reid/write



home // about
shitbloggin with reid scoggin

link roundup 16

Published:

reading

The available intelligence was not relevant. The most experienced man at the table was Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general who had the president’s respect and understood, perhaps, how quickly that could evaporate. Mike Pompeo, the CIA director whose agency had consistently reported that it had no evidence of a Syrian chemical bomb, was not present. Secretary of State Tillerson was admired on the inside for his willingness to work long hours and his avid reading of diplomatic cables and reports, but he knew little about waging war and the management of a bombing raid. Those present were in a bind, the adviser said. “The president was emotionally energized by the disaster and he wanted options.” He got four of them, in order of extremity. Option one was to do nothing. All involved, the adviser said, understood that was a non-starter. Option two was a slap on the wrist: to bomb an airfield in Syria, but only after alerting the Russians and, through them, the Syrians, to avoid too many casualties. A few of the planners called this the “gorilla option”: America would glower and beat its chest to provoke fear and demonstrate resolve, but cause little significant damage. The third option was to adopt the strike package that had been presented to Obama in 2013, and which he ultimately chose not to pursue. The plan called for the massive bombing of the main Syrian airfields and command and control centers using B1 and B52 aircraft launched from their bases in the U.S. Option four was “decapitation”: to remove Assad by bombing his palace in Damascus, as well as his command and control network and all of the underground bunkers he could possibly retreat to in a crisis.

new sy hersh is like christmas in june. for framing, check out 2014’s The Red Line and the Rat Line, regarding turkish involvement in the ghouta sarin attack and obama’s response.

In an environment which is no-longer home or prison, but both - a safe space from which danger never really disappears - the depressed are made accustomed to exerting labour for their discursive masters, slotted into cybernetic dispositions grafted with buttons they can push, and saints they can worship.

It angers them, it confuses them. It fucks and shits and eats - yet does it think? What happens when you show it something sprayed with ‘Hyperracism’? ‘Who could utter such a thing?’ Interesting, let’s note it down. It doesn’t need analysis. It’s impressive, in a way, this diremption of professionalisation (all the arsenal of discourse analysis, power structures, systemic issues… all the rituals of purification). Heretical interventions taunt them with overtness, with the suggestion that their careful techniques and theoretical acrobatics might be useless… they gnash their teeth. It! - the object angers them because the obsolecence is their own: they have been trained only to label, to recode, not even to decrypt, but to identify (with) labels, to receive signs and representations… not the prospect of the total abrogation of this category. Bad investments hurt.

As capital increasingly encroaches on cognition (to stealthily reveal itself as the real agent), the only theory that remains coherent is immanent. Let it go - it cannot be stopped by anyone - definitely not by you.

I know that the psychology studies that show up on my Facebook feed or on Andrew Gelman’s blog are preselected for bad methodology. I thought that while bad statistics proliferated in psychology for decades (despite warnings by visionaries like Cohen), this ended in 2015 when the replicability crisis showed that barely 36% of finding in top psych journals replicate. Some entrenched psychologists who built their careers on p-hacked false findings may gripe about “methodological terrorists“, but surely the young generation will wise up to the need for proper methodology, the least of which is doing a power calculation.

And yet, here I was talking to a psychology student who came to give a presentation about statistical power and had the following, utterly stupefying, exchange:

Me: So, how did you calculate statistical power in your own research?

Her: What do you mean ‘how we calculated it’?

Me: The statistical power of your experiment, how did you arrive at it?

Her: Oh, our research was inspired by a previous paper. They said their power was 80%, so we said the same.

This person came to present a paper detailing the ways in which psychologists fuck up their methodology, and yet was utterly uninterested in actually doing the methodology. When I gave her the quick explanation of how power works I wrote down in part 1 of this post, she seemed indifferent, as if all this talk of statistics and inference was completely irrelevant to her work as a psychology researcher.

This is mind boggling to me. I don’t have any good explanation for what actually went on in her head. But I have an explanation, and if it’s true it’s terrifying.

In 2009 SSI paid 8M people about $45B. 60% of those under 65 had a “mental disorder.” Did many have a legitimate disorder? Sure. Whatever. But when the system ties benefits to a mental disorder, the point is the benefits, not the mental disorder.

What you should be asking is why, if society has decided to give the poor a stipend of $600/month, does it do this through the medical establishment and not as a traditional social policy? And the answer is very simple:

  • you, America, would go bananas if poor people got money for nothing, you can barely stand it when they get it for a disability;
  • if you offload a social problem to medicine, if you medicalize a social problem, then you’ve bought yourself a generation or two to come up with a new plan or invade someone.

Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (or the city of your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it’s a disease, it’s nobody’s fault. Yay empiricism.

this got TLP in a lot of trouble and it was deleted, hence the archival copy.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Side-channel attacks can recover secret keys from cryptographic algorithms (including the pervasive AES) using measurements such as power use. However, these previously-known attacks on AES tend to require unrestricted, physical access to the device. Using improved antenna and signal processing, Fox-IT and Riscure show how to covertly recover the encryption key from two realistic AES-256 implementations while:

  1. Attacking at a distance of up to 1 m (30 cm in realistic conditions; “TEMPEST”),
  1. Using minimal equipment (fits in a jacket pocket, costs less than €200) and
  1. Needing only a few minutes (5 minutes for 1 m and 50 seconds for 30 cm).

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public demonstration of such covert attacks from a distance. This demonstration reinforces the real need for defence-in-depth when designing high assurance systems — as Fox-IT is well known for.

Before artificial computers, humans were basically the only computers available, and so they had to be used for all needed tasks, even those requiring only a tiny fraction of human capability. These simplest tasks were the first to be automated. Then as hardware got cheaper and we could afford to spend more on software, we worked to automate more complex tangled tasks. These are tasks that use more of the tools within each brain, that have a lot of complex internal structure, and that must be coordinated in more detail with a complex non-human or human world.

So far, humans have been limited in their competition with automation because their brain software has been stuck inside its brain hardware. Compared to today’s artificial hardware, human brain hardware is good at memory and parallel computation, but terrible at communication with outside systems. If our brain hardware remains stuck while artificial hardware keeps getting better, it seems that eventually everything must be done better and cheaper artificially.

However, eventually brain emulations (ems) should be possible. Then human software can use artificial hardware and compete on more equal terms. And once we understand more about human software, we’ll be able to change it at least somewhat. At that point, the question for each task will be: is this task better done by a descendant of human software, by a descendant of artificial software made via some process recognizably like how we now make software, or by software made via some other process?

This inability of the brain to track “its own astronomical dimensionality; it can at best track problem-specific correlational activity, various heuristic hacks,” is the same thing H.P. Lovecraft meant when he spoke of the “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. This acute blindness to the reality within and without, to the intrinsic and extrinsic facets of our own singular being and the Real or Outside is to be faced with the fact that move and have our being within an absolute darkness of which we know nothing. Like Plato’s mythical cave fantasists we project a fantasy reality onto the darkness of the cave walls and call that our world. Where Plato erred is in adding the notion that while we sit in the dark there exists behind us and outside us, beyond the universal chaos of time and space some other world – a world of pure forms (eidos, Ideas, substantial forms, etc.) that are the true sources of all our fake copies. So that the task of philosophy was to guide us back, to remember that this other immortal realm exists and that this is where our true home is beyond time and space. Problem is that Plato made this up; or, should we say he provided in his time a secularization of the mysteries of the Pythagorean-Orphic traditions that had been passed down through hundreds of years of Greek history from the early Shamans of those long forgotten sects and cults of the mysteries. Nothing is ever made out of whole cloth, instead Plato attributed his discoveries to his mentor Socrates so that Plato as a novelist of Ideas became for all intents and purposes the first Science Fiction author.

part two here.

The blockchain is the new hot technology. If you haven’t heard about it, you probably know Bitcoin. Well, the blockchain is the underlying technology that powers Bitcoin. Experts say the blockchain will cause a revolution similar to what Internet provoked. But what is it really, and how can it be used to build apps today? This post is the first in a series of three, explaining the blockchain phenomenon to web developers. We’ll discuss the theory, show actual code, and share our learnings, based on a real world project.

part two, “in practice”.

misc