tag:quandyfactory.com,2024-10-13:/202410132024-10-13T12:00:00ZQuandy Factory Newsfeed - AllQuandy Factory is the personal website of Ryan McGreal in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada..http://quandyfactory.com/blog/271/our_media_platforms_are_failing_in_the_fight_against_fascism2024-10-11T12:00:00ZOur Media Platforms are Failing in the Fight Against Fascism
<p>I have a pet theory that fascism rears up every time there is a transformational new communications medium and the fascists are able to exploit the lack of filters and protections in the new medium. Over time, as people and systems adapt, the fascist impulse gets downregulated again.</p>
<p>But this time, for various reasons, the systems that operate our new communications media are actually doing progressively <em>less</em> to filter, downregulate and protect against fascism, not more, as they mature. This is both fascinating and terrifying.</p>
<p>On Facebook, they decided to take the easy way out and deprioritize or outright block all news reporting indiscriminately, instead of trying to filter the reliable news from the propaganda and disinformation. The result is that an entire cohort of social media consumers get almost no news whatsoever now.</p>
<p>Xitter, um, decided to go a different route. That site actively incentivizes the worst kinds of disinformation and even pays propagandists to spread it through revenue sharing. And its owner is out there every day promoting and boosting insane fascist conspiracy theories. </p>
<p>(And not for nothing, but he has also spent tens of millions of dollars funding a Super PAC that supports Republican campaigns and especially the Republican presidential candidate.)</p>
<p>Media sharing sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have opaque algorithms that promote content based not on accuracy but on emotional intensity and similarity to previously viewed content. This has the effect of serving as an intake funnel into increasing radicalization.</p>
<p>The legacy news media are struggling to compete for attention with these new media platforms, and tend to lean into their own forms of sensationalism to try and remain relevant. In addition, squeezed for revenue, these companies are cannibalizing themselves, which further reduces their quality and reliability and make them a target of claims that the news media can’t be trusted.</p>
<p>To the extent that democracy requires a reasonably literate, well informed electorate, this media landscape is very bad news.</p>
<p>In the past, the mainstream media were a primary line of defence against rising fascist sentiment. The fascists themselves understand this, which is why they attack the legitimacy of the media so relentlessly and invest so heavily in creating their own parallel networks.</p>
<p>Essentially, today’s major media networks are all either: (a) recoiling from their responsibility to be a bulwark against disinformation; (b) losing the capacity to serve this role; or else (c) actively working to promote the disinformation and propaganda they are supposed to be guarding against.</p>
<p>It’s bad. Really bad.</p>
<p>In a not-crazy media environment, it would be unimaginable for the election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to be a statistical tie. In a not-crazy media environment, Trump would never have gotten within several miles of the nomination for one of the two major national political parties.</p>
<p>But that’s not the media environment we live in.</p>
<p>No matter who wins in November, a huge share of Americans inhabit a funhouse mirror view of the world. Bringing them back into some kind of shared understanding of reality is going to be a huge challenge under any media context, but probably impossible if the media platforms refuse to help.</p>
<p>I would like to end on a hopeful note, and it is this: we are not the first generation to face this challenge, and we can learn from how previous generations responded to it. Our media environment is new, but the basic task remains: to figure out how as a society we can agree on what is real.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/269/the_conspiracy_to_steal_the_2024_election_is_hiding_in_plain_sight2024-09-25T12:00:00ZThe Conspiracy to Steal the 2024 Election is Hiding in Plain Sight
<p>It’s vitally important to understand the central truth about the way authoritarians think about power: they don’t care if you believe them when they claim something, they only care about having the power to make their claims stick, regardless of how many people actually believe them. </p>
<p>In some ways it’s better when most people don’t actually believe them, because it lets them show that the truth has no constraining power over them.</p>
<p>Authoritarian power-grab conspiracies that succeed don’t succeed because of secrecy. <a href="/blog/204/the_j6_committee_and_conspiracy_theories_vs_real_conspiracies">They succeed when knowing about them is not enough to stop them.</a></p>
<p><em>I can’t emphasize this enough.</em> TFG is not trying to win more votes. He is saying out loud, over and over again, that he plans to win by controlling how the votes are counted in the swing states. </p>
<p>His campaign isn’t even running a ground game. Instead, they’re openly running a full-court press against voters and voting.</p>
<p>His enablers in state governments are changing voting laws and regulations to suppress legitimate turnout by making it more difficult to obtain voting ID, aggressively purging voter registrations, cutting the number of polling stations in Democratic-leaning districts, even making it a crime to provide water to voters lined up for hours in the heat because there are so few polling locations.</p>
<p>They’re also attacking the mechanisms of voting itself, taking over key positions in state election commissions and implementing new rules - often blatantly illegal - designed to manufacture chaos when it comes to tabulating and certifying results. </p>
<p>This tactic creates space for the other part of their plan: To undermine public confidence in which candidate won a swing state so badly that it becomes effectively impossible to submit a clean slate of electors to the House. </p>
<p>Why does that matter? Glad you asked. </p>
<p>The theory goes that if the states can’t present their electors on time, or if the results are deadlocked, then it falls to the House itself to break the stalemate. And the current Republican House majority leader didn’t just vote against certifying the results in 2020, he actually led the House effort to overturn the 2020 election results through specious legal arguments. </p>
<p>Asked point-blank about 2024 this week, he said, “If we have a free, fair and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution.”</p>
<p>“If”.</p>
<p>Again, if this conspiracy succeeds, it won’t be because they managed to keep it secret. They’re doing it all in public view. </p>
<p>If it succeeds, it will be because they succeeded in seizing the apparatus of power and making their plan stick. </p>
<p>Mike Johnson has the power he has over the next election - as House majority leader and second in line to the presidency - because his fellow Republican party members decided that his efforts to overthrow the last election were not disqualifying. That was a choice to put power ahead of truth.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the state of Nebraska won’t make a last-minute change to their law apportioning electors to switch to a winner-take-all model because a single Republican state lawmaker - State Senator Mike McDonnell - stood up to the massive pressure from the MAGA movement and refused to allow a special session to enact the change. </p>
<p>This demonstrates the huge difference a single courageous person can make, but it also illustrates just how fragile the rule of law has become under the sustained assault of a party that no longer wishes to earn power by winning public support.</p>
<p>All of this is happening even as organized, coordinated campaigns of abuse and violence seek to drive good people out of public office and the machinery of democracy and civil service.</p>
<p>And despite all this, the outcome remains a toss-up just six weeks from election day.</p>
<p>I’m not American so I can’t vote. But the world is watching, and would-be authoritarians the world over are busy taking notes and cheering for their guy to win. </p>
<p>Thanks to political polarization and the Electoral College, the election will most likely end up being decided by around 50,000 votes in a handful of swing states. Every single vote matters. And every action taken to reach people and inspire them to vote for freedom and democracy is essential.</p>
<p>I wish I had a more inspiring closing note, but this is going to be a nail-biter and there is no magic wand to guarantee the outcome. </p>
<p>The good news is that this is also true for the people trying to stack the deck against democracy. </p>
<p>They’re trying, but they have not yet succeeded. </p>
<p>And if enough Americans come together to campaign for a more hopeful, more inclusive future, that hopeful goal is absolutely within reach. </p>
<p>The rest of the world is rooting for you to succeed in keeping your republic and carrying it forward. </p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/268/vp_harris_must_seize_control_of_her_own_narrative2024-07-28T12:00:00ZVP Harris Must Seize Control of Her Own Narrative
<p>As Louis Pasteur famously said, <em>chance favours the prepared mind</em>. And the free world is most fortunate that Vice President Kamala Harris, suddenly the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, was prepared to seize the historic opportunity presented a week ago today when President Joe Biden yielded to mounting pressure from his party and announced that he would no longer seek re-election.</p>
<p>Harris has her work cut out for her, not only because she is not well-defined in the minds of many voters but also because she is about to face an extremely well-funded partisan media assault.</p>
<p>The right-wing rage machine is unburdened by the need for logical consistency, so it embraces a kind of natural selection process in which an army of trolls generates an array of different attacks on their enemy and then they check to see which attack resounds with voters. </p>
<p>They don’t need a theory of the case against Harris; they just need to keep generating more and more BS until they find something that sticks. Right-wing narratives resonate because they shamelessly adopt whichever narratives happen to resonate.</p>
<p>They haven’t found an effective narrative against Harris yet. And the quicker and more clearly Harris defines herself, the less attack surface the right will have to impose some other definition onto her. So far she is off to an excellent start, defining her temperament and her vision not only in relation to core American values but also in razor-sharp contrast to her opponent’s biggest weaknesses.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>She wants to expand your freedom. He wants to control your life. </p></li>
<li><p>She wants to move the country forward. He wants to drag it backward.</p></li>
<li><p>She stands for the rule of law. He makes a mockery of the rule of law.</p></li>
<li><p>She’s upbeat and hopeful. He’s grim and apocalyptic.</p></li>
<li><p>She’s a bit goofy. He’s deeply weird and creepy. </p></li>
<li><p>She laughs. He sneers. </p></li>
<li><p>She likes Venn diagrams, he likes violent 4chan memes.</p></li>
<li><p>She fights for women’s rights. He abuses and demeans women. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>Harris also has another advantage: the modern right is so terminally online and so up its own ass that it can’t help reaching to an ugly combination of lazy sexism/racism and obscure references from the right-wing rabbit hole that swing voters find super-weird and off-putting.</p>
<p>But they’re also ruthless and relentless, and they will keep grinding and grinding until they find an attack that works, no matter how ugly or absurd. So Harris and her campaign team need to move fast to build on their early and really extraordinary success striking a new and energizing tone. </p>
<p>In 2020, Harris struggled to find her voice. After a couple of early comms missteps in her Vice Presidency, the Biden administration seems to have withdrawn her from a lot of high profile media appearances. It’s possible that fear of letting her upstage Biden may have also played a role.</p>
<p>What her incredible launch into the position of presumptive Democratic nominee tells us is that she spent that time out of the harsh media glare wisely. </p>
<p>She has been doing the hard work to build relationships throughout the party, mostly through the kind of smaller personal interactions at which she has always excelled. So when President Biden made his history-making announcement and then endorsed her to replace him, she was able to leverage her party relationships to line up enough delegates and party leaders to lock up the nomination.</p>
<p>Additionally , and just as importantly, Harris presents as refreshingly authentic and comfortable and clear in her persona and power and conviction, and that resonates better than any crass political hit job ever could.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/projects/266/introducing_catgpt2024-05-22T12:00:00ZIntroducing CatGPT
<script>
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catgpt_seps = [' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', '? ', '. ', '. ', '. ', '! '];
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await sleep(this_delay);
$('#catgpt_response').val(response_string);
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$('#catgpt_prompt').val('');
narrative = $('#catgpt_narrative').html();
narrative = narrative + '<p><strong>' + prompt + '</strong></p>';
narrative = narrative + '<p>' + response_string + '</p>'
$('#catgpt_narrative').html(narrative);
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<div><button id="catgpt_generate_response_button" name="catgpt_generate_response_button" onclick="catgpt_generate_response()">Generate Response</button><br/></div>
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Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/265/modern_life_is_rubbish_is_not_rubbish_after_all2024-05-21T12:00:00ZModern Life is Rubbish is Not Rubbish After All
<p>In the early 1990s, there was a record store in Westdale on King West near Newton where you could actually listen to a CD before choosing to buy it. </p>
<p>When the second Blur album, <em>Modern Life is Rubbish</em>, came out, I rushed to the store to check it out - and I hated it. I was expecting another baggy tour-de-force like <em>Leisure</em>, but instead I got something sounding like mid-career Kinks and I was put off.</p>
<p class="image">
<img src="/static/images/modern_life_is_rubbish.jpeg" alt="Modern Life is Rubbish"></img>
</p>
<p>So I didn’t buy it. Of course, I came back into the fold with Parklife, and have remained a Blur fan ever since. But for whatever reason I never circled back to <em>Modern Life</em>. </p>
<p>Until now. I’ve been listening to it all weekend and I honestly don’t know what was wrong with me. The album is delightful! </p>
<p>It’s a rich serving of proto-Britpop with all the hallmarks that would characterize the Blur sound for the rest of the decade: the zany mishmash of British Invasion, post-punk and Baroque chamber music, the lush harmonies, elaborate melodies and chord progressions, the playful and dissonant guitar work, the quirky syncopated rhythms, the cheeky observational lyrics - a fully realized, coherent expression of a discrete musical worldview. </p>
<p>So to <em>Modern Life is Rubbish</em>, I offer my apologies for having dismissed you out of haste and distorted expectations, and I look forward to continuing to try and make up for lost time.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/270/modern_life_is_rubbish_is_not_rubish2024-05-21T12:00:00ZModern Life is Rubbish is Not Rubish
<p>In the early 1990s, there was a record store in Westdale on King West near Newton where you could actually listen to a CD before choosing to buy it. </p>
<p>When the second Blur album, <em>Modern Life is Rubbish</em>, came out, I rushed to the store to check it out - and I hated it. I was expecting another baggy tour-de-force like <em>Leisure</em>, but instead I got something sounding like mid-career Kinks and I was put off.</p>
<p>So I didn’t buy it. Of course, I came back into the fold with Parklife, and have remained a Blur fan ever since. But for whatever reason I never circled back to Modern Life. </p>
<p>Until now. I’ve been listening to it all weekend and I honestly don’t know what was wrong with me. The album is delightful! </p>
<p><img src="https://quandyfactory.com/static/images/IMG_4969.jpeg" alt="Modern Life is Rubbish" /></p>
<p>It’s a rich serving of proto-Britpop with all the hallmarks that would characterize the Blur sound for the rest of the decade: the zany mishmash of British Invasion, post-punk and Baroque chamber music, the lush harmonies, elaborate melodies and chord progressions, the playful and dissonant guitar work, the quirky syncopated rhythms, the cheeky observational lyrics - a fully realized, coherent expression of a discrete musical worldview. </p>
<p>So to <em>Modern Life is Rubbish</em>, I offer my apologies for having dismissed you out of haste and distorted expectations, and I look forward to continuing to try and make up for lost time.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/264/a_dog_riding_a_skateboard:_some_preliminary_thoughts_on_tesla’s_‘full_self-driving’_feature2024-05-19T12:00:00ZA Dog Riding a Skateboard: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Feature
<p>So Tesla has made their “Full Self Driving” beta feature available to every Tesla owner for a free month to test it out.</p>
<p>After a few days of trying it in various conditions - driving to Niagara and back, driving to Toronto and back, several trips in Hamilton, driving in rush-hour traffic, driving in the rain - I have some preliminary thoughts.</p>
<p>Tesla FSD is like a dog riding a skateboard. You think: Wow! Someone taught a dog to ride a skateboard! And the dog learned to ride a skateboard! That’s genuinely amazing.</p>
<p>Of course, the dog isn’t particularly good at riding a skateboard. I mean, it’s a dog. What did you expect? But it’s still a dog riding a skateboard, and that’s impressive.</p>
<p>So I’m simultaneously of two minds.</p>
<p>On the one hand, it’s genuinely amazing to experience a car driving itself - speeding up and slowing down, changing lanes, stopping for red lights and stop signs, waiting for pedestrians to cross before proceeding, and so on.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it drives like a cautious, inexperienced teenager. Over the course of a few trips:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>On a residential collector, it didn’t notice a stop sign that was partially obscured by a bush until quite late and it had to brake hard to stop behind the white line. </p></li>
<li><p>Turning left onto a street with two drive lanes, it turned in between the two lanes and wavered back and forth without being able to decide which lane to pick. </p></li>
<li><p>Turning left from a minor arterial onto a residential side street, it couldn’t decide whether it had time to make the turn before an oncoming car. </p></li>
<li><p>On a major arterial it kept wanting to change into the curb lane even though the curb had frequent parked cars. </p></li>
<li><p>On one freeway it saw something (I don’t know what) which freaked it out and it turned itself off, beeping loudly at me to take over. </p></li>
<li><p>On another freeway it warned me that FSD was “degraded” due to a light drizzle that came on.</p></li>
<li><p>On yet another freeway it turned itself off because something splatted onto the right door pillar camera and it couldn’t see properly any more. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>In each of these situations, I had to assume manual control. It was fine because I was already in a state of high alert and prepared to do so. And to be fair, the service hits you over the head with its repeated insistence that you do need to stay alert, keep your hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over.</p>
<p>It even periodically prompts you to apply slight turning pressure to the steering wheel if you’re holding it too loosely.</p>
<p>Fair enough. As a driver-assist service, it’s pretty cool and even useful, especially on long drives with relatively simple conditions. </p>
<p>But then call it “Driver Assist”, not “Full Self-Driving”. The “Beta” qualifier is being asked to do an unreasonable amount of work to align the name with the thing named. </p>
<p>After all, it’s not Tony Hawke doing a kickflip mctwist. It’s a dog riding a skateboard. </p>
<p>As impressive as it is, It’s nowhere near good enough to replace a human driver. And look, the software will get progressively better over time. If it’s 90 percent of the way now, it will get to 95 and then 99 and then 99.9 and so on.</p>
<p>But even breathtakingly transformative driving software won’t be able to overcome what turns out to be a devastatingly prosaic technical limitation: today’s Teslas have no way to clean their own cameras. </p>
<p>Frankly, given how much attention the software challenges get, I’m surprised more people aren’t pointing this out. The best self-driving software in the world can’t drive if it can’t see.</p>
<p>You could imagine a hyper-engineered solution in which Teslas share their sensor data with each other to create a mesh network that enhances every car’s situational awareness. But that doesn’t exist today, it requires a fast reliable high-bandwidth network with ultra-low latency, and it requires other Teslas to be on the road at all times to serve as a consistent backup when a car’s sensors fail.</p>
<p>I expect it would be a lot easier to equip every car with camera wipers. Indeed, some other luxury car makers already do this. So there could be a Tesla model in the future that is truly self-driving. But barring retrofits, no current production Tesla has this. </p>
<p>Which means that even if and when the software is perfected, today’s Teslas will never be truly self-driving. That’s not a bad thing in itself. Indeed, it remains an objectively excellent car despite not having this transformative ability. </p>
<p>But there’s a fair argument to be made that calling their driver assist service “Full Self-Driving” amounts to false advertising.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/263/todays_large_language_models_are_essentially_bs_machines2023-09-07T12:00:00ZToday's Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) in which a specialized computer system called a neural network consumes a very large set of written language, and learns to identify patterns in how the individual words it has ingested relate to each other and to larger structures of written language. Then it is fine-tuned with additional training - often by teams of human trainers who provide feedback on the LLM's responses - to produce the desired kinds of responses to prompts.</p>
<p>When you prompt an LLM with a question, it uses predictive logic to generate a response by successively predicting the next word in the sentence, based on its expansive model of how words relate to each other. </p>
<p>This approach can produce extraordinary outputs, but it's important to understand what is <em>not</em> happening. The LLM does not "understand" what it is saying. It has a model of how words relate to each other, but does not have a model of <em>the objects to which the words refer</em>. </p>
<p>It engages in <em>predictive logic</em>, but cannot perform <em>syllogistic logic</em> - reasoning to a logical conclusion from a set of propositions that are assumed to be true - except insofar as a rough approximation of syllogism tends to emerge from predicting each word in a response based on a large corpus of training data. </p>
<p>In addition, today's LLMs cannot independently fact-check their own responses against some kind of knowledge base. </p>
<p>What they can do is generate text that sounds reasonable and persuasive, especially to a reader who is not particularly well-versed in the material the LLM is generating text about. </p>
<h3>Reasonable-Sounding Nonsense</h3>
<p>In preparation for this article, I asked the Bing Chatbot, which is powered by the OpenAI LLM ChatGPT, "Who is Ryan McGreal?" From Bing's response, I learned that I have written for the New York Times, authored three books, and hosted podcasts about technology and society. </p>
<p>I asked more about the NY Times article, and Bing told me the article is titled, "How to build a better city" and was published as part of a series called "The Future of Cities".</p>
<p>I asked about the three books I authored. Bing told me the first book was a collection of essays called "Urbanicity: The Book", published in 2010, and that I contributed several articles to the book. </p>
<p>The second book was called "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap", published in 2016, a companion novel to the 2015 documentary of the same name. In that book, I wrote a chapter sharing my personal and professional experiences as a programmer and advocate for women in tech. </p>
<p>The third book was called "The Future of Cities", published in 2019, and was compiled from the NY Times series in which I had contributed an essay. </p>
<p>The responses all came with citations and links to sources for the fact claims. And the responses themselve all sound entirely reasonable.</p>
<p><strong>They are also entirely made up.</strong> </p>
<p>I have contributed an essay to a published collection, but the book was called "Reclaiming Hamilton" and it was published in 2020. I've never written for the New York Times, and as far as I can determine, the three books to which Bing claims I contributed chapters don't even exist. </p>
<p>But its responses were so reasonable sounding that I actually had to do an independent search to see whether I had perhaps forgotten having written these things.</p>
<h3>Understanding BS</h3>
<p>In 1986, American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote an important essay titled, "On Bullshit" in which he presented a theory of BS that has become ever-more relevant in the Internet and especially the social media age.</p>
<p>Frankfurt draws a sharp distinction between lies and BS. With a lie, the person making the claim has a specific intent of trying to convince you that their false claim is true. The liar cares about what is true, because they want you to believe something specific that is specifically not true.</p>
<p>Whereas with BS, the person making the claim is not trying to contradict the truth. Rather, they are entirely indifferent as to whether what they are saying is true or not. As Frankfurt puts it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The absolute indifference to what is true is what distinguishes BS from a lie. In that sense, as Frankfurt warns, bullshitters are actually more harmful to the truth than liars. </p>
<h3>LLMs are BS Generators</h3>
<p>LLMs are trained not to produce answers that meet some kind of factual threshold, but rather to produce answers that <em>sound reasonable</em>. As currently designed, they have absolutely no way to determine whether a generated response is true or not, or whether its conclusions logically follow from its propositions. </p>
<p>If one were inclined to anthromorphize these models, one might say that they are <em>indifferent</em> to whether what they are producing is true or even makes logical sense. </p>
<p>However, we must be careful not to ascribe intent to LLMs. After all, they are not in any way conscious, let alone malicious. They are merely algorithms predicting a series of words in response to a prompt based on the patterns they identified in their training data.</p>
<p>However, the practical <em>effect</em> of how they operate is that they function as generators of BS. As LLMs get embedded in more and more systems that interact with humans, and particularly as they get smaller and more portable, this property should make everyone who genuinely cares about the truth feel a little bit queasy. </p>
<h3>Ripe for Abuse</h3>
<p>LLMs provide bad-faith actors with an incredibly prolific tool to generate mountains of persuasive-sounding nonsense to flood the public discourse and erode the very concept of a shared understanding of reality. </p>
<p>Indeed, the role of <em>sheer volume</em> in attacking civil society through disinformation deserves its own essay. As fascist chaos agent Steve Bannon famously put it, "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."</p>
<p>The goal of <em>flooding the zone</em> is not so much to convince people to believe in a specific lie, though lies - and especially Big Lies - are part of it. Rather, the goal is to introduce so much confusion, exhaustion and cynicism about what is and isn't true - that is, to produce so much <em>BS</em> - that the broad civic and political consensus which underpins every movement for justice becomes impossible to sustain.</p>
<p>This tactic is perhaps most effectively used in <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html">the Russian "firehose of falsehood" propaganda model</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as "the firehose of falsehood" because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, "[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience." Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever other socially-benign services they might provide, LLMs also make the task of flooding the zone exponentially easier. </p>
<h3>What’s Next</h3>
<p>The companies and engineers who are building the current generation of LLMs have bet big on the scale of the training data - the first L in LLM. So far, increases in the size of the training set have, indeed, translated into more impressive performance. It’s an open question whether and for how long this trend can continue. </p>
<p>Evangelists like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company built ChatGPT, the LLM that powers the Bing chatbot, has stated his belief that scaling the training set large enough can lead to <em>artificial general intelligence</em>, or AGI, which AI researchers regard as the Holy Grail of AI. He may be right, or we may be close to a local maximum in which further increases in data scale hit diminishing returns. </p>
<p>And there are other headwinds. Large scale copyright holders have begun pushing back on AI companies consuming their content without permission or compensation. This is likely to lead to protracted litigation, and likely the best outcome for all concerned will be some sort of licencing framework. But it is definitely a risk.</p>
<p>Another, potentially more serious problem is the rise of LLM-generated content itself. As a progressively larger share of the total content of the internet is generated by LLMs, that means a progressively larger share of the training data for future generations of LLMs will be the output from previous generations. This is a problem because, when used as inputdata, the output of an LLM is like already-digested food.</p>
<p>Indeed, a <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493">fascinating research paper</a> released this year found that feeding LLM-generated content into an LLM leads to “model collapse”. As the authors write:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can occur in … LLMs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Since there is currently no reliable way to test whether a given piece of content was written by a human or a LLM, this threatens to be an increasingly thorny challenge.</p>
<p>Of course, all of these challenges may eventually be surmountable. The ceiling of performance as a function of data size may be far off. The addition of logic and fact checking modules may already be in the works. Licencing arrangements may solve the copyright problem. </p>
<p>But for the time being, today’s LLMs remain plagued by the BS problem - and calling the plausible nonsense LLMs generate “hallucinations” does not make them any less troublesome for people who value increasing the amount of truth going out onto the world.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/261/proposed_debate_with_antivaxxer_just_a_shameless_bid_for_content2023-06-20T12:00:00ZProposed Debate With Antivaxxer Just a Shameless Bid for Content
<p>The players and purveyors of the alternative media build their brands at least in part on distrust in the mainstream news media (and mainstream institutions more generally). And there's plenty of grist for that mill, everything from rigid formats to narrative construction to gatekeeping talent. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most universal issue with the legacy media is not this or that political bias; rather, it's that they make most of their money based on how many consumers they can attract, so they are incentivized to chase an audience. That leads them to sell the controversy instead of getting to the truth.</p>
<p>But if advertisement-driven news networks are the problem, advertisement-driven social media networks are definitely <strong>not</strong> the solution. Case in point: the current Joe Rogan controversy, in which Rogan and an army of his followers are goading and taunting and harassing a highly respected vaccine scientist to have a debate with a fraudulent antivax grifter on Rogan's show. </p>
<p>As bad as they often are, the mainstream media at least have some professional standards and norms that act as a moderating countervail to the incentive to chase drama. </p>
<p>Social media influencers like Rogan have no such filter. He regularly hosts grifters, swindlers, cranks, conspiracy theorists and alt-right hate-mongers, granting them a more or less uncritical platform to spread their propaganda to his millions of followers.</p>
<p>He also repeatedly extends his huge platform to antivax con artists like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, and now Robert F. Kennedy Jr, giving them wide latitude to spread their reckless, dangerous disinformation with little to no meaningful fact-checking. </p>
<p>Dr. Peter Hotez, an American paediatrician and vaccine scientist whose research produces patent-free vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, had the temerity to criticize Rogan for giving a platform to Kennedy (by linking to a <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7zz9z/spotify-rogan-rfk-vaccine-misinformation-policy">Vice article</a> on the matter), and Rogan responded by trying to goad Hotez into a live debate with Kennedy with Rogan as moderator.</p>
<p>When Hotez quite reasonably refused such a poison pill, Rogan incited his vast array of followers to pursue and accost Hotez, with other influential tech bros, including Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, piling on as well. Hotez has already had people accost him outside his home as a result of this campaign of abuse.</p>
<p>He's absolutely right to refuse the debate. Antivax grifters have an elaborate toolkit of tactics they use to overwhelm their audience and their critics, like a hundred-year storm surge overwhelming a sewage treatment plant.</p>
<p>As a core tactic, antivaxers spray a vast and rapid firehose of claims that are calculated to sound reasonable enough to a non-scientist, and they shamelessly, repeatedly violate every principle of good-faith debate to suit their purposes: they invent claims from whole cloth, shamelessly inflate or downplay real evidence, claim that sources state the opposite of what they actually state, elevate the credibility of non-peer reviewed 'research' that would never be able to get published in a real journal, make conclusions that do not follow from real premises, move the goalposts every time someone goes to the effort to disprove their claims, and claim they are being 'silenced' by a conspiracy when they cannot get scientists to take them seriously.</p>
<p>As a format, a live, oral debate is great fodder for entertainment, which is why Rogan keeps asking for it. But an oral debate is at best only modestly useful for political competition, and quite useless for settling important scientific questions. </p>
<p>Scientific debate happens in peer-reviewed scientific journals, where teams of researchers submit papers documenting their experiments and the conclusions they draw, subject to review prior to publication by other professional scientists and to written feedback following publication. </p>
<p>It's not a perfect system, but over time it allows theories that are well-supported by multiple independent lines of evidence to emerge as a consensus, while tending to disprove theories that cannot bear the weight of evidence.</p>
<p>Ultimately the scientific debate format rests on the good faith of its practitioners: the working scientists conducting research, the editors and reviewers checking their work prior to publication, and the community of professionals who read the journals, engage with its contents and revisit their own work based on what it teaches them.</p>
<p>When scientists debate - over whether a study was well-constructed or whether a conclusion can fairly be drawn from experimental results, say - they are fellow participants in a shared concept of what constitutes empirical evidence, what constitutes a valid logical contingency, and so on. When they cite a source, they try to represent fairly what the source actually states.</p>
<p>Antivax grifters labour under no such constraints. It is inherently more difficult to debunk a false claim than to assert it. It takes no effort to make up a BS claim but it takes considerable effort to do the work and then show your work to prove that the claim is false. It is tedious, exhausting, exasperating work, and there is exactly zero chance that the antivaxxer will ever admit they were wrong. </p>
<p>After all, the researcher who first claimed that the MMR vaccine causes autism in a 1998 <em>Lancet</em> article was eventually proven to have deliberately fabricated his research and hid his massive conflict of interest from reviewers. He was eventually struck from the UK medical register and barred from practicing medicine altogether. </p>
<p>Yet Kennedy continues to repeat the categorically disproven claim to this day, and shifted the goalposts from claiming the vaccine itself causes autism to claiming that a preservative that is sometimes used in vaccines causes it. Of course, that claim is also categorically false: there is no correlation whatsoever between receiving any vaccine and being diagnosed with autism.</p>
<p>So any debate between Kennedy and a credible scientist would be a huge waste of everyone's time - everyone, that is, except Kennedy, who would gain the allure of credibility from sharing a debate stage, and Rogan, whose eye-watering compensation in his exclusive contract with Spotify is tied to his ability to keep drawing an audience. </p>
<p>That need to keep growing his audience incentivises him to keep producing more and more extreme content to feed their appetite for novelty and drama. </p>
<p>In any case, the idea that Rogan could be a qualified, responsible moderator of a constructive debate between an antivax grifter and a real scientist is absurd. He doesn't know what he doesn't know about vaccine science, and he doesn't care. To him it's all just entertainment.</p>
Ryan McGreal2http://quandyfactory.com/blog/260/we_deserve_to_know_why_hamilton_lrt_is_so_delayed2023-06-07T12:00:00ZWe Deserve to Know Why Hamilton LRT is So Delayed
<p>On May 13, 2021, the Federal and Ontario Governments jointly announced a $3.4 billion funding commitment to build and operate a new light rail transit (LRT) system in Hamilton. This milestone was the culmination of years of encouraging progress punctuated by frustrating delays and heartbreaking setbacks - incuding a previous iteration of the project that the Ontario Government <a href="https://raisethehammer.org/article/3719/province_abruptly_cancels_hamilton_lrt">suddenly cancelled</a> on December 17, 2019, just a few months before the final construction bids were supposed to be submitted.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1000121/ontario-and-canada-investing-34-billion-to-advance-hamilton-lrt">press release</a> from the May 2021 funding announcement calls the project "shovel-ready" and quotes Ontario Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney saying this partnership would "ensure that we can get shovels in the ground as soon as possible for this critical transit project". </p>
<p>But here we are, more than two years later, and Metrolinx, the Ontario crown agency tasked with implementing the LRT project, has not even put out a request for qualifications (RFQ) yet. </p>
<p>An RFQ is the first step toward procuring a large contract like building LRT. It is a process by which potential bidders demonstrate that they are qualified to complete the work they are bidding for. Metrolinx carefully reviews the applicants and then selects a shortlist of qualified bidders who are then invited to participate in a request for proposals (RFP).</p>
<p>The RFP is a competitive bidding process in which qualified participants submit proposals to build the project according to an agreed set of specifications. The bidder with the most competitive proposal is then selected to receive the contract.</p>
<p>Normally the RFQ and RFP process takes around two years to complete. But after more than two years since the LRT funding announcement, the process has not even <em>started</em> yet. To say this is frustrating is an understatement.</p>
<p>I would really love to understand exactly what Metrolinx has been up to for the past two years.</p>
<p>We know that, following some recent LRT construction fiascos - particularly the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in Toronto, which is already two years late and significantly over budget - Metrolinx decided to change their procurement model. Under the old system, Metrolinx would award a master agreement to design, build, finance, operate and maintain (DBFOM) the entire project to a consortium made up of individual companies that specialize in each aspect of the process.</p>
<p>So a consortium would be an ad hoc partnership that includes an engineering firm, a construction company, a financing company, a supplier of rolling stock, a system operator, and so on. </p>
<p>The idea is that the contract will discipline the parties to the consortium to work together in alignment on hitting the contractual milestones. In practice, what actually happens is that when some aspect of the project is in jeopardy or fails, the parties to the contract start taking each other to court and the crown agency is ultimately left to deal with the fallout.</p>
<p>So Metrolinx revised their procurement model to maintain control of the overall project and to dole out individual sub-contracts for the vraious works.</p>
<p>In principle, this should achieve some valuable organizational goals. A big problem with the DBFOM model is that each consortium is formed on an ad hoc basis and there's no accumulation of organizational expertise in building large, complex projects like LRT. Intead, each new consortium in a DBFOM procurement model is essentially starting from scratch. </p>
<p>With Metrolinx as the master player, it should theoretically be able to develop a continuity of steadily-increasing project management expertise that is absent from the ad hoc approach. Whereas communication breakdowns and failures of a necessary component might tear a consortium apart, Metrolinx as project manager can theoretically maintain oversight on every aspect of the project and identify and fix problems before they spiral out of control.</p>
<p>This new model should also allow Metrolinx to move a lot faster, since they can tender the work in more bite-sized pieces instead of having to go through a huge monolithic qualification and bidding process for the whole thirty-year project horizon, which can take years.</p>
<p>So I'm genuinely confused as to what the Hamilton LRT project management team have been doing for the past two years. From the outside, there is no public evidence they've done anything at all.</p>
<p>I don't assume they're incompetent or malicious, but I do think the public has a right to know why this is taking so long. I hope someone from Metrolinx can provide some genuine insight into what's happening - and not just a bureaucratic non-answer but some real honesty.</p>
<p>Two years ago, Hamilton LRT was "shovel ready". Heck, four years ago it was already in the home stretch of the original RFP process, before the Ontario government suddenly cancelled it based on claims about cost overruns that <a href="https://raisethehammer.org/article/3733/who_changed_the_total_for_hamiltons_lrt_project_cost">turned out to be bogus</a>.</p>
<p>Not only has the ground not yet broken on major construction, but the procurement process to get to that groundbreaking is at least a year and probably closer to two years away.</p>
<p>Is Metrolinx making Hamilton LRT a priority, or has this file just been languishing in relative abandonment for the past two years? Is the project being deliberately slow-walked under political interference from some party that wants it to fail? Has Metrolinx become so risk-averse after recent high-profile gaffes that they are now too afraid to move decisively? Are needlessly bureaucratic internal processes jamming up the works?</p>
<p>Again, we deserve some honest answers. </p>
<p>If the delay is not deliberate, we deserve to know what Metrolinx is doing to identify and address the underlying cause. </p>
<p>If it is deliberate, we deserve to know who is interfering with an approved and funded project, and why.</p>
Ryan McGreal2