whatihear
19d ago
Yeah, that’s true, though I think TPMs might be able to prevent that since they will check the boot image and are involved in data decryption. I’m not sure if having the BIOS password allows you to subvert that though. I think the way it works is that the key or part of the key is registered with the TPM and then it asserts about the boot image hash before releasing that key, so it is only possibly to use known good boot images to decrypt your data. Maybe having the BIOS password would allow you to reset the TPM, but I think there is no way to do that without clobbering the key it stores.
No idea if these machines have that set up though.
whatihear
20d ago
As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.
whatihear
1mo ago
I mostly agree. Progress is only linear in retrospect and in the minds of the people pushing for it. There is not actually some great moral lodestar that history inevitably pushes us closer to, what counts as progress is mostly about what the powerful say it is. As you point out it is not possible to provide a total ordering of policies according to progress, but I do think that the general direction of progress is fairly clear from within any given political reference frame (except those reference frames that don't even have the notion).
whatihear
1mo ago
If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.
whatihear
1mo ago
Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).
There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.
The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.
whatihear
1mo ago
Defining reaction that way would seem to produce some pretty strange results. It would mean that none of the prominent writers and internet microcelebrities one normally thinks of as reactionary get any credit for their writing or public persona (they may be reactionary in their private lives, but Moldbug's writings wouldn't count one way or another). You would also have to conclude that lots of people with progressive liberal politics are more reactionary than certain conservatives (90% of Boston Brahmans would count as more reactionary than Milo Yanopolis). This is also the first time I've heard this requirement put forward for being a reactionary. To be honest it seems like it is the result of cope. Reaction is so far out of the Overton window that its proponents know they can never make headway, and saying, "a real reaction just goes his own Sigma Male way instead of trying to make change in the world," is a good way to feel better about it. It also rhymes with all the "politics is personal" stuff you get from progressives, which is pretty interesting (though I'm not quite sure what relevance it has to the position, just something I noticed).
whatihear
1mo ago
The right wants to preserve and the left wants to improve. At least, that's the high level framework that I and I think a lot of other people were taught. There is clearly something to this, but it is equally clear that it isn't the whole picture. In particular, there is no room in this paradigm for an important third category that, while an exotic species in most of our political culture, is quite common in this particular discursive wildlife preserve: the reactionary. Just like progressives on the left, reactionaries don't just want to preserve the existing culture, they want to improve it. The keep difference is that rather than innovation, they want to roll things back to the way they were.
Reactionaries are of the right. No only do they oppose Progress, they actively want to roll it back! Since the long arc of history bending towards justice (or Cthulhu swimming left) is linear, anyone wanting to roll things back must stand in opposition to Progress. This expansion of the basic left-right paradigm is pretty well understood by the people who have become, in their own conception, regime-aware, and by their ideological enemies interested enough to notice. (Marxists have long railed against reactionaries, but my sense is that they just call anyone opposed to the eternal science of dialectical materialism a reactionary be they a conservative or a reactionary proper).
This was my view until recently, when I listened to the recent Political Orphanage podcast with Guy Standing as a guest. Guy Standing very much reads as a man of the left, but all his ideas are callbacks to medieval institutions. I think this is most clear in his view of the commons, but his latest book about labor (that great old saw of the Classic Left) is still a callback to roll things back to the past.
Once I realized that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary, a category that I had previously not thought possible, I realized that large chunks of the left are reactionary in nature. One good example can be seen in the tension between the Marxists and the Bakuninite SRs in the Russion underground leading up to the Russian revolution. Marxists are all about Progress, to a degree that hardly anyone dares to envision these days, but by understanding of Russian anarchism at the time was that it was all about the traditional Russian peasant village. It's true that they wanted to throw of the Tsarist yoke, but the fundamental institution they wanted to center life around was ancient. They wanted to roll things back to before city states really got going.
I think there is also a strong strain of left-reaction in environmentalists. The core of environmentalism is about rolling back processes that everyone conceived of as progress when they got started (how do Marxists feel about industrialization?). Environmentalism is about rolling things back to a simpler and purer time.
We also see left-reaction in the fetishization of indigenous peoples. When people go on about listening to indigenous ways of knowing, they are talking about returning to an ancient epistemological framework, actively rolling back Progress. This also helps explain why Anglos in Britain don't count as indigenous to these people. What's to return to?
I know it's not exactly a novel observation that the linear political spectrum fails to capture important nuance, but this has really driven home to me the idea that what counts as left or right is mostly about vibes and historical coalitions. We can still anchor of Burke as being on the right, but everything else is up for grabs. Liberals are the original leftists, but by this point they straddle the center, with some on the right and some on the left. Because Progress must always march on, no one set of ideas can ever be guaranteed to be on the left, though originality seems like it helps a lot. Patriarchy has reigned though most of history, so feminism seems light it ought to have been pretty well dug in on the left, only now Progress calls for the reinforcement of gender roles and radfems are in coalition with social conservatives. Nothing matters, it's all just vibes, coalition building, and branding.
One big caveat to this is that it doesn't seem like you necessarily get to choose the branding for your own ideas. Your left-right branding is assigned to you by the zeitgeist, and there is some real connection to the historical left and right.
It's also the case that, at least for now, I think this mostly applies to mapping out the range of possible political position space. There are not that many mainstream right-reactionary positions. The biggest and most effective I can think of is originalism, and arguable the pro-life movement is another, but for the most part, the right that is allowed in the Overton window is one big rearguard action. In practice, if someone is trying to change things, they are still usually attempting Progress.
whatihear
9mo ago
...they did.
When? If you are talking about the resettlement of the German tribes inside imperial borders, they only did that after smashing them in battle and disarming them. Sometimes they would skip the smashing in battle bit, but there would always at least be a negotiated settlement before the tribes were allowed to move into the empire uncontested. Towards the end of the empire they stopped disarming the Germans, but that was definitely not by choice, it was because the empire was falling apart.
whatihear
10mo ago
I've long had a feeling of disquiet about just how far removed from the necessities imposed on us by the fact of our physical existence we are in the modern era. For me, this manifested most strongly as a revulsion towards a career that just pushes paper or people around, and made me interested in STEMy stuff, but I don't think I'm alone in this. I think this sense of disquiet undergirds a lot of strange behavior you can observe in left wing hippies and right wing homesteader types. For some people it isn't the disconnection from physical reality (by this I mean mostly agriculture and manufacturing), but instead from what one might call the societal production function. My grandmother once remarked that as a girl she thought the only jobs worth doing were being a soldier, a teacher, or a farmer, and I think this sentiment was coming from a similar place as my feeling that you have to be getting your hands at least a little dirty.
I think you're a bit like my grandmother in that you feel that there are certain social truths that will remain inescapable so long as we are a bunch of jumped up apes. As I get older, I've started to come around to this view more even as I loosen my grip on my old feeling that work is fake unless you're building a little. Pinker really convinced me that Hobbes was right, and watching the world devolve into chaos as US hegemony fades is only strengthening that view.
whatihear
1yr ago
I'm looking for a audiobook, series of audiobooks, or podcast that gives a historical survey of the middle east starting with the founding of Islam. Basically I'd like to have an AP Euro/AP US level of detail about the region. Normally my proceedure for this is to look for a "History of $REGION" podcast, but I found that I felt I couldn't trust the "History of Islam" podcast I found because it was done by a believer and I wasn't sure how much that distorted the narrative (I didn't get the sense he was a propagandist, just had some fairly obvious biases). This part of history seems uniquely political, so I'm afraid I would run into the same issue if I just bought a random book on the subject.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Ideally this would be by a non-believer. Even more ideally, by a non-believer from quite a while ago (somehow I feel like people might have been able to be more objective about it before 9/11).
whatihear
1yr ago
One big reason people are not bringing up Tom Cruise's Scientology connection is that it is old news. For better or for worse, if a nasty fact has been out there for a long time, people don't bring it up in the discourse as much. This is how the process of un-cancellation works on an individual level (I think broad vibe shifts also have something to do with it). The Scientology thing has been litigated in the court of public opinion for quite some time.
whatihear
1yr ago
"has an advantage" != "is better". Two different competitors will always have a multitude of different advantages and disadvantages relative to one another. It just happens that the results of male puberty have a very strong advantage over the results of female puberty for almost all sports.
whatihear
1yr ago
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
whatihear
1yr ago
Yeah, I saw that after I posted that response.
I think the impulse to say that the female franchise was a bad idea comes from the observation that women tend to be more prone to certain behaviors which lead to a toxic politics (women are generally the front-line enforcers of orthodoxy), which I think is actually true, but conveniently ignores the fact that men have their own set of such behaviors that are arguably worse (our violence at the personal level extends to supporting more state violence and jingoism). I think that mixed gender friend groups are generally healthier than single gender, and I tend to think that the same is true for the political realm as well as each gender provides some balance for the other.
whatihear
1yr ago
I don't think your local interlocutors have advocated for stripping women of the right to vote (though maybe someone has elsewhere in the thread). I've read them more as hoping for a shift in power at the level of culture and norms, but basically disparaging that this is possible.
Personally, I'm somewhat optimistic that we will find a better balance in the long term, but believe the short term will be bumpy. We've only had gender equality in the west for maybe half a century, and that equality is not perfect because some aspects of patriarchy have inertia and most feminine privilege remains unexamined due to the nature of the feminist movement. I think feminism is mostly downstream of the industrial revolution, but cultural evolution can take awhile and I think we still have a ways to go before we have adjusted to the economic substraight of the information economy.
Argentina and Mexico are not really first world societies. Turkey and Israel both use fairly oppressive religions to control women's reproductive behavior.
whatihear
1yr ago
I have one friend who is a great guy, quite smart and funny, and quite willing to help out any of his friends at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, he has the misfortune of not being all that attractive. He's in his early thirties and single, and I don't think there is anything wrong with him. Some guys just have it hard.
whatihear
1yr ago
I think the fact that they are a smaller country is one reason. China is so big and economically muscular that they can throw their weight around. Smaller countries must integrate into an international system if they want to do well. Also, china is not the only datapoint. South Korea started off a military dictator ship and transformed into a (somewhat shaky) liberal democracy. Singapore is known for being the model authoritarian state, but they have been very slowly loosening the ratchet. Various peripheral European states have been influenced to clean up their act in various ways by the economic power of the EU.
whatihear
1yr ago
Yeah, I think I basically agree with that unless I'm misreading you. I think "scientist" has a bunch of cachet, and we should assign that cachet to the people doing what is normally thought of as science rather than pushing paper.
whatihear
1yr ago
A software engineer, on the other hand--or better yet, a software architect--need not necessarily do any programming. They can offload the tasks that require that specific technical skill to programmers.
There is no meaninfful distinction between programmers and software engineers. I consider myself a programmer because I feel like it captures what I do more accurately, and refer to myself as a software engineer in situations where it is financially beneficial. Software engineering is programming plus bureaucracy. Lots of things involve bureaucracy. When it comes to software engineering, programming is the main bit. If you take out the programming, it's not software engineering anymore. I have no patience for someone who thinks they are contributing technically by building a pie-in-the-sky UML diagram and demanding that actual programmers implement their out of touch vision.
I suspect that this is at the root of the contention between your perspective and mine. Do you regard doing science as a set of technical skills? Or do you regard doing science as making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world?
I think you're right about that this is where we disagree. If we take doing science as "making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world", well that applies to the electron microscope salesmen, academic departmental secretaries, directors of corporate research orgs, plumbers who install chilled water systems in labs, the maintainers of python and r, and any number of other people who contribute in some small way to the broad economic activity of advancing science. You my protest that since science coordinators work a bit closer to the main body of the academic work than the directors of a corporate lab, they are scientists, but both of those roles are mostly about coordinating the technical work.
So if I run a bio-chem lab (the Hooser Lab at Stanbridge) and my goal is to progress what we know about what causes aging and what may halt the process in mammals, then my main job is to make sure that my lab can actually make useful progress in my goal. I need to break down what my lab needs to do, what resources it needs to do that, and how I can get those resources. Then I get those resources, and oversee the process. And as much as I enjoyed writing scripts to analyze data when I was a postdoc at Whatihear Lab at Oxbridge, maybe my time would be better spent on reviewing drafts for publications (because I have the breadth of knowledge to connect that esoteric result to broader field, or to suggest in the discussion multiple probable interesting consequences), and speaking with grant-giving foundations (because I have built my reputation as a serious scientist and they will take me seriously), while a postdoc in my lab oversees the data analysis.
Within our current system, that's what you need to do to push research forward. It doesn't mean you would be a scientist in that situation.
I'm not blaming PIs for the current state of affairs. They are operating within a system of constraints and incentives that they had no role in building. I'm just pointing out that they are not scientists, despite being the best trained people to fulfill such a role.
whatihear
1yr ago
Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ? It may not have lasted long, but there was quite a bit of damage.
In the western legal tradition, violent crime is not a tort, or at least not exclusively a tort. If Brown murders Jones, the case is The State of Maryland vs Brown not Jones vs Brown. This is because violent crime causes lasting damage to the social fabric. I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric. The knock on effects of delegitimizing the state's agents of violence are where most of the damage was.
whatihear
1yr ago
I really don't know how things used to work, but that certainly seems plausible. Certainly as we produce more scientists the bar is probably lowered since the distribution of human intelligence is relatively fixed over time (the Flynn effect is not enough to make up for the expansion in the number of scientists, especially because it works mostly by lifting up the bottom of the distribution so we have more average people and less profoundly stupid people).
The idea of larger labs causing eroding an old apprenticeship model is interested, though in my experience smaller labs can be pretty bad learning environments because the professor does no research and there are not enough older grad students to mentor the new grad students. Maybe things would have been different if all labs were smaller and more professors actually did their own research.
whatihear
1yr ago
The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.
Jesus that sounds horrible. Fortunately, I don't think things are quite that bad in my friend's lab, but her PI is known to play favorites. There is definitely a ton of political BS.
That doesn’t matter with a correctly configured TPM though. The decryption process for the disk includes a key stored in the TPM, which is never revealed, and the TPM itself verifies the boot image (which is the thing responsible for decrypting the data).
You can definitely boot whatever you want, and even trick the user into inputting their password, but if that password is only half the decryption key, you can’t actually go in and tamper with any of the data. You could still replace it wholesale or send the password somewhere else for further attacks, so it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as bad as if the TPM was not set up to do boot attestation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals#measured-boot-with-support-for-attestation
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