First Looks category archive

At Psychology Today Blogs, Ravi Chandra reviews what he calls “the 13 ‘disses’ of abusive power.”

Here’s the list:

Disturbance, Distress, Dissatisfaction (including discontent, disgruntlement, and disenchantment), Disconnection (including dissociation and discombobulation), Disruption, Disappointment, Disagreement, Disobedience, Dysfunction, Distortion, Disdain (including disrespect, disregard, devaluation, and contempt), Disability, and the Disproportionate.

Methinks you might want to read more of dat about “dis.”

This blog first came live 19 years ago today from my guest room on one of the original IBM Pentiums (given to me by a co-worker who was cleaning out a closet) running Slackware v. 10.x. I wanted to learn how to self-host a website.

A lot has happened since then, including database crashes, data loss, migration to a hosting provider, migration from shared hosting to a VPS, etc., etc. I’m no longer self-hosting, but I’m still learning stuff . . . .

Freedom of thought? What is this thing that you call “freedom of thought.”

Visitors.

Walz is right. These folks are weird.

If you are a mystery buff, as I am, you might want to take look at Alison Golden’s cozies.

When it comes to tight plots, Agatha Christie she’s not, but she brings her characters to life.

The only nit I have to pick is that she seems to think that “all right” is one word, misplet as “alright.”

At the Portland Press-Herald, Michael Jones makes a declaration of hearing a most resounding rhyme.

_________________

*Mark Twain.

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.