#Stochastics

[noosphe-re]

Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. This tremendous truth is not made of objects, emotions, or sensations; it is beyond these, as Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is beyond music. This is why art can lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.

Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music

#quote #Iannis Xenakis #Xenakis #Formalized Music #music #art #religion #mathematics #stochastics #Beethoven

[edenfenixblogs]

Let’s put some numbers to Jewish fear right now.

In news that I’m sure will thrill all antisemites, it would take startlingly little effort to foment widespread violence against us and cause another genocide of the Jewish people.

I have had many fellow Jews express to me how overwhelming it is to see the rising antisemitism. I have seen many Jews express fear at being drowned out of public, online, and IRL spaces due to dangerously violent vitriol.

I have also seen people who claim to advocate for Palestine—especially western leftists—openly mock Jews who express this fear.

Finally, I and my fellow Jews have often expressed that, while we wholeheartedly support Palestinian freedom and self determination, it is exhausting to have to say so repeatedly, especially when we are trying to advocate for ourselves. This is not due to any latent or widespread hatred of Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians. It is because we are an extremely maligned and marginalized minority that is fighting to be heard against strong, hostile forces that at best wish we’d shut up and at worst want us eradicated from the planet.

There is a disconnect about how much harm people can do to Jews by spreading antisemitism and refusing to dismantle their own internalized antisemitism—and everyone has internalized antisemitism. It is one of the oldest forms of prejudice in the world and is found in almost every single culture. It is as, if not more, pervasive than white privilege. Yes. You read that right. And if asked to elaborate, I will provide numbers on that to the best of my ability. For the purposes of this post, however, I want to focus on the global distribution of religious groups only.

Specifically, this disconnect is between Jews who are fully aware and feel the affects of this damage and goyim who simply do not comprehend our marginalization.

To help, let’s put some numbers to this. In this post, I’ll be using the Pew Research Center’s survey and findings on the Global Religious Landscape. This is the most recent data from a reputable source that I could find which surveyed every world religion at the same time. While the Jewish population has grown slightly in the intervening years, so have most (if not all) other religious populations around the globe. I wanted to use figures measured at the same time to avoid bias for or against any religious group.

For the purposes of this post, I will not be discussing folk religions or other religions. This is not because they are not important. This is because they are not a monolith and individual folk religions and other religions may have even fewer adherents per religion than Judaism. I am currently only focusing on religions and religious groups who have more adherents than Judaism.

In descending order of adherents, there number of people in the world belonging to these groups:

2,200,000,000 (2.2 Billion) Christians

1,600,000,000 (1.6 Billion) Muslims

1,100,000,000 (1.1 Billion) Religiously unaffiliated people

1,000,000,000 (1 Billion) Hindus

500,000,000 (500 Million) Buddhists

14,000,000 (14 Million) Jews

Reduced to the simplest fractions there are:

1100 Christians for every 7 Jews

800 Muslims for every 7 Jews

550 Religiously unaffiliated people for every 7 Jews

500 Hindus for every 7 Jews

250 Buddhists for every 7 Jews

Combined, there are 6,400,000,000 non-Jewish people in religions or religious groups (including religiously unaffiliated people).

This means that for every 7 Jews there are 3200 people in religious groups who outnumber us.

Jews are 0.2 % of the global population.

When we tell you that hate is dangerous, it is because…

It would only take 0.21% of 6.4 Billion people to hate us in order to completely overwhelm and outnumber every single Jewish person on the planet. In other words, only 67.2 out of every 3200 people.

And given how violent and aggressive people have become toward us in recent weeks, that doesn’t seem far off.

No, most Christians, Muslims, Atheists/Agnostics, Hindus, and Buddhists do NOT hate Jews.

But if even 0.21% of them do hate us, Jews are at a legitimate and terrifying risk of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is not possible for Jews alone to fight this rising tide of hate. There simply aren’t enough of us. And many of us are too scared to tell you the truth: if you don’t vocally and repeatedly stand up for Jews (and not just the ones you agree with) you will be complicit in the genocide that follows. Police your own communities.

Nobody acting in good faith is asking you to abandon Palestinians or their fight for self determination and equality in their homeland. All we are asking is for you to learn about antisemitism, deconstruct it in yourself, and loudly condemn it when it occurs in front of you. We are asking you to comfort us and not run away when we are scared or even angry at you. Because a lot of us are angry with you, because we are extremely scared right now and many of you are not helping us. Many of you are actively and carelessly spreading dogwhistles that further the global rise in hatred against us.

You can support Palestine AND avoid Islamophobia WITHOUT making antisemitism worse. But you can’t stop antisemitism by staying silent in the face of it. And if you don’t speak up, you will get us killed. Silence, in this case, is quite literally violence.

Many of us have armed guards posted at our synagogues and schools and community centers because of this. I certainly had times where my synagogue and school had to have armed security for our safety.

The only reason more of us haven’t died already is because we have millennia of experience in confronting this kind of hatred and guarding against it.

But in pure numbers, if you don’t speak up for us now, we don’t have a chance at survival without support.

So, what can you do, specifically?:

* Make a stand or public statement about condemning antisemitism without mentioning another group. Acknowledge Jewish fear, pain, and current danger without contextualizing it in someone else’s. It could literally be something as simple as “Antisemitism is bad. There’s never a reason for it. I won’t tolerate it in presence in real life or online.” If you cannot bring yourself to publicly make this statement, you should have a serious look at yourself to understand why you can’t.

* Learn about the six universal features of antisemitism and the many, various dog whistles affecting the global Jewish community

* Do not welcome people who espouse rhetoric that includes any features from the above bullet point in your community unless you are able to educate them and eliminate that behavior.

* Check in on your Jewish friends, regularly and repeatedly. Do not wait for them to reach out to you. They are scared of you. Even if you don’t have the emotional space to have conversations about antisemitism. Just send a message once in a while, unprompted, “Jfyi, antisemitism still sucks. I support you.”

* Redirect conversations about which “side” is “right” to how to attain peace. Do this by saying that this line of argument is not conducive to peace, and link to a well-respected organization not widely accused of either antisemitism or Islamophobia that is devoted to achieving a peaceful resolution, increasing education, or providing humanitarian aid to relevant affected groups—including Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs. You can find over 160 such organizations at the Alliance for Middle East Peace https://www.allmep.org/

* Look to support experienced groups without widespread and verifiable claims of prejudice against either Jews or Muslims or Arabs or Palestinians. Many of these organizations can also be found at the AllMEP link above. Avoid groups on the shit list as well as unproductive and harmful movements.

* Do not default to western methods of political demonstration. Specifically, protests are not useful in attaining peace in western nations at this time. Israelis and Palestinians can and should protest to the best of their abilities in Israel and Palestine so as to pressure their own governments. However, protests in western nations have proven to be poorly regulated and to further the spread of bigoted rhetoric and violence against Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Furthermore, there are nearly as many Palestinians in the world as there are Jews. It is extremely easy and common for the voices of bad actors and bigots on all sides to completely drown out Jewish and Palestinian voices and concerns at these events.

* Spend more time listening and learning than speaking and acting. Anyone who tells you this conflict is simple is someone who is lying to you. Take the time to learn the ways in which your actions and words can get people hurt before joining the fray.

* Stop demonizing Zionism as a concept, even if you disagree with it. Understand that it is a philosophy with many different movements that often conflict with each other. The Zionism practiced by Netanyahu and the Likud party is NOT representative of most Zionists or interpretations of Zionism. It is an extremist form of Zionism known as Revisionist Zionism.

* Don’t deny Jewish indigeneity to the levant. It doesn’t help Palestine and hurts Jews by erasing our physical and cultural history as well as erasing the Jews who remained in Israel even through widespread diaspora.

* KEEP THE HOLOCAUST OUT OF YOUR MOUTH

Things That Are Always OK

* Denouncing Antisemitism loudly and publicly

* Denouncing Islamophobia loudly and publicly

* Telling your Jewish and Muslim and Arab friends you support them and won't abandon them

* Elevating the work of respected, widely accepted people and organizations devoted to attaining peace for all, rather than just one group of people.

* Develop media literacy

* Understand what aspects of the current western leftist movements Jews are criticizing, rather than assuming our criticisms are motivated by hatred for Palestine or Palestinians.

* Expressing sorrow for civilian deaths regardless of religion or nationality.

* When you are not Jewish and you share a post about antisemitism from a Jewish person, please say you’re a goy. This isn’t because you’re not welcome to share. This is because it is indescribably comforting to know we aren’t just talking amongst ourselves and screaming into the void. Let us know you are supportive of us. It doesn’t mean that you or we hate Palestine or Palestinians or that we oppose their full and equal rights in our shared homeland.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #israel #Palestine #Zionism #anti zionisim #jewish muslim solidarity #Jewish goyim solidarity #media literacy #responsible advocacy #direct action #life under stochastic threat #I dare a goy to reblog this challenge

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #chatbots #plausible sentence generators #robot lawyers #robolawyers #ai #ml #machine learning #artificial intelligence #stochastic parrots #bullshit #bullshit generators #the bullshit wars #llms #large language models #writing #Ben Levinstein

[socialist-microwave-laser]

"kill all zionists" and "jewish schools and community centers and places of worship are places of zionist indoctrination" are two ideas that wayyyyy too many people hold at the same time

#antisemitism #anti-zionist antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #anarchist #jumblr #stochastic terrorism

[nlvxexchange]

Using Technical Analysis in FX Trading

Using Technical Analysis in FX Trading

Technical analysis in forex trading focuses on price movements and chart patterns. Generally, traders look for patterns in candlesticks and price bars. These patterns indicate that the price is undergoing consolidation or will move upward or downward. For example, a bearish “head and shoulders” pattern contains 13 candlesticks. That means that there will likely be a downward movement in price. In…

View On WordPress

#FX Trading #Stochastics #technical analysis #Technical Analysis in FX Trading

[grneyedmonster15]

The circumstances surrounding Nex Benedict’s death are so frightening to me. Little kids getting bullied and murdered just for existing as their authentic selves is horrific on its own, but it’s even worse that this murder was instigated by that fascist terrorist Chaya Raichik and that this same fascist terrorist was appointed to an Oklahoma Board of Education library media advisory committee by an apparently equally fascist superintendent. On top of that, I heard that the school punished Nex, the *victim* of this vicious attack, rather than the perpetrators.

Now law enforcement is claiming Nex didn’t die of trauma from the assault, which is absolute horseshit because even if it turns out their head injury wasn’t the immediate cause of death, their death was still a direct and foreseeable result of being terrorized and assaulted by other kids and then being punished by the school for being victimized.

Nex’s death was especially jarring to me because they looked a lot like my youngest child, who is pansexual. My heart lurched when I saw their picture. I was already worried about my child’s safety at school because we live in a red area, because my child has been bullied before over being autistic, and because of our country’s absolute failure to address gun violence, but now that the fascists are ramping up their terrorism against LGBTQIA children, I’m absolutely terrified for my child.

#Nex Benedict #bullying #stochastic terrorism #lgbtqia #school sanctioned murder

[nitya-sh]

A DETAILED GUIDE to STOCHASTICS

According to stochastics, when a stock is trending upwards, the closing price tends to trade at the upper end of the day’s range of price action. The range of prices at which a stock trades throughout the daily session is referred to as price action.

More At: WHAT IS STOCHASTICS? A DETAILED GUIDE

#stochastics #forex trading indicators #stock market #investment #market #financial market

[republikkkanorcs]

🤡

#republican assholes #traitor trump #crooked donald #maga morons #never trump #stochastic terrorist

[socialjusticeinamerica]

There’s a special place in Hell for Trump supporters.

#fuck all trump supporters #never trump #republican assholes #traitor trump #crooked donald #Trump violence #Republican violence #maga violence #January 6th insurrection #Trump coup #dictator trump #stochastic terrorist #Trump’s bloodbath

[vaspider]

https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1535794285206876160?t=vjVK02p2ZOE9MS0d45SuXw&s=19

(Note, this is a Tumblr autopopulate from a Twitter link, it has alt text.)

Okay, so good news first: these 31 Patriot Front twerps announced their presence by wearing their khakis/blue shirt/white mask uniforms, got dimed out either by someone who saw them loading their weapons and themselves into the back of a U-Haul or a fed in one of their chats, spent a very long time hotboxing themselves with beef jerky farts and unwashed ballsack stink, and then got arrested and charged with conspiracy to riot. They never made it to their target, the Coeur d'Alene Pride celebration. Their faces have been recorded by independent journalists and several of them are known fascists and bad actors, and the rest of them will probably be quickly identified, if they haven't been already.

The bad news: they were armed and their target was the Coeur d'Alene Pride celebration.

The first thing I want to say here is: I have no intention of permitting things like this to keep me from existing in public. The goal of stochastic terrorism is to force your targets to hide, to fear, to feel unsafe anywhere and everywhere.

Second: when you go to Pride this year, take reasonable precautions. If you go with a group, make sure you have an emergency plan - if you get separated, where will you meet up? Do you know who to call - actually know a phone number in case your phone gets broken or lost - to check in? If you have medical conditions that medical personnel need to know about in an emergency, are you wearing something that would alert people to that?

Second, consider learning how to use and carrying a first aid kit set up for gunshot wounds. There are expensive ones, but you should be able to get one which may help save someone's life for $30-50.

I'm not being alarmist here, and I'm not advocating for people to panic or to hide in their houses. Make your own decisions about your risk tolerance. I am advocating for people to be reasonably prepared, whatever that means for you, and to have an emergency plan.

This Pride is a good time to reaffirm or make local community links. Community is our best hope for surviving this.

We take care of us. 💗

#stochastic terrorism #pride #gun violence #queerphobia #queerphobic violence #transphobic violence

[edenfenixblogs]

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately explain to goyim how insane it feels to be Jewish right now.

Like, our entire world is just shattering and everyone else is just…living their lives. I feel like I’m inside a tornado being spun around constantly. But it’s so high above everyone’s heads that they can’t even register that I’m there.

#jumblr #antisemitism #life under stochastic threat

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Supervised AI isn't

It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1692233111260582161

After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-removes-embarrassing-offensive-ai-assisted-travel-articles-2023-8

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."

In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."

There were more.

Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?

But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.

This deliberate misdirection actually reveals a deep truth about AI: that the story of AI being managed by a "human in the loop" is a fantasy, because humans are neurologically incapable of maintaining vigilance in watching for rare occurrences.

Our brains wire together neurons that we recruit when we practice a task. When we don't practice a task, the parts of our brain that we optimized for it get reused. Our brains are finite and so don't have the luxury of reserving precious cells for things we don't do.

That's why the TSA sucks so hard at its job – why they are the world's most skilled water-bottle-detecting X-ray readers, but consistently fail to spot the bombs and guns that red teams successfully smuggle past their checkpoints:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

TSA agents (not "officers," please – they're bureaucrats, not cops) spend all day spotting water bottles that we forget in our carry-ons, but almost no one tries to smuggle a weapons through a checkpoint – 99.999999% of the guns and knives they do seize are the result of flier forgetfulness, not a planned hijacking.

In other words, they train all day to spot water bottles, and the only training they get in spotting knives, guns and bombs is in exercises, or the odd time someone forgets about the hand-cannon they shlep around in their day-pack. Of course they're excellent at spotting water bottles and shit at spotting weapons.

This is an inescapable, biological aspect of human cognition: we can't maintain vigilance for rare outcomes. This has long been understood in automation circles, where it is called "automation blindness" or "automation inattention":

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29939767/

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

This is a huge problem. It's why people just click "OK" when they get a bad certificate error in their browsers. 99.99% of the time, the error was caused by someone forgetting to replace an expired certificate, but the problem is, the other 0.01% of the time, it's because criminals are waiting for you to click "OK" so they can steal all your money:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ema-report-finds-nearly-80-130300983.html

Automation blindness can't be automated away. From interpreting radiographic scans:

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-could-safely-automate-some-x-ray-interpretation

to autonomous vehicles:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/automated-vehicles-may-encourage-new-breed-distracted-drivers

The "human in the loop" is a figleaf. The whole point of automation is to create a system that operates at superhuman scale – you don't buy an LLM to write one Microsoft Travel article, you get it to write a million of them, to flood the zone, top the search engines, and dominate the space.

As I wrote earlier: "There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes 'OK' every time a dialog box appears":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/21/let-me-summarize/#i-read-the-abstract

Microsoft – like every corporation – is insatiably horny for firing workers. It has spent the past three years cutting its writing staff to the bone, with the express intention of having AI fill its pages, with humans relegated to skimming the output of the plausible sentence-generators and clicking "OK":

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-cuts-dozens-of-staffers-in-shift-to-ai-2020-5

We know about the howlers and the clunkers that Microsoft published, but what about all the other travel articles that don't contain any (obvious) mistakes? These were very likely written by a stochastic parrot, and they comprised training data for a human intelligence, the poor schmucks who are supposed to remain vigilant for the "hallucinations" (that is, the habitual, confidently told lies that are the hallmark of AI) in the torrent of "content" that scrolled past their screens:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

And what of the people who lose their (vital) jobs to (terminally unsuitable) AI in the course of this long-running, high-stakes infomercial?

Well, there's always the food bank.

"Go on an empty stomach."

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

West Midlands Police (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/westmidlandspolice/8705128684/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #automation blindness #humans in the loop #stochastic parrots #habitual confident liars #ai #artificial intelligence #llms #large language models #microsoft

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

Don Jr and his band of social media strategists are no doubt behind this brazen stochastic terrorism.

Threats against federal elected officials are against the law. The Secret Service until recently would investigate every threat no matter how unlikely and prosecute nearly all. Now anything goes with Republican domestic terrorists who are somehow above the law. This can not and should not be allowed to stand. They have threatened us, our leaders, and our democracy for decades. It’s past time they were held accountable.

#stochastic terrorism #threats against the president #republican assholes #maga morons #Republican political violence #political violence #republicans are domedtic terrorists #Republicans are lawless traitors and criminals

[probablyasocialecologist]

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.

At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

[...]

Propagandists have fomented disgust to dehumanize Jewish people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous people as “savages”; immigrants as “animals” unworthy of protection; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual deviants and “predators” who prey upon children.

[...]

Researchers have estimated that transgender people are more than fourfold more likely to be the victims of violent crime than their cisgender counterparts, and while not a direct link to violence, other scientists have linked disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism to a higher opposition to transgender rights. Over the past few months, assailants repeating the groomer slur have threatened to kill drag queens and LGBTQ people, as well as educators, school officials, librarians, parents and lawmakers who have come to their defense.

In the lead-up to the midterm elections, a blitz of far-right radio ads targeting Black and Hispanic stations in swing states has repeated falsehoods about transgender people and a QAnon warning that the Biden administration will make it easier for children “to remove breasts and genitals”—an attempt to evoke disgust. Other ads aimed at white audiences claim minorities are the true aggressors and destroyers of social norms. One decries “anti-white bigotry.” Another warns ominously, “Stop the woke war on our children.”

The cynical appeal to protecting children by attacking minorities has exposed a bitter irony: disgust is an emotion that evolved to keep us out of danger, but people have long misused it to inflict cruelty and catastrophic harm.

#Terrorism #Stochastic Terrorism #fascism #alt right #conservatism

[rejectingrepublicans]

This must be stopped.

😡🤬

#republican assholes #traitor trump #crooked donald #maga morons #Republican political violence #Republican violence #republican stochastic terrorism

[stochastiz]

i'm distracting myself from real life by thinking about magic users who stim using their spell components

of course there are the classics of using your arcane/divine focus and/or material components to fidget with:

rolling augury sticks/bones/dice around in your hands or pushing them around a table, shuffling and cutting your tarot deck

feeling the softness of the feathers used for flight-based magic

twirling small pieces of wire and constantly bending them into various shapes before straightening them again

pulling your amulet along the chain that holds it along your neck, using a particular spot or groove along its surface as a worry stone to rub your finger on or pick at

but what about the verbal stims you can make out of the arcane and divine languages the magics are based in:

turning casting phrases into patterns to chant or challenging yourself to repeat them as fast as you can like tongue twisters

picking out the particularly satisfying parts of the elemental languages used in your casting to echo throughout the day

maybe a non-magical party member picks up bits and pieces of the phrases the casters of the group say as they cast and try speaking them for themselves, seeing how the words form the potential for magic in their mouth but find no purchase to be brought into existence

i've mainly been thinking about somatic and physical components as stims though. how the intricate finger and wrist movements used to pluck magic out of thin air must be so satisfying. but also how a magic user who might gesture wildly as they speak or try to keep their fidgeting fingers from drawing too much attention could be gesticulating with movements from their spells unintentionally, and what sort of subtext that could lend to what they are saying:

a cleric going through the motions of a bane or a blessing towards their conversational partner, depending on how the conversation is going

gesticulating through an emotion calming spell as they try to talk someone down from a heated argument

a wizard saying "sorry, could you repeat that?" as their fingers imperceptibly twitch through their language comprehension spell and they focus more of their attention on the speaker

a druid fumbling to catch an item they dropped as their fingers try to summon a vine instead of reaching for it themselves

nervous fingers busily trying to cast invisibility on the body they're attached to after their joke falls flat

fingers rubbing temples in a similar way to how they would cast a spell to see through illusions or invisibility as the caster continues trying to see the solution they know is right in front of them

hands subtly motioning to produce flame or acid or electricity in their palms before being outstretched to shake the hand of a new acquaintance that has already managed to rub the caster the wrong way

hands that jolt into the beginnings of protective spells with each roll of thunder or crack of lightning the caster hears outside

it just seems very right to me

#some of my favorite examples of this and definite inspirations for this train of thought: #caleb widogast #suvirin kedberiket #aka #suvi the wizard #and the queen herself #laerryn coramar seelie #can you tell how hard i tried to not make the spells super d&d-only? #i'll likely be coming back to this idea #i have many more thoughts on the subject #stochastic ramblings #stochastic stories #microfiction #best of stochastiz