answers the second, doesn't it? You could ask exactly the same questions with regard to John Brown - another classic American figure.

The supposed distinction between the "moderate" and "extremist" left is wildly overblown. There's no social exclusion, etc, in either direction. Nobody cares or is surprised about President Obama's association with Bill Ayers. Or, for that matter, Thoreau's with John Brown. Again, there's really nothing new here.

(I do think it's appropriate that in the nation of John Brown, we all need to walk through metal detectors to get on an airplane. Nothing could be more American than terrorism.)

It's pretty simple - Anglophone North America is a left-wing polity and always has been, its deviant and extinct Confederate branch aside. You won't find a single leftist trope that isn't repeated over and over again in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As Earl Browder put it, "Communism is 20th-century Americanism."

This is why we're all supposed to be all nuanced and shit when it comes to Communist atrocities, but when it's time for the Fascist atrocities everyone has to stand up and yell HITLER HITLER HITLER. Precisely like a five-year-old.

It's just a sort of national lookin' after #1. We naturally ignore the sins closest to us and focus on those of others. Left is "self" and right is "other." Otherwise, we would need to express genuine collective guilt rather than dime-a-dozen collective contempt.

Pinkie Pie is a frickin' genius.

But I'm curious about this equation, interesting == effective == intricate. Intricate == complex, right? So, the exploit certainly reveals that Chrome's security model is complex. And this is supposed to be a good thing? Seems like a good thing, if you're Pinkie Pie...

You don't think you're proving the point of my Eric Rudolph analogy?

Ie: you don't feel perfectly fair, rational, and justified in applying the "icky," simplistic, five-year-old algorithm to Eric Rudolph?

If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers?

This applies to everyone who responded below. Good luck in composing an answer that evades the questionnaire...

What I'm saying is that it's immoral to play kissy-face, even intellectual kissy-face, with murderers.

Somehow this is controversial. But you can see it easily if you flip the political polarities. Hence, Eric Rudolph.

Something obvious you can't see is called a "blind spot." Is there anything else in your blind spot?

Here's a catchy name for the ad bubble - we could call it "advertising-supported software." Or, for short, ASS.

Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more like the shelf slots that Safeway sells to food vendors. Google is a store - the world's biggest store, browsed by full-text search.

(In fact, if I was Goog, I'd separate the UI into two intents, with a radiobutton or something: either you're shopping, or you're searching for information. The latter is a free, spamless service that supports the former.)

I think FB will have to learn to make its money the old-fashioned way - by providing valuable services. FB is a valuable service - it makes $5 per user a year, from ads. How many FB users would drop the service if they had to pay $5 a year? And how many other services can FB add? Dropbox anyone? Dropbox isn't ASS...

Advertising is a crappy way of funding services. It chiefly exists because of payment friction. Startups are supposed to be the future. Is crap the future? Is your project ASS? Great, but have a plan to exit before the ASS bubble pops. Some of us remember the first era of "eyeball valuation"...

Oh, that's lovely. I'm sure Professor Skrbina is also pen pals with Eric Rudolph, the abortion bomber:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph

Every other week, he teaches his adoring young undergrads to understand Rudolph's subtle, nuanced position on the sanctity of human life... not.

FWIW, both Kaczynski's and Rudolph's philosophical opinions are worthy of debate. Their persons, however, are icky. Icky rubs off - even if you're a professor.

Why should scientists have to plead with their yahoo enemies?

This is organized political violence, and organized political violence only exists where it's passively tolerated by the government. Suppose the NAACP learned that a bunch of yahoo skinheads were planning an attack on the National Museum of African Art. Do you think for a minute that the museum curators would be writing a cringing, please-don't-attack us letter about the important artistic contributions of African Americans? Naah - a bunch of yahoo skinheads would be preparing for a 15-year staycation at Pelican Bay.

Treat left-wing extremists the same way you treat right-wing extremists - problem solved. Not that the problem's going to be solved. But it's worth thinking about why.

You should go through the whole history and downvote, if you've got the time - it will reduce my overall karma.

Dr. Johnson defines bigot as:

... a man devoted unreafonably to a certain party; prejudiced in favour of certain opinions; a blind zealot. It is ufed often with to before the object of zeal; as, a bigot to the Cartefian tenets...

I'm pretty sure you're not a bigot to the Cartesian tenets. You do strike me as pretty zealous, though - n'est ce pas?

I am actually quite okay with bigots and bigotry. We can't all embrace change. We don't all have to. One thing is certain, though - if it's not surprising, it's not change. Welcome to the 21st century!

The worst of everything tends to get my attention - doesn't it get yours?

There are three kinds of blacks in America today - feral, traditional, assimilated. Traditional black people are the nicest people in the world and have the coolest churches. Unfortunately they're all over 50 and have high blood pressure. Assimilated black people are just like white people except for the little box they check when they want to get into Harvard. (Samuel R. Delany's memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, is among other things a wonderful evocation of the old "Jack and Jill" black upper class.) Feral black people need to be rounded up, flex-cuffed, laser de-tattooed, sent to boot camp for three months, and placed in the unconditional custody of traditional black people, who will know exactly what to do with them.

Is that enough stereotypes for you? A stereotype is a pattern you don't want to recognize. I think you'll find you recognize these patterns just fine, however.

Trust me, I'm oddly familiar with the country this used to be. Go back and read some primary sources - there are a lot here:

http://unz.org/

Crime statistics in the USA have actually fallen a lot recently. What's your explanation of this? You didn't by any chance watch The Wire? You don't by any chance read the New York Times?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/nyregion/no-room-for-disse...

The former captains spoke of an unrelenting, often unethical pressure to manipulate crime statistics. In addition, the professors studied police and health data and found weird divergences. City hospital data shows a 90 percent increase in emergency room visits for assaults from 1999 to 2006. But police data for the same period records a nearly 50 percent decrease in assaults.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law

Yes (I accept the correction). See below:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3989048

You're claiming that integration ruined Brooklyn? Can you explain the mechanism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

If you ever actually talk to anyone who was personally involved in the former, and they're being frank, they'll tell you that a primary concern was a rational fear for their physical safety and/or that of their families. Which adds up to the latter. Why do you think there are no Serbs left in Kosovo, or no Albanians in Mitrovica?

E. Michael Jones's Slaughter of Cities (http://www.amazon.com/The-Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Cleansing...) is a good overview from a j'accuse perspective. For a mainstream author, read J. Anthony Lukas' Common Ground. Better yet, read them both.

Of course we've digressed into the question of harmful effects (of the civil-rights movement) on white people. My original post was mainly concerned with the effect on black people.

Perhaps you've noticed some cultural changes? Are they for the better? If we could sit down together and watch WSHH for an hour, how exactly would we disagree?

http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/

You're right, of course - I'm glad to be corrected.

What I really meant to say was that in 1962 there were no no-go zones anywhere in America, Crackerjack Peckerwood Creek in the deep back asshole of Alabama where no one without a mullet in a Camaro would want to go anyway excepted. (Alas, in 1962 there were no Camaros either.)

Trust me, I went to high school in Howard County, Maryland, and I would be the last person in the world to speak up for the indigenous American peckerwood. However, I also note that there's a big difference between Peckerwood, Alabama being a no-go zone (if your skin is darker than a bad white zinfandel), and half of Brooklyn being a no-go zone (for any sane person regardless of race, color or creed).

You'll have to cast out that beam in your eye first. Cabrini-Green is no big deal?

http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...

Your choice: grow up without a "right" to vote (not actually a right but a power, and of no direct value to you). Or grow up in Cabrini-Green.

Oh, and my party:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobitism

Democracy is working out pretty much as we always expected. Don't you think? You think your system of government is a success? Oh, please, I can't wait to hear this.