ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
"Right and wrong"? What's that? I keep hearing here that those things don't real. Naive meta-ethical relativism, you see. Best you can do is something something game theory (don't ask how that's supposed to work). And best as I can see, assassination is a strategy in the strategy set. Ergo, there's nothing "wrong" about it.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
SPLC
This seems pretty apart from a core problem within academia.
harassment
Uh, likewise? That's sort of just a general phenomenon that exists in a variety of places?
which they can then use to their advantage in future fights (any other university considering work with SEGM will either come across the scandal when vetting the organization and get cold feet, or in the event they don't, activists can forward it to them once any such future relationship is discovered.
Yeah, uh, the same?
I'm really struggling to see how any of this is actually about academia qua academia. There's almost nothing here about the typical workings of academia, interactions with the federal government, levers that could be pulled, specific goals to be accomplished.
Big picture, it seems like most of this is that there is some influence on academia's decision-making, and that influence is political in nature and bad. ISTM that the goal would be some form of reducing that influence or the effectiveness thereof, rather than detonating all of academia, itself. Would that at least be a reasonable statement of a plausible goal?
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I find this to be, frankly, borne of ignorance and lack of creativity. That is, similar to what I wrote here, it scans to me like "Joe Sixpack" bloviating on Middle East politics. Perhaps some of that is epistemic helplessness, seeing for example the classic hapax legomenon about Afghanistan, then just casually coming to the conclusion that all is hopeless and we should just nuke 'em all and turn the sand into glass. There's no sense of theory of war/politics involved, no understanding of the concepts behind consolidating gains, just shooting from the hip without much thought.
Even here in your latest comment, you seem to grasping for something to 'work' (you don't use the word, but ISTM that it's what you're going for), but there's no sense of what 'working' is. There's not even really a well-formed goal. Just a vague sense of these people seem bad, and it seems complicated, and I don't know what to do, so I'll just go in blastin'.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
This also touches on Trump's dreaded funding cuts. We've had a number of people here complaining about them, claiming that Trump should have used a more precise approach. It can't be done. Any presumption-of-innocence approach would yield no significant outcome, as institutions could hire activists faster than you could get them fired.
This is, like, just a non sequitur, no? Something something, list of grievances, declaration that $Thing can't be done, because something something, the other side can recruit or something? Is the implication here just the @gattsuru comment? No bother firing (upon) them one-by-one; no bother even considering any other possible pathway either; really gotta just go for a mass casualty event?
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I think the slightly easier steelman would be riffing off your phrase "much-bigger news than a murder". That is, one might think that this is "just a murder". Murders happen all the time. They're often not Paper of Record material. So the steelman view could be something like, "This wouldn't be Paper of Record news if it wasn't for Republicans Pouncing to try to make it news."
Of course, this still exposes some significant premises. One could have taken a similar view for several other cases that became cause celebres mostly due to the left "pouncing". It takes more time and effort to work through some reasoning for why any given incident is "legitimately" newsworthy versus primarily being pushed for political concerns. Nevertheless, the most basic observation that is difficult to explain away is that I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'." Their concerns just are; they're inherently just and true; there is no intermediate agent actively choosing to pump up the situation for political purposes.
But all these sorts of observations require realizing the possibility and then having sufficient time/exposure to realize what's happening, which is more sophisticated than most observers are likely to be.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
What stood out to me the most in that article was that it was, "Republicans Pounce". The style guide is dumb, but that's sort of baked in at this point. It's almost mechanical, like if someone changed their spellchecker. Whereas making the affirmative choice to headline with "Republicans Pounce" requires more in-the-moment intent.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Yeah, I basically haven't meaningfully read any of these, but every time I skim one, I kick myself more and more for not commenting what I thought when the very first one was posted: "I wonder whether they'll do Jews or Blacks first when they get around to it."
#HlynkaWasRight
This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences. As he notes, this ends up to a large extent rederiving traditional Christian morality
Pretty much doubt. I mean, I'd probably have to wade through a bunch of garbage to distill out an actual attempted derivation; it's much more likely to be a loose collection of handwavy claims than any sort of serious deductive argument.
It's kind of funny how all sides of the atheist internecine war want to make claims that the core of their morality is game theory. Of course, this game theory is somehow "not objective", meaning that other people can't simply rederive it from the premises... but good luck asking them to explain how that's supposed to work. And more funny is that they all seem to come up with quite different conclusions about what their handwavy game theory premises are supposed to imply (derivation often not shown). I'm pretty confident that the folks here who appeal to it don't think it directly derives traditional Christian morality. ...especially not Jim's version.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Yeah, I guess. I was looking at WINE/such first, and my "cursory amount of research" was basically just asking an LLM, which IIRC told me that they had problems with Excel. I should revisit doing it with a VM. Biggest challenge will be making a workflow that is wife-approved, since she needs to use it, too.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
I've got my wife pretty bought-in on super cheap Chromebooks for 'laptop-like' stuff. She genuinely lives in a browser and isn't ever doing computationally expensive stuff, so it works pretty well. There's maybe one or two things that would make me weakly prefer for her to have a Mint laptop, but given our shared preference for super cheap, small form factor, low power (low heat), long battery life, etc., I think chromebooks get the job done well enough.
For the main desktop, which I ask to do a lot more stuff, I have it dual-booting Win10 and Mint at the moment. There are a few niche things I'm still figuring out, but the main one is Excel. We have a fair amount of stuff in Excel, and it appears that things don't translate directly into Libre... especially any of the books with significant VBA macros. A cursory amount of research tells me that it's actually annoying to get Excel working in Linux, so I might be staring down having to just re-write everything and having a clean break in compatibility for prior years' info. I've still only done cursory research into it, partly because I don't want to think about having to redo it all.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Please find that part in the document. It appears that you have not yet read the document. We've made progress in that it seems that you have found it... but you haven't read it.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
That some providers sometimes drop some charges is pretty irrelevant to either the question of whether there is any meaningful legal risk to providing price estimates or the question of whether it is socially good for them to do so. If, as the good doctor says, there has never actually been a case of a patient suing a provider because an estimate didn't match the ultimate bill, then the liability concern is fake. It's fake even if they sometimes drop some charges because of their fake worry for a fake concern. Honestly, I can't even see what legal theory one would try, because it's so incredibly easy and obvious how to make estimates in a way that doesn't produce any legal liability. Basically every other industry that has estimates does it just fine.
Just a heads up, though, this is just part of the gish gallop. There are seventeen other fake reasons doctors give for why they can't provide prices. And frankly, just like with a Holocaust denier, you can spend your time focusing on one or two of them, really showing that they're totally fake, and then they'll just shift to some of the other ones for the next week or so, and in two weeks, these ones will pop right back up, as if nothing was ever said on them.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Ok, so it is a totally fake "liability concern", and to your knowledge, no patient has ever sued a provider over a bad estimate. Care to weigh in on whether you think this commonly happens in other industries where providing estimates is routine?
You're sort of running out of excuses to not provide prices if you're all the way down the list to fake "liability concerns".
ControlsFreak
10d ago
ROFL. You got me. Oh boy, did you get me. It uses the term "specific selectors" and often just the unqualified "selector" to refer to them. I see just how much you weigh being intentionally obtuse versus actually understanding how things work.
So now that we've all had a little laugh, perhaps you could now describe what you think specific selectors are and what their role is in the program? And perhaps try to be serious this time, moving the conversation toward a shared understanding of how the world works.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I would expect that most people who get into the military or intelligence game (or, frankly, politics) have to at some point wrestle significantly with morality/their soul. Taking a brief look at his career on Wikipedia, I wouldn't be surprised if "didn't blow a classified program when a Senator went rogue, but still obviously kept the public representatives informed" didn't rank in the top ten of situations where he might have thought there was moral difficulty in doing what he thought was in the interest of protecting you and yours.
I should at some point note that I'm saying this as someone who detests his politics. Honestly, some of the political stuff he did was significantly worse than "not blowing a classified program when a Senator went rogue, but still obviously kept the public representatives informed".
Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?
EDIT: Remember, you had said that the role was, "Nothing".
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Senate Intelligence Committee
It's good that you're aware of who this was. Now think about it for a minute. Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence. In that role, he would have routinely given classified briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don't believe that anyone has ever claimed that he ever lied to them in any of those briefings. Those classified briefings are for the purpose of informing SSCI on what's actually going on.
This briefing was different. It was an unclassified, public briefing. The purpose was not to inform SSCI, especially not to inform them about classified matters. One might honestly wonder what the point of it even was... or whether it's even almost a contradiction in terms to have an unclassified, public briefing on covert intelligence programs. So when you think about it, you realize that the point of this briefing was not to inform SSCI about what's going on; the point of it was for the government to sort of get together and try to somewhat inform the public about what's going on. Doing so on a covert intelligence program sort of requires that everyone plays well together to inform on the things that "should" be publicly revealed, while avoiding things that "should" stay classified and secret.
Of course, the rub is that folks might have different perspectives on "should". Perhaps Wyden genuinely thought that it "should" become public. But the fact of the matter is, from Clapper's seat, it was classified. I think almost no theory of how the government should operate is such that it should be really relying on him to make that determination on his own. Yes, he has Original Classification Authority, but in reality, that's still pretty limited. For matters concerning significant programs like this, frankly, he shouldn't be out on his own in up and deciding to declassify it in the middle of a random briefing. That sorta thing should mostly be a matter for the President, possibly in consultation with folks like SSCI, with plenty of secret deliberation before pulling the trigger.
As such, Wyden was basically the turd in the punchbowl, preferring to pursue his own vision of "should" over the purpose of what those sorts of hearings are about. That's fair enough; he's a Senator. But it makes it more difficult for future such hearings to do the job as intended; if there's a real concern that even a single Senator will go rogue, I imagine they're probably going to pull back and be less informative generally.
I think the follow-on of what happened afterward is mostly just noise; again, there's no doubt that SSCI received the correct answer, both before and after this one briefing. They certainly already knew exactly what these programs were doing; they certainly had already gotten classified briefings telling them such; afterward, I highly doubt anyone had any real claim to having been misled... except of course, if you're a Senator talking the press, trying to drum up votes for yourself or trying to make something that is classified unclassified. Wyden even gave up the game with responding to it with a request for DNI to officially correct the public record (that is, put classified information in the public record).
It's hard to tell if Wyden genuinely thought it should be public, but didn't want to take the hit of actually revealing it himself... or if he was just trying to figure out a way to drum up more votes by playing the anti-SIGINT character. Whereas it's much easier to figure out that Clapper was just trying to keep classified stuff classified, play along with the supposed point of such an unclassified briefing, and then ultimately end up scrambling to perform damage control from such a bizarro event.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Nobody who understands banking thought at the time that banks were making sensible commercial decisions to debank gun shops...
"Online smut generates high chargeback rates" is, among banking risk and compliance professionals, a notorious fact that no longer requires a citation. "Gun shops generate high chargeback rates" is something that would be surprising, if true. (AFAIK, it isn't, and the regulators pushing Chokepoint didn't claim it was).
Yup. They went with "reputational risk", which is overtly admitting that the only 'problem' that could be in play is that some people would disapprove of the banks doing business with gun shops. One may still not think that "online smut generates high chargeback rates" is a sufficient reason to pull back, but it's genuinely a qualitatively different type of reasoning, and the two cases don't really stand/fall together by analogy.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I'm not aware of any laws typically preventing someone from answering the question "Do you beat your wife?".
True, but irrelevant to the point. I'll ask again. Do you beat your wife? Is the correct answer to that, "I cannot answer that"?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Charitably, your comment is acknowledging that there is a difference between the CDR program and the program that collected the contents of internet communications. Moreover, your comment acknowledges that this conversation is about the program that collected the contents of internet communications. To all of this, I agree.
Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
The foreigners are the ones on foreign soil. The Fourth Amendment attaches to people.
Congress gave retroactive immunity to telecoms for potential violations of statutes. Congress can provide such immunity with a further statute. Congress cannot, with a further statute, simply provide an exception to the Fourth Amendment. So, the 4A question remains separately.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Do you beat your wife? Is the correct answer to that, "I cannot answer that"?
lying to Congress
This is pretty loaded terminology. Is it "lying to Congress" to say one thing about a classified program in a public Congressional forum and then give to Congress the correct, classified answer thereafter? Has Congress been lied to? Like, I get it. You're wanting to say that he lied to the public, and that may be true and scandalous, but it still doesn't sound as bad, so you have to juice it up a bit.
under oath
As I wrote here, when I tried to trace back this claim, I couldn't find good evidence for it. TBH, I think it would be kind of unusual for people to be under oath in those types of hearings.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
The Ninth and Second Circuits were both okay with it. Would it be nice to get it up to SCOTUS? Sure. I don't recall if any of those plaintiffs petitioned for cert.
One note is that your analysis actually needs to start a step earlier. They are collecting the contents of communications of foreigners on foreign soil. We have black letter Supreme Court precedent that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to them. So, your challenge (which has so far failed in the circuit courts) is to demonstrate that one even needs to parse that text in the first place.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Clapper was under oath
I tried to follow this claim back when the event happened. I couldn't find any authoritative source that actually claims it. I even went back and watched the CSPAN feed of the event, and there was no oath taken or shown. But it's sort of meaningless, anyway. He also took an oath to not divulge classified information outside of narrow circumstances.
Clapper is a clown, and I don't care about him generally, but it's a stupid stupid hill to die on to claim that anyone should be put in that situation. Frankly, that's Wyden's fault, and he should know better.
Perhaps this was all just a bit of confusion. I was responding to your bit:
where the internal link was to funding cuts to academia, with the context being whether or not there were goal-oriented, somewhat tailored ways of approaching it compared to what I've perceived in these fora as calls for 'indiscriminate chemotherapy'. So, I guess, I'm not really sure what you're meaning or going for.
I think I already linked it, but it might not have been worth the time to read it before, but here is some context, with links to prior discussions where I was pushing back against the 'indiscriminate chemo' calls, culminating in the more recent cuts being targeted and linked to institutional behavior.
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