Links to Consider, 11/20
Henrik Karlsson is optimistic about AI and energy; Aaron Renn on Evangelicals and Israel; Scott Alexander reads Rene Girard; Frank Furedi on the decline of parental authority
A descendant of ChatGPT could be deployed to millions of users, learn something from each interaction, and then propagate gradient updates to a central server where they are averaged together and applied to all copies of the model. In this way, the system can observe more about human nature in an hour than humans do in a lifetime, which allows it to rapidly learn any skills missing from the training data.
Watch out for “averaged together.” The AI had better be able to filter out “information” that comes from users who are relatively ignorant.
On energy, he writes,
By 2050, the authors of the article from Nature projects, solar will have become the dominant energy form globally …
Furthermore, solar power has a synergetic effect with battery farms. Battery farms make solar more valuable by providing storage for when the sun goes down. And battery prices are plummeting much faster than expected
I wish that I knew enough to be able to sort out the competing claims about renewable energy. For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith.
Support for Israel is declining for demographic reasons, an ascendent left is increasingly turning a pro-Palestinian position into the high status one (just as they successfully did for so many other things), and even American Jews increasingly question Israel in light of its hard right turn under Netanyahu.
If these trends continue, they will make evangelicals, who are themselves shrinking in numbers and significance, more conspicuous as outlier supporters of Israel rather than simply particularly enthusiastic supporters of a pro-Israel position that represents the mainstream. Given the low status of evangelicals as an official out group in American society, that would not be good for the cause of Israel.
This sounds right to me. I don’t think this is your grandfather’s anti-semitism. It’s more like Israel and Jews are not cool. Sort of like it’s not cool to be straight. When I’m feeling depressed, I think that the ultra-progressives will continue to control the definition of what is cool, and society will just rot away.
When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that the Overton Window will shift, and ultra-progressives will be derided and despised by everyone else. In the 1950s, no German wanted to admit to having been a Nazi supporter. Maybe today’s ultra-progressives will follow a similar path.
Scott Alexander reads a book by Rene Girard (so you don’t have to, I’m tempted to add).
Girard admires Nietzsche for correctly identifying the core of Christianity as a previously unprecedented form of morality that supported victims and the oppressed (as opposed to pagan “master morality”, which supported the powerful and popular).
If you follow Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, the All In podcast, or especially Erik Torenberg, you will get a lot of the Girard and Nietzsche stuff. I think that Alexander does a great job of taking down Girard. Girard is neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing the intellectual plague of critical theory and ultra-progressivism.
If you’re concerned about the influence of wokeness on society, you should be more interested in things like affirmative action laws, anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes. All those things get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, the opposite of mob violence. Does Girard have anything to say about them?
It is important to realise that the adultification of childhood is not simply about recycling a political agenda through the voice of children. It is about recycling all forms of adult obsessions – including sexual ones – through children. The sexualisation of children – including the very young – is integral to the adultification imperative. In the Anglo-American world, the casual insertion of drag queens into children’s lives is justified by many because kids are never too young to be exposed to the intricacies of adult sexuality. Sex education of pupils is fast giving way to sexuality education, which encourages children to experiment with their identity. Predictably, we have seen the emergence of child drag queens. And at least for some – thankfully, a very small number of adults – children are represented as suitable targets of their sexual desire. The invention of the identity of ‘minor-attracted people’ is entirely in line with adultification. Paedophiles can now draw on the cultural resources that promote the role reversal between children and adults.
He wants adults back in charge, meaning adults who have a more traditional sense of how adults and children should relate.
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"I wish that I knew enough to be able to sort out the competing claims about renewable energy. For now, I am inclined to side with pessimists like Peter Zeihan and Michael Muthukrishna, rather than with the optimists like Karlsson and Noah Smith."
An easy heuristic is to carefully read the optimists, and the people they cite. Noah Smith and like-minded people like Andrew Dressler cite studies that prominently state that continued and expanded subsidies, and legal/regulatory mandates, are necessary in order to continue expanding renewable energy. In other words, renewables are currently nonviable economically, and depend on political preferences for viability.
".....ultra-progressives will continue to control the definition of what is cool, and society will just rot away" is where we're headed.... and have been (on an exponential curve) for some decades now. Most right-thinking people find this just too depressing so prefer to avert their intellectual gaze from it. I believe the wheel will eventually turn (don't know when)....but it will get ugly while it turns. I don't know if that counts as any kind of optimism or not?