Sophianotloren

An unveiling ceremony for a new statue honoring retired Miami Heat basketball player Dwyane Wade went viral over the weekend. Installed outside of the Kaseya Center on Biscayne Boulevard, where the team plays home games, the bronze statue had the internet in stitches for taking Wade’s appearance as a mere suggestion, with some critics calling the work “Wayne Dade” and “Dwyane Wade from Temu,” among other choice observations.

On the other hand, many claimed that the statue did bear an objective likeness … to Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix (1999), as well as Kelsey Grammer as Frasier Crane from Frasier (1993–2004).

The statue was a joint effort by Omri Amrany and Oscar León of Studio Rotblatt Amrany, an Illinois-based sculpture atelier with myriad bronze homages of historical and cultural icons across sports, politics, and more under its belt. Amrany and León appear to be taking the criticisms on the chin — the former explained to Front Office Sports that he wants to be “an artist that creates an in-your-face response and you cannot expect all of human society will have a positive reaction.”

Wade himself, either out of genuine kindness or sheer stoicism, took the unveiling in stride, calling the sculpture “beautiful” and “one of the best statues that’s been created.” Some fans, however, have latched onto a particular sound bite during which Wade turns back at the statue and rhetorically muses “Who is that guy?” when talking about how crazy it was to have his career memorialized in such a manner.

There were some other hyper-specific comparisons thrown into the ring as well:

Some compared Amrany and León’s most recent output to the Cristiano Ronaldo bust fiasco of 2017, when the international soccer star was rendered with a bizarre smirk, asymmetrical eyes, and an uncomfortable stiffness made even more disconcerting with the elongated tree trunk of a neck.

As additional context, the specific pose referenced in the Wade statue immortalizes the MVP’s reaction to scoring the tie-breaker shot during a game against the Chicago Bulls on March 9, 2009, when he jumped onto the scorer’s table and shouted “This is my house!” to the Miami crowd in the stands after sealing the deal. Wade considered that a career-defining moment and noted that he was glad to have it immortalized during the unveiling ceremony.

“[Wade] knew exactly what he wanted,” Amrany told Front Office Sports, noting that Wade had requested that he and León immortalize the double-overtime win for the commission.

“Dwyane is part of the next generation who is getting the tribute,” Amrany continued to the sports magazine, explaining that Wade was present for the unveiling of Studio Rotblatt Amrany’s Michael Jordan statue in Chicago when he was a child. “I would like to see another 11-year-old kid with his father inspired by this statue and, 20 or 30 years from now, will have his own statue unveiled.”

Meanwhile, some have taken the liberty to Photoshop the statue’s face onto photos capturing Wade’s important moments on and off the court:

And while there’s plenty to laugh at, we’re reminded that this is only the beginning of our future in a world where arts and culture funding is the first matter on the chopping block — especially in Florida …

Archaeologists at Pompeii have unearthed a small home featuring at least four frescoes in the Insula dei casti Amanti or House of Chaste Lovers complex, the park announced last week. 

Contradicting the name of the site at which the works were discovered, these Fourth Style frescoes, associated with the period between 62–79 CE, aren’t exactly chaste. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the explicit content of much previously excavated art at the ash-preserved Ancient Roman city, the works on the walls of the house are both erotic and mythic in nature. For its size, the park said in a statement, the small house contains a “high level of wall decorations,” some of which are sexually graphic. 

The small house was discovered as part of an ongoing excavation of the northeast section of the complex, named after a painting of a subtle kiss between a man and a woman. 

While some of the frescoes found in the dwelling were damaged during early 19th-century excavations, the archaeological park said, one of the paintings was particularly well preserved and inspired its provisional name: House of Phaedra. It depicts Euripides’s tragedy based on the Greek myth of Hippolytus, in which the Cretan princess Phaedra falls in love with the divinity, who rejects her, leading Phaedra to kill herself and leave a note accusing the god of raping her. As the story goes, Hippolytus’s father, the King of Athens Theseus, invokes Poseidon to punish his son. 

In the House of Phaedra fresco, the princess is pictured partially nude and sitting in a chair, head bowed, while a bronze-colored and nude Hippolytus (whose large phallus is partially covered by cracks in the surface) projects a wide-eyed stare at Phaedra. An older man, possibly meant to be Theseus, grabs his arm.

The most graphic work in the recent round of discoveries is an artistic depiction of copulation between a satyr, the hypersexual and wine-loving mythological creature, and a nymph. Obscured by damage from an earlier excavation, another fresco shows a man and a woman believed to represent Venus and Adonis. A fourth damaged fresco may portray the Judgement of Paris, a mythical contest between the most beautiful Greek goddesses. 

Relying heavily on Greek mythology, the paintings encapsulate a Roman Empire not dominated by Christianity, frozen in time by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, about two centuries before Christianity became the empire’s official religion.

Architecturally, the home is notable in that it does not contain an atrium with a basin to collect rainwater, as was typical of Pompeian houses. In a recent academic journal article, Pompeii archaeologists linked the absence of atriums after six centuries of popularity to societal changes in the years leading up to the volcano’s eruption. 

Aside from the frescoes, the House of Phaedra was also found to contain an altar decorated with a painted flying bird of prey towering above two snakes. According to Pompeii’s archaeologists, the altar once held a last offering which included burned essences, a fig leaf, and a red marble figure of a deity.

Archeological Park of Pompeii Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement that the excavation is “an example of public archaeology,” referencing the fact that the house was uncovered and restored “under the eyes of visitors” at a site viewable to the public.

brucesterling:

negativepeanuthoarder:

“love is what makes us human” actually it’s ‘select all images with boat’ but go off I guess

anexperimentallife:

See also, “We’re in a drought; conserve water!” Meanwhile, bottled water companies and golf courses for rich folk empty the aquifers.

megpie71:

the-real-seebs:

traveling-madness:

toddchavezwatchescartoons:

based firemen

you sign up for the job because you want to save lives, and sometimes you get a chance to just be really, really, clear about “yes it is my job to save lives, there is an obstacle, and i am paid to use an axe to solve this problem”

My respect is for the emergency dispatcher who listened to what this kid was saying, and chose the correct emergency service for the request - didn’t bother with police, didn’t bother with the ambulance, just sent the fireys, because they’ll get the necessary job done easily and prevent the other two from being required.

The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City removed works by the Argentine artist Ana Gallardo that included offensive statements and slurs about older former sex workers.

The curatorial team initially limited access to the works following a letter of concern from Casa Xochiquetzal, the shelter for unhoused former sex workers in Mexico City that Gallardo visited for the project in question. Later, after advocates protested outside the museum and graffitied its facade with messages in support of sex workers, MUAC withdrew the works and issued an apology.

Gallardo’s solo exhibition, Tembló acá un delirio, opened at MUAC on August 10. The show swiftly drew criticism from activists, artists, and advocates for the sex worker community, in particular over the artwork “Extracto para un fracasado proyecto (2011–2024)” (“Extract for a failed project 2011–2024”), which consists of a monumental text etched by Gallardo directly onto a wall at the museum. Written haphazardly without punctuation and in the first person, the paragraph recounts Gallardo’s alleged attempt to collaborate with sex workers in a “nursing home for women prostitutes” and “old street whores.”

Among the offending lines are derogatory characterizations of an older sex worker named Estela, described by Gallardo as an “old sick whore” whom she was asked to care for. 

Last week, Casa Xochiquetzal sent a letter to exhibition co-curator Alejandra Labastida denouncing Gallardo’s text, refuting her account of caring for Estela, and accusing the artist of photographing the woman without her consent.

“Ana Gallardo uses the word ‘whore’ and the expression ‘daughter of a whore’ as insults on multiple instances. These already constitute misogynistic slurs, but they become even more concerning when used specifically against Casa Xochiquetzal, its former director, and its residents,” reads the letter, which the organization shared in Spanish on Facebook.

“Ana Gallardo disrespects the identity of the house’s residents, discloses Estela’s name, records her and displays her, records and displays the outside of the house, lies, defames, insults, re-victimizes, attacks, impacts the women, and all of this using public funds and with MUAC’s approval,” the letter continues. The organization also claimed that Gallardo never returned after her one day onsite, refuting the artist’s account of “returning to care for” Estela in the mural text.

Gallardo declined Hyperallergic’s request for an interview via Ruth Benzacar, the Buenos Aires gallery that represents her.

Casa Xochiquetzal was founded in 2006 as a residence for unhoused women who are former sex workers. The organization offers residents medical and mental healthcare, leisure activities, food, shelter, and “all that is needed for a dignified life and death in spite of the conditions that they face at this age, and at the end of a difficult life,” their statement reads.

MUAC first responded to the organization’s letter with a statement on October 10 explaining that Gallardo’s work “alludes to the frustration she experienced, from her personal perspective, but also to learning about the limits of artistic work to address certain issues.” Two days later, the museum said it had restricted access to “Extracto” while the exhibition underwent a review.

On October 15, museum leadership announced the decision to remove the wall piece and another artwork, “Sin título, 2011,” from the exhibition altogether after protesters from groups including Alianza Mexicana de Traajadorxs Sexuales (AMETS) and LLECA-Escuchando la calle rallied at MUAC throughout the weekend. Activists spray-painted messages on its facade demanding “respect and rights for all sex workers” and calling the museum “whorephobic” — a term used to describe ongoing prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and violence toward those in the sex industry. Another graffiti described Gallardo as White and privileged.

In its most recent statement, MUAC said the museum and curatorial team “recognize a significant failure and offer an apology to the people offended.”

The museum said that in its decision to display the work, it did not consider that it would be “offensive to those who support the Casa Xochiquetzal, to the community of activists advocating for sex workers, and to a broad sector of the public who is concerned about the danger of extractivism in contemporary cultural practices.”

“The fact that the works caused offense is contrary to the purpose of the curatorial project, to the intentions of the artist and the institution,” it continues.

In a separate statement, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, under which MUAC operates, stated that it is “against all violence against people and especially women and historically vulnerable groups.” 

MUAC clarified that a public forum regarding the exhibition and its criticisms is forthcoming and open to anyone interested. 

The cognitive dissonance of displaying political art became clear to longtime critic Rachel Spence in 2006. She was visiting Palazzo Grassi, the Venice outpost of the Pinault Collection, when she saw, hanging paradoxically in the private museum of a French billionaire, an edition of Barbara Kruger’s 1987 “I shop therefore I am” artwork. The bleak visual left her stunned by the capability that context has to sap the work’s life force as a political proclamation, rendering it an oxymoronic caricature of anticapitalist critique.

This introductory anecdote lays the groundwork for the tone of an ambitious new publication by Spence, who argues that in the 21st century, art’s relationship to capital, climate, and politics is more important and insidious than ever before — and the state of culture more dire. The confluence of visual art, money, and ethics is an unwieldy topic, but Spence takes it on in Battle for the Museum: Cultural Institutions in Crisis. Its nearly 200 pages are tightly packed with the major art-world controversies from the last decade or so. Offering a useful overview for those joining the art world who don’t know a lot and want to know more, Spence succinctly explicates the power struggles that brought us to this point.

Spence begins by introducing readers to “Planet Art,” her moniker for the “capricious, contradictory ecosystem” of the art world. She posits that the primary concern and function of contemporary art — auction houses, galleries, museums, fairs — is money-making, with its greatest benefits yielded for mega-wealthy buyers at the expense of workers. In this ecosystem, she explains, affluent bad actors remedy their public reputations by investing in treasured institutions, not to mention evading taxes with their art purchases. In a chapter titled “Decolonise This Philanthropy” (cheekily titled in the vein of activist organization Decolonize This Place, which has led demonstrations at museums across New York), Spence leads with an account of monthslong protests in 2018 at the Whitney Museum against its former Vice Chairman and board member Warren Kanders, CEO of munitions manufacturer Safariland. Hyperallergic‘s reporting is heavily cited (full disclosure: including an initial report by me), setting the stage for Spence to navigate the embattled landscape of museum funding. She condemns dubious financing from other maligned trustees and donors like Leon Black and the Sackler family, as well as the spate of European and American museums building outposts in the United Arab Emirates, enticed by big payouts while ignoring human rights abuses. “There’s nothing intrinsically unethical about selling art,” she writes. “But there is something wrong with a system in which the trade and display of art are inextricable from the exploitation of people and the natural world because money has more clout than morals.”

Spence is patently incensed by the state of art under capitalism, and this righteous indignation seeps into her prose. She finds her voice somewhere between scholar and critic. As the book continues, she acknowledges her own shift away from the “Planet Art” term, explaining that the process of writing Battle for the Museum reminded her that “the sector is not a hermetic bubble sealed off from its environment.” Though the book is well-researched and thorough in its overview of ethics and activism in art, it veers from rigid nonfiction, ultimately deeply opinionated and editorialized. Over its course, Spence argues for degrowth and a razing of this capital-forward landscape to build a re-envisioned ecosystem benefitting the majority rather than an elite minority of buyers, trustees, and executives. She proposes new paths forward — for example, a shift toward performance and hyperfocus on local art scenes in lieu of international art fairs to lessen art’s impact on emissions. She recognizes her idealism at times but stands firm in her beliefs: “Just because abuse of power is ubiquitous, just because no system is without flaws, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth trying to improve what we can, when and where we can.” 

For the sake of scope, Spence narrows her attention to a brief, recent slice of art history, mostly focusing on controversies that have occurred within the last decade. Undergirding her arguments is her insistence that the art world is at an all-time low, more toxically reliant on capital than ever before. She acknowledges dissenters who might cry out that it has always been this way, citing the Medicis and other wealthy patrons across history, but says our current confluence of income inequality and climate catastrophe are particularly grievous; even the book jacket declares that “culture and power” are more related “now more than ever.”

However, Battle for the Museum left me unconvinced that this era is quantifiably worse than previous years; such generalizations lack nuance and blanket over the already-underknown history of grassroots art activism. I can, of course, agree that the past 10 years in the culture industry have been historic. The exploitation of workers is dire, and this recent spate of unionization at museums and protests against unscrupulous institutional funding points to a culture sector at an impasse, where the values of workers, artists, and leadership are at odds. As was the case in the 1960s and ’70s, too, when the working-class artists who launched organizations like the Art Workers’ Coalition and Black Emergency Cultural Coalition took museum leadership to task for their exploitation and exclusion of marginalized groups in the arts. These examples by no means undermine the tremendous leaps made in recent years, but buttress them. 

Spence is wrangling a lot of information and bounds full-speed ahead, rapidly mentioning almost every controversy, small and large, addressed by contemporary artist-activists. But the writer fares best when elaborating on crucial historical moments that led the arts ecosystem to this exacerbated crisis point. She breaks down, for instance, the shift of UK public museums being “covertly privatized” (encouraged by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and solidified by the ’90s under Tony Blair). This astute section critiques the newfound commodification of museums as trendy “destinations” that focus as much on a well-stocked gift shop as their collections. She lucidly traces this shift to oil sponsorship, like BP at the British Museum and Shell at the National Gallery, and resulting in protests among the sector’s climate activists, who have taken to massive occupations of their lobbies in recent years.  

Spence believes that art can “help save the world.” Whether or not you agree, it is critical and necessary to our lives — activists know it, politicians know it, investors know it. Its connectivity to capitalism and government is unquestionable, and ignoring this fact only exacerbates the art world’s corrosion. Battle for the Museum asks us to consider what we’re willing to sacrifice to save it.

Battle for the Museum: Cultural Institutions in Crisis (2024) by Rachel Spence is published by Hurst Publishers and is available online and through independent booksellers.

jordanbolton:

To The Person I Returned The Expensive Shirt To - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

Hovertext: If you had a better graphics card, I'd appear at work sooner.

New comic!
Today's News:

I am flying out for BAHFest. Wish me luck!

classicclass:

Bettie Page and her sister 1940’s

calivintage:

Dancing school: This image shows a group of girls at a dancing school in Harlem in 1938, which was opened by Mary Bruce, who taught ballet and tap for 50 years.

image from new york city’s ‘radical camera’ exhibit.

In August, Amnesty International voted to support the decriminalization of prostitution. Many sex workers’ unions and advocacy groups say making their work legal would help them stay safer. It would mean they wouldn’t have to reach clients through sketchy underground channels and could get help from authorities without fearing arrest.

In a paper for U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, G.G. Rowley described a similar fight that played out in Japan in the 1950s with sex workers unsuccessfully fighting to keep their jobs legal.

At the time, Rowley writes, about half a million women worked full- or part-time as prostitutes in Japan. One source put their typical earnings at 30,000 yen per month in take-home pay, at least three times as much as the salary of a typist, phone operator, or factory worker. The economics of sex work rested partly on patronage from U.S. servicemen who were part of the occupation after World War II and those who visited on rest-and-recreation leaves from the Korean War.

Rowley writes that, prior to the 1950s, the government licensed prostitutes and allowed them to operate in red light districts. But a movement to abolish prostitution, driven largely by middle-class Christians, had begun in the 1880s. After World War II, the occupying Allied command Health and Welfare Section also pushed for an end to legal sex work.

Like today, many opponents of legal prostitution expressed particular concern about human trafficking. Aside from protecting “the way of life of 40 million respectable married women,” as one put it, advocates for the new law argued they were saving women from being forced into sex work by their family members. At the same time, they also sought to make Japan more respectable in the eyes of other nations.

The sex workers themselves disagreed, forming a union and publishing a newspaper to express opposition to the abolitionist movement. Many of the women writing in the newspaper explained that they were helping younger siblings pay for junior high school or they were supporting their parents. They pushed back against legislators who saw their behavior as immoral, asking how they were expected to live if their source of income was taken away.

The Prostitution Prevention Act did finally pass in 1956. But Rowley notes that it did not eliminate prostitution. A survey in 1957 found that 80 percent of prostitutes planned to continue operating. By the time enforcement of the act began in 1958, more than 60 percent of former proprietors of brothels had officially changed their businesses to inns, bars, cafes, or other legal establishments, with sex work continuing more quietly inside. However, Rowley writes, the illegal nature of the industry led it to be taken over by organized crime, which continues to play a big role in Japan’s widespread, but technically illegal, sex trade today.

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Photo Credit: Women loiter in the doorways of nightclubs in Yoshiwara, the red light district of Tokyo, while prospective clients wander past or stop to look, circa 1955. (Photo by Orlando /Three Lions/Getty Images)

 

The post The Battle to Keep Prostitution Legal in 1950s Japan appeared first on JSTOR Daily.

Not a fan of these paleo bars.

"There's one thing that I have in common with every person in this room. We're all trying really hard to figure out how to save the world."

The speaker, Cat Lavigne, paused for a second, and then she repeated herself. "We're trying to change the world!"

Lavigne was addressing attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference, which she helped organize at Google's Quad Campus in Mountain View the weekend of July 31 to August 2. Effective altruists think that past attempts to do good — by giving to charity, or working for nonprofits or government agencies — have been largely ineffective, in part because they've been driven too much by the desire to feel good and too little by the cold, hard data necessary to prove what actually does good.

It's a powerful idea, and one that has already saved lives. GiveWell, the charity evaluating organization to which effective altruism can trace its origins, has pushed philanthropy toward evidence and away from giving based on personal whims and sentiment. Effective altruists have also been remarkably forward-thinking on factory farming, taking the problem of animal suffering seriously without collapsing into PETA-style posturing and sanctimony.

Effective altruism (or EA, as proponents refer to it) is more than a belief, though. It's a movement, and like any movement, it has begun to develop a culture, and a set of powerful stakeholders, and a certain range of worrying pathologies. At the moment, EA is very white, very male, and dominated by tech industry workers. And it is increasingly obsessed with ideas and data that reflect the class position and interests of the movement's members rather than a desire to help actual people.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it's becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a "rounding error."

I identify as an effective altruist: I think it's important to do good with your life, and doing as much good as possible is a noble goal. I even think AI risk is a real challenge worth addressing. But speaking as a white male nerd on the autism spectrum, effective altruism can't just be for white male nerds on the autism spectrum. Declaring that global poverty is a "rounding error" and everyone really ought to be doing computer science research is a great way to ensure that the movement remains dangerously homogenous and, ultimately, irrelevant.

Should we care about the world today at all?

Don Davis / NASA

EA Global was dominated by talk of existential risks, or X-risks. The idea is that human extinction is far, far worse than anything that could happen to real, living humans today.

To hear effective altruists explain it, it comes down to simple math. About 108 billion people have lived to date, but if humanity lasts another 50 million years, and current trends hold, the total number of humans who will ever live is more like 3 quadrillion. Humans living during or before 2015 would thus make up only 0.0036 percent of all humans ever.

The numbers get even bigger when you consider — as X-risk advocates are wont to do — the possibility of interstellar travel. Nick Bostrom — the Oxford philosopher who popularized the concept of existential risk — estimates that about 10^54 human life-years (or 10^52 lives of 100 years each) could be in our future if we both master travel between solar systems and figure out how to emulate human brains in computers.

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate "a mere 1% chance of being correct," Bostrom writes, "we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives."

Put another way: The number of future humans who will never exist if humans go extinct is so great that reducing the risk of extinction by 0.00000000000000001 percent can be expected to save 100 billion more lives than, say, preventing the genocide of 1 billion people. That argues, in the judgment of Bostrom and others, for prioritizing efforts to prevent human extinction above other endeavors. This is what X-risk obsessives mean when they claim ending world poverty would be a "rounding error."

Why Silicon Valley is scared its own creations will destroy humanity

Anna Riedl

There are a number of potential candidates for most threatening X-risk. Personally I worry most about global pandemics, both because things like the Black Death and the Spanish flu have caused massive death before, and because globalization and the dawn of synthetic biology have made diseases both easier to spread and easier to tweak (intentionally or not) for maximum lethality. But I'm in the minority on that. The only X-risk basically anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was artificial intelligence.

The specific concern — expressed by representatives from groups like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford — is over the possibility of an "intelligence explosion." If humans are able to create an AI as smart as humans, the theory goes, then it stands to reason that that AI would be smart enough to create itself, and to make itself even smarter. That'd set up a process of exponential growth in intelligence until we get an AI so smart that it would almost certainly be able to control the world if it wanted to. And there's no guarantee that it'd allow humans to keep existing once it got that powerful. "It looks quite difficult to design a seed AI such that its preferences, if fully implemented, would be consistent with the survival of humans and the things we care about," Bostrom told me in an interview last year.

This is not a fringe viewpoint in Silicon Valley. MIRI's top donor is the Thiel Foundation, funded by PayPal and Palantir cofounder and billionaire angel investor Peter Thiel, which has given $1.627 million to date. Jaan Tallinn, the developer of Skype and Kazaa, is both a major MIRI donor and the co-founder of two groups — the Future of Life Institute and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk — working on related issues. And earlier this year, the Future of Life Institute got $10 million from Thiel's PayPal buddy, Tesla Motors/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who grew concerned about AI risk after reading Bostrom's book Superintelligence.

And indeed, the AI risk panel — featuring Musk, Bostrom, MIRI's executive director Nate Soares, and the legendary UC Berkeley AI researcher Stuart Russell — was the most hyped event at EA Global. Musk naturally hammed it up for the crowd. At one point, Russell set about rebutting AI researcher Andrew Ng's comment that worrying about AI risk is like "worrying about overpopulation on Mars," countering, "Imagine if the world's governments and universities and corporations were spending billions on a plan to populate Mars." Musk looked up bashfully, put his hand on his chin, and smirked, as if to ask, "Who says I'm not?"

Russell's contribution was the most useful, as it confirmed this really is a problem that serious people in the field worry about. The analogy he used was with nuclear research. Just as nuclear scientists developed norms of ethics and best practices that have so far helped ensure that no bombs have been used in attacks for 70 years, AI researchers, he urged, should embrace a similar ethic, and not just make cool things for the sake of making cool things.

What if the AI danger argument is too clever by half?

Shutterstock

What was most concerning was the vehemence with which AI worriers asserted the cause's priority over other cause areas. For one thing, we have such profound uncertainty about AI — whether general intelligence is even possible, whether intelligence is really all a computer needs to take over society, whether artificial intelligence will have an independent will and agency the way humans do or whether it'll just remain a tool, what it would mean to develop a "friendly" versus "malevolent" AI — that it's hard to think of ways to tackle this problem today other than doing more AI research, which itself might increase the likelihood of the very apocalypse this camp frets over.

The common response I got to this was, "Yes, sure, but even if there's a very, very, very small likelihood of us decreasing AI risk, that still trumps global poverty, because infinitesimally increasing the odds that 10^52 people in the future exist saves way more lives than poverty reduction ever could."

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, "Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell." Even if you only think there's a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he's right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you're saving 10^32 lives.

Bostrom calls this scenario "Pascal's Mugging," and it's a huge problem for anyone trying to defend efforts to reduce human risk of extinction to the exclusion of anything else. These arguments give a false sense of statistical precision by slapping probability values on beliefs. But those probability values are literally just made up. Maybe giving $1,000 to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute will reduce the probability of AI killing us all by 0.00000000000000001. Or maybe it'll make it only cut the odds by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. If the latter's true, it's not a smart donation; if you multiply the odds by 10^52, you've saved an expected 0.0000000000001 lives, which is pretty miserable. But if the former's true, it's a brilliant donation, and you've saved an expected 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lives.

I don't have any faith that we understand these risks with enough precision to tell if an AI risk charity can cut our odds of doom by 0.00000000000000001 or by only 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. And yet for the argument to work, you need to be able to make those kinds of distinctions.

The other problem is that the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today. That's by no means an obvious position, and tons of philosophers dispute it. Among other things, it implies what's known as the Repugnant Conclusion: the idea that the world should keep increasing its population until the absolutely maximum number of humans are alive, living lives that are just barely worth living. But if you say that people who only might exist count less than people who really do or really will exist, you avoid that conclusion, and the case for caring only about the far future becomes considerably weaker (though still reasonably compelling).

Doing good through aggressive self-promotion

Dylan Matthews

To be fair, the AI folks weren't the only game in town. Another group emphasized "meta-charity," or giving to and working for effective altruist groups. The idea is that more good can be done if effective altruists try to expand the movement and get more people on board than if they focus on first-order projects like fighting poverty.

This is obviously true to an extent. There's a reason that charities buy ads. But ultimately you have to stop being meta. As Jeff Kaufman — a developer in Cambridge who's famous among effective altruists for, along with his wife Julia Wise, donating half their household's income to effective charities — argued in a talk about why global poverty should be a major focus, if you take meta-charity too far, you get a movement that's really good at expanding itself but not necessarily good at actually helping people.

And you have to do meta-charity well — and the more EA grows obsessed with AI, the harder it is to do that. The movement has a very real demographic problem, which contributes to very real intellectual blinders of the kind that give rise to the AI obsession. And it's hard to imagine that yoking EA to one of the whitest and most male fields (tech) and academic subjects (computer science) will do much to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold.

The self-congratulatory tone of the event didn't help matters either. I physically recoiled during the introductory session when Kerry Vaughan, one of the event's organizers, declared, "I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need." In the annals of sentences that could only be said with a straight face by white men, that one might take the cake.

Effective altruism is a useful framework for thinking through how to do good through one's career, or through political advocacy, or through charitable giving. It is not a replacement for movements through which marginalized peoples seek their own liberation. If EA is to have any hope of getting more buy-in from women and people of color, it has to at least acknowledge that.

There's hope

Anna Riedl

I don't mean to be unduly negative. EA Global was also full of people doing innovative projects that really do help people — and not just in global poverty either. Nick Cooney, the director of education for Mercy for Animals, argued convincingly that corporate campaigns for better treatment of farm animals could be an effective intervention. One conducted by the Humane League pushed food services companies — the firms that supply cafeterias, food courts, and the like — to commit to never using eggs from chickens confined to brutal battery cages. That resulted in corporate pledges sparing 5 million animals a year, and when the cost of the campaign was tallied up, it cost less than 2 cents per animal in the first year alone.

Another push got Walmart and Starbucks to not use pigs from farms that deploy "gestation crates" which make it impossible for pregnant pigs to turn around or take more than a couple of steps. That cost about 5 cents for each of the 18 million animals spared. The Humane Society of the United States' campaigns for state laws that restrict battery cages, gestation crates, and other inhumane practices spared 40 million animals at a cost of 40 cents each.

This is exactly the sort of thing effective altruists should be looking at. Cooney was speaking our language: heavy on quantitative measurement, with an emphasis on effectiveness and a minimum of emotional appeals. He even identified as "not an animal person." "I never had pets growing up, and I have no interest in getting them today," he emphasized. But he was also helping make the case that EA principles can work in areas outside of global poverty. He was growing the movement the way it ought to be grown, in a way that can attract activists with different core principles rather than alienating them.

If effective altruism does a lot more of that, it can transform philanthropy and provide a revolutionary model for rigorous, empirically minded advocacy. But if it gets too impressed with its own cleverness, the future is far bleaker.

Correction: This article originally stated that the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is in Oakland; it's in Berkeley.

“For those on the left who watched an obstructionist Congress spit Obama’s attempts at compromise back in his face for eight years, it’s easy to see a candidate like Sanders as the unrepentant voice of real change—someone who views the political right as an instrument of billionaires, and has the bona fides to oppose them with the knowledge that the mythical “middle ground” has become a dangerous fantasy.
 
His résumé precedes him—Sanders voted against the first Iraq War, against the Patriot Act, and against the second Iraq War. He opposed NAFTA before it was signed, and he opposed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that kept commercial and investment banks separate, and may have prevented the financial crisis. He wasn’t silent in his opposition—on YouTube, you can watch Sanders predict exactly what would happen in the aftermath of Iraq in a speech from 2002, or see him berate Alan Greenspan for the economic ideology that would lead to the recession, or witness his eight-hour filibuster after Obama extended the Bush tax cuts in 2010.
 
It’s a record that distinguishes Sanders from most of his Democratic colleagues, including Hillary Clinton, who voted for both the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, accepts corporate money from super PACs, supported the trade agreements, and opposed gay marriage until 2013. To the hordes of progressives flocking to his side, Sanders is a rare phenomenon—a politician who walks the walk.”

- Behind the scenes with Bernie Sanders: Three days in Iowa that explain why Hillary’s fading and the Dems have a new front-runner

The brave and brilliant youngster Ahmed Mohamed has been showered with support since his ludicrous and racist arrest this week, receiving invitations to MIT, Harvard, NASA, Facebook, Twittter, and the White House, to name a few. (It’s important to note that the police who arrested him and the school who saw fit to punish him for a science project have yet to see any ramification for their actions. Internship offers are nice, but justice was not served.)

Even better, the boy made a heartfelt speech encouraging young kids to be themselves and vowing to “try my best not just to help me but to help every other kid in the entire world that has a problem like this.” Skeptics, science advocates, and anyone who values justice should applaud him.

One would think that the big names of mainstream atheism would commend the triumph of a young child’s passion for science and invention over bigotry and racism. Somehow, though, we’ve seen a different response.

From Bill Maher on Real Time:

“What if it had been a bomb? The lack of perspective on this is astounding . . . It’s not the color of his skin. For the last 30 years, it’s been one culture that has been blowing shit up over and over again.”

He’s not talking about American culture, unfortunately.

Richard Dawkins was disappointed that the boy merely built a clock instead of inventing the clock itself (which he’s never claimed; apparently Dawkins is hung up on the “build” versus “make the parts and then build” distinction). What a fraud!

The leaders of movement atheism love to say they support young people who take a stand for what they believe at great personal risk. But when it comes to science—which, for many of us, is the antithesis of superstition and the approach to the world that can, given time and the right actors, actually solve its problems—they’re more than willing to throw young activists and pioneers under the bus when they’re not the right skin color or, Spaghetti Monster forbid, they’re Muslim.

This behavior indicates, to me, a greater problem in atheism: a refusal to admit that we, too, can demonstrate fundamentalist leanings when the evidence doesn’t support our personal bigotries. If a school expelled a young white kid for a science project, these same leaders would be up in arms, but when the kid happens to be Muslim, the reaction is justified because of—drum roll please—bias. Where is your critical thinking now?

Keep building, Ahmed. Sorry about atheists. We’re the worst sometimes.

“I am no good Goodness is not the point anymore Holding on to things Now that’s the...

This is Martin Shkreli. He’s a despicable piece of shit.

Why? You ask?

Well:

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[…]

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said. He said that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the price was now more in line with those of other drugs for rare diseases.

“This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

[…]

Yeah, nobody really uses this drug, so he’s totally doing a great thing! Oh, except for:

Turing’s price increase could bring sales to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year if use remains constant. Medicaid and certain hospitals will be able to get the drug inexpensively under federal rules for discounts and rebates. But private insurers, Medicare and hospitalized patients would have to pay an amount closer to the list price.

Well, this is probably just a one time thing. I mean, he’s only 32 and … oh.

In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.

This is what happens when a country like America allows something as fundamental as the health of the human beings who live in this country to be a thing that shitbags like Martin Shkreli can use to get rich. This is disgusting, and wrong, and nothing will be done to stop this because PROFITS.

(via Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight - The New York Times)

Hovertext: 'Your feelings are stupid' is actually my family motto.

New comic!
Today's News:

Thanks for a wonderful BAHFest, everyone! 

So, I got this reply to one of my craigslist ads a couple days ago.

Not only has this dude emailed me just to mansplain why I’m wrong in the way I express my own needs — which has nothing to do with offering me a place to live — he’s made sure I have no idea of his name. Usually if you’re replying to a craigslist ad, it still shows the name attached to your email address, even though it  anonymises the address itself. This guy shows up as “craigslist reply 2abc” so I figure in this case the closest thing to a name for him is “Anonymous Bastard Coward.”

He’s referencing the part in my ad which says:

“I’m a night owl, a lesbian woman, a computer geek, and a music lover. I am ethically non-monogamous and shameless about sex (pro tip: “no overnight guests” is a polite way of saying “sex is shameful.” I don’t do shameful.)”

He tells me in his little rant:

“Well no overnight guests has another meaning, too. It’s about the landlord wanting and having the right to know who is using their property, and the additional parking, utility use, and noise problems. Landlord tenant is a two way street.”

Problem is, his justifications don’t hold up — because if any of those things are concerns, then they’d be concerns without the “overnight” part, too!

What happens if I invite a couple of friends over for brunch in the late morning, tea in the afternoon, or dinner and drinks and sportsball on TV in the evening? Making a meal for more than just myself, putting on the kettle, guests using the bathroom… do potentially increase “utility use” — by an incredibly small amount. If my friends drive cars when they come by, they’ll have to figure out parking (and I’d be sure to say “hey, actually that spot won’t work, maybe try down the block, etc.” if I needed to.) Watching the game might be noisy, too, especially after a few beers! And, what, would the landlord be expecting to interview and approve or deny each person I chose to invite for any of those events? Pretty sure that’s not legal, just like he couldn’t legally say “no guests or visitors ever.”

No, the only reason to single out overnight guests as forbidden is because you’re squicked by the thought of your tenant fucking.

Noise problems? You mean “the sound of your tenant fucking.”

Additional parking? You’re assuming that I drive, and that anyone I happened to pick up would be driving too, AND that if they were driving, there would be so little parking that it would cause problems. It’s a flimsy excuse.

Utility use? You mean “the shower in the morning after your tenant fucks” or “the gas to run the stove when your tenant makes breakfast for the person they fucked last night.” And why would that (likely shared!) shower matter to you? What difference does an occasional fancy breakfast make?

I mentioned all of this to The Rabbit just after I’d gotten the email. She herself is a landlord, and her first response was “what’s it to him, anyway?! It’s not like he’s ever even going to rent to you, so why should he care?” She pointed out that it’s ridiculous for him to worry about any of that, and agreed enthusiastically when I suggested that it was just a matter of having gotten under his skin with my grain of truth about his (and far too many other people’s) shame about sex — enough so that he felt compelled to tell me, a woman on the internet who he’s never met and likely never will, why I’m wrong.

So, yeah. I stand by my original statement: “no overnight guests” is a polite way of saying “sex is shameful.”

And I still don’t do shameful.

Filed under: General

Cropped for size from the via at Miss Cellania.

bankuei:

“Ok, so you thought the boy made a bomb.”

“Yes.”

“And instead of evacuating the school, you pulled him out of class, arrested in front of everyone, then interrogated him, on the premises without getting the children to safety?  So, we’re going to put you up for criminal endangerment of this entire school”

“Well, uh, maybe we didn’t really think it was a bomb”

“Oh, ok, so instead you lied to police and federal authorities in order to bring up false charges against a minor for… kicks? I mean, you’re basically picking between which charges you’d like to go up on here.   Let me know, so we can get the paperwork right.”

hushaby:

Narre tod mein spielgesell Franz Fiedler (1885-1956) Gelatin silver print Germany,1921. : Arte Excéntrico

kateordie:

sizvideos:

Sir Patrick Stewart Loves A Male Kiss

Video

I think Patrick Stewart has reached such a glorious “fuck it all” age and does what he likes and has a great time doing it.

scrawls:

ghostiness:

OK, but I partially disagree with this headcanon, and here’s why:

1) Bruce is totally playing Gamora. You don’t think Bruce Banner has played Dungeons & Dragons before? Bruce Banner has absolutely played Dungeons & Dragons before. He played all through high school and college and when Bucky announces the campaign Bruce jumps at the opportunity because he just misses it so much (mostly rose-tinted nostalgia goggles but). So he sits Bucky down and asks him for every bit of info he can on the setting and spends a whole night with a pot of tea drafting up the five-page backstory for his space assassin and her family tree and her struggle with her relationship with the villain and comes to Bucky with a fully-ready character sheet and a list of things Bucky will need to OK before Gamora hops in.

Bucky quietly resolves to integrate as much as he can into the story, mainly because Bruce came up with some better ideas than he’d had.

2) Tony is definitely playing Quill, because Tony has never played D&D before. You don’t get to be where Tony Stark is in life and have much free time. He does what a lot of newbies do and bases a character on himself, or at least the parts he likes: clever, snarky, pre-’90s musical taste, beds space babes, heroic sometimes probably. He wants to be cool but has no idea how to be cool within this context (“My character’s name is Starlord.” “What? Tony, no.”). He hogs the spotlight all the time (all the time) but clearly has no idea what he’s doing and when someone who seems like they know what they’re talking about gives him advice he always takes (“I’m going to need that guy’s leg.” “Seriously? Alright” *Rolls to grapple*).

Quill’s backstory is primarily Bruce’s doing. Tony just handed it in with a “yeah whatever’s on there.”

3) Thor is playing Drax but didn’t join until a few sessions in when he tagged along and decided it looked like fun (“THIS PLEASES ME! ALLOW ME TO JOIN YOUR TALES OF ADVENTURE!”). He definitely needed help constructing his character sheet, but he had no problem coming up with a character. Bucky asked him what he wanted to play and got that glint in his eye and responded “I WILL FORGE A HERO WORTHY OF THE ANCIENT TALES OF ASGARD.” And he put a lot of thought into Drax, both in personal history and personality. He’s mostly modeled on Thor’s favorite Asgardian folk heroes, with some personal flaws and quirks thrown in that Thor thinks are interesting.

Of course Thor doesn’t really understand the game part of it, he’s in it for the story (“Thor what the hell man there’s no way we can take on Ronan at this level!” “AH BUT THINK OF THE THRILLING DRAMA OF THE MOMENT DRAX AND RONAN MEET AGAIN!” “We are all going to die.” “AND IT WILL BE A THRILLING TRAGEDY!”)

4) Steve is absolutely playing Rocket but what started as a complete joke ballooned into a fully fleshed-out character with a tragic backstory. Steve’s an artist, he’s a creative guy and little too creative for his own good sometimes and bouncing his ideas off of Natasha turned a simple joke into a more elaborate character dynamic than even Bruce’s. He trolls Bucky a lot and it’s even better for Steve when he really gets into Rocket’s character and plays up the drama, partly because Bucky can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

5) Somewhere in the brainstorming session, Steve and Natasha decided that Rocket has a partner who is a talking tree. Natasha pitches this idea completely straight-faced to Bucky and after the fiasco of Steve’s character idea Bucky’s just too tired to say no to the tree-man. Natasha gives him a bit of a backstory and how Rocket and Groot got together and it sounds pretty solid, so whatever, tree-man can stay.

Then when all the characters get introduced Natasha just hovers over Tony and puffs out her chest and says in her deepest voice: “I am Groot.”

And Steve snickers and nobody has any idea why.

A session later Natasha is responding to everything Tony says with that same deep “I am Groot.” and Steve goes blue in the face trying to hold in his laughter and Tony cracks and the game has to pause for 10 minutes while Nat and Steve recompose themselves.

Nat also has a better grasp of the rules than Bucky realized and completely tweaked her character into being able to do basically anything she can justify. And it’s all right there in the book, Bucky can’t even argue from a rules standpoint. They’re only level 5 Groot shouldn’t be essentially bulletproof but through some loophole in the rules, yep, there it is.

Natasha Romanoff is trained to exploit weaknesses. Of course she’s a total munchkin.

IT GOT SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER

Pirate chicken week continues!