First Looks category archive

At Populist.com, Kaili Joy Gray quotes what J. D. Vance has said about Donald Trump.

No excerpt or summary will do it justice.

Just go read it.

Braving the remnants of Hurricane Debby to drink liberally.

Addendum:

Debby went easy on us. We got some wind and sprinkles and I drove through one rain squall on my way to DL, but the worst of it passed west of here, where they got tornado warnings.

Dion Lefler takes a deep dive into the ginned up right-wing controversy over Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. A snippet:

It’s entirely possible that Khelif possesses a genetic advantage over some of the other competitors in the event — sort of like Michael Jordan had those preternaturally large hands of his.

But it’s become increasingly clear that Khelif is not a man.

Instead, she’s the victim of rumormongering by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who runs an outfit called the International Boxing Association.

The Bletchley Circle.

It’s a gripping tale, but you should know that it is also a dark one.

I’m watching it on Tubi.

Also on Tubi, you might want to check out Colonel March of Scotland Yard. Boris Karloff plays Colonel March. It’s fun to watch him play the good guy.

(I have made this post a “sticky” so it will appear at the top of the page until I unstick it in a few days.)

(Unstuck 2024-08-05.)

In preparing a post that will appear tomorrow (WordPress allows you to schedule future posts), I learned that I have been misquoting Mark Twain, fortunately in a way that did not alter the intent of what he said. He did not say that history “often echoes,” he said that it “often rhymes.”

Using the blog’s “search” feature, I went back and fixed my mistakes (I reserve the right to fix my mistakes). I can’t say that I got all of them, but I think I got most of them.

Rebecca Watson draws a line between intentional dis- and misinformation on the Disinformation Superhighway and what she refers to as sh*tposting (which I can best define as sort of stupid wisecracks intended as “humor”). She uses as a starting point the J. D. Vance couch slur and how it went from a casual and completely fabricated post on the site that used to be known as Twitter to a torrent of tripe (warning: some language).

Or you can read the transcript.

Afterthought:

Methinks the primary take-away here is that “social” media isn’t.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Jessica Koehler explores why persons cling to beliefs even when they are demonstrably false, aka “belief persistence,” and offers some techniques for combating it. A snippet:

Politics is a domain rife with belief perseverance. Political beliefs are often deeply ingrained and tied to one’s identity, making them particularly resistant to change. This is evident in how people consume news and information. Individuals tend to gravitate towards media sources that align with their existing political beliefs, reinforcing their viewpoints while dismissing opposing perspectives.

Given the debased state of dis coarse discourse, this is a valuable read; I commend it to your attention.

Florida Woman.

Sam Uretsky looks at the current iteration of Large Language Models (LLMs). He is not impressed.

A snippet:

Worse, not only may an LLM be trained on false information, but, the programming may be capable of altering its reinforcement skills, as in a paper, “Sycophancy to Subterfuge: Investigating Reward-Tampering in Large Language Models.”

The abstract begins, “In reinforcement learning, specification gaming occurs when AI systems learn undesired behaviors that are highly rewarded due to misspecified training goals. Specification gaming can range from simple behaviors like sycophancy to sophisticated and pernicious behaviors like reward-tampering, where a model directly modifies its own reward mechanism.” That is, if the program of the AI includes rewards for giving the answers that please the questioner, the LLM will tell a white lie to get a reward, the way a white rat in a maze will learn to get a treat.

Follow the link for context.

Aside:

Just because you shouldn’t believe it just because you see it on a computer screen, you shouldn’t believe it just because it comes out of a computer’s speakers.

Methinks Rat has a point.

Aside:

In the late 1990s, I was working for a company that manufactured security software. Their programmers were working like mad to make sure their software made it into 2000 without any issues.

One of my neighbors was so freaked out by the hype around Y2K that he bought a generator. It was I swear the world’s loudest home generator with the world’s most sensitive auto-switch. The slightest little blip in the current–one that you didn’t even notice if you were watching TV at the time, one so small that it didn’t even make the lights blink–would cause it to come on and wake the neighborhood.

Using the recent incident at the Republican National Convention as a starting point, Professor Arie W. Kruglanski explores the pull of the portable phallus, why the disaffected feel so gun. In light of the soaring number of shootings in the United States, methinks it a worthwhile read. Here’s a tiny bit:

Why, though, if everyone yearns for significance and respect, do only very few individuals drop everything to attend to concerns of their ego? And why do they choose gun violence when there are many other ways of gaining recognition: through good works, career achievements, athleticism, etc.? The answer to the first question is personal, and to the second, cultural. The quest for significance needs to be strongly activated to elicit action. Humiliation, discrimination, and a history of bullying and exclusion (apparently suffered by Crooks) can bring one to a boiling point, ready to do just about anything to restore their hurt sense of self worth. Violence, unfortunately, is a most direct and immediate means for humans to assert dominance and power, and hence to earn the respect of others. Therefore it comes to mind almost automatically when feeling belittled, dishonored, or treated as if one didn’t matter.

(Broken link fixed.)

Thom discusses the Republican plan to undo the American revolution and reduce America to a monarchy under Trump.

H. Colleen Sinclair offers some pointers about how to safely navigate the Disinformation Superhighway.

One more time, “social” media isn’t.

Indeed, methinks “social” media has contributed mightily to the coarseness of dis coarse discourse. Persons on “social” media forget that their discourse is public and have turned the public arena into a locker roon.

Off to drink liberally.

Mangy Fetlocks stands aghast marvels at right-wing evangelical they-call-themselves Christians embrace of Trump.

Via Job’s Anger.