Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2023

Bill C-11 should properly be called the “Justin Trudeau Internet Censorship Bill”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains why the federal government’s Bill C-11 is a terrible idea:

Canada’s Liberals insist the point of Bill C-11 is simply to update the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting of telecommunications in the country. The goal of the bill, according to a Ministry of Canadian Heritage statement, is to bring “online broadcasters under similar rules and regulations as our traditional broadcasters”.

In other words, streaming services and social media, like traditional television and radio stations, would have to ensure that at least 35 percent of the content they publish is Canadian content — or, in Canadian government speak, “Cancon”.

The bill is inching toward a final vote in the Canadian Senate as soon as next month. It’s expected to pass. If it does, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in an October blog post, the same creators the government says it wants to help will, in fact, be hurt.

[…]

If you’re confused by all this — if you’re wondering why the Liberal Party and its allies in these quasi-governmental organizations are suddenly so worried about Canada’s national identity — that’s understandable.

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Trudeau proudly declared, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canada, he explained, is “the first postnational state”. The authorized, two-volume biography of Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is called Citizen of the World. Pablo Rodriguez maintains dual citizenship — in Canada and in Argentina, where he was born.

So why is Trudeau, of all people, championing this legislation? There’s an easy explanation — and it has nothing to do with borders or culture.

“Bill C-11 is a government censorship bill masquerading as a Canadian culture bill,” Jay Goldberg, a director at the conservative Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told me. Referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Goldberg said, “The government is intending to give the power to the CRTC to be able to filter what we see in our news feeds, what we see in our streaming feeds, what we see on social media.”

Supporters of Bill C-11 emphasize it would affect only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok, and other Big Tech platforms; the Heritage Ministry statement notes “the bill does not apply to individual Canadians”. But the language is so vague that it’s unclear how it would actually be implemented.

For example, it would be up to CRTC regulators to decide what constitutes “Canadian” content. The singer The Weeknd was born in Toronto but now mostly lives in Los Angeles. Does he still count as Canadian? What about rock n’ roller Bryan Adams, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, and spends a great deal of time in Europe?

“We have absolutely no idea how AI will go, it’s radically uncertain”… “Therefore, it’ll be fine” (?)

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Scott Alexander on the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy, which is particularly apt in artificial intelligence research these days:

The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy goes:

  1. The situation is completely uncertain. We can’t predict anything about it. We have literally no idea how it could go.
  2. Therefore, it’ll be fine.

You’re not missing anything. It’s not supposed to make sense; that’s why it’s a fallacy.

For years, people used the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy on AI timelines:

Eliezer didn’t realize that at our level, you can just name fallacies.

Since 2017, AI has moved faster than most people expected; GPT-4 sort of qualifies as an AGI, the kind of AI most people were saying was decades away. When you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA when something will happen, sometimes the answer turns out to be “soon”.

Now Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution tries his hand at this argument. We have absolutely no idea how AI will go, it’s radically uncertain:

    No matter how positive or negative the overall calculus of cost and benefit, AI is very likely to overturn most of our apple carts, most of all for the so-called chattering classes.

    The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring. No one is good at predicting the longer-term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changes (we can do the short term, albeit imperfectly). No one. Not you, not Eliezer, not Sam Altman, and not your next door neighbor.

    How well did people predict the final impacts of the printing press? How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? We even have an expression “playing with fire.” Yet it is, on net, a good thing we proceeded with the deployment of fire (“Fire? You can’t do that! Everything will burn! You can kill people with fire! All of them! What if someone yells “fire” in a crowded theater!?”).

Therefore, it’ll be fine:

    I am a bit distressed each time I read an account of a person “arguing himself” or “arguing herself” into existential risk from AI being a major concern. No one can foresee those futures! Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability. Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become. It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison. The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable — “boom!” Yet at some point your inner Hayekian (Popperian?) has to take over and pull you away from those concerns. (Especially when you hear a nine-part argument based upon eight new conceptual categories that were first discussed on LessWrong eleven years ago.) Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough. The mere fact that AGI risk can be put on a par with those other also distant possibilities simply should not impress you very much.

    So we should take the plunge. If someone is obsessively arguing about the details of AI technology today, and the arguments on LessWrong from eleven years ago, they won’t see this. Don’t be suckered into taking their bait.

Look. It may well be fine. I said before my chance of existential risk from AI is 33%; that means I think there’s a 66% chance it won’t happen. In most futures, we get through okay, and Tyler gently ribs me for being silly.

Don’t let him. Even if AI is the best thing that ever happens and never does anything wrong and from this point forward never even shows racial bias or hallucinates another citation ever again, I will stick to my position that the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy is a bad argument.

Canada’s not-so-secret ruling class – the Laurentian elite

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Yuan Yu Zhu explains why Canada, despite its huge geographical spread, is ruled almost exclusively by people drawn from a very small, very incestuous ruling class:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike many countries’ socio-political elites, the Laurentians are not readily identifiable on sight. They have long abandoned their differentiated mid-Atlantic drawl; their houses do not have moats.

What distinguishes them above all else is the uniformity in their outlook. Britain is often said to be run by a consensus blob; but its Canadian equivalent make the Westminster blob seem positively anarchical.

As John Ibbitson, the great chronicler of the Laurentian elite, has written:

    Although they often disagree among themselves, they share a common set of assumptions about Canada: that it’s a fragile nation; that the federal government’s job is to bind together a country that would otherwise fall apart; that the biggest challenge is keeping Quebec inside Confederation; that the poorer regions must forever stay poor, propped up by the richer parts of the country; that the national identity — whatever it is — must be protected from the American juggernaut; that Canada is a helpful fixer in the world, a peacekeeper, a joiner of all the best clubs.

Latterly they have added to this list the belief that Canada is a genocidal state built on stolen land, which should atone for its past through part-performative truth and reconciliation – without, however, actually giving any of the stolen land back. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that they are almost all small-l and/or big-L liberals.

This is not to say that their class background (in a country whose official ideology denies the existence of such a thing) is not highly homogenous. They are generally to be found in the two or three large cities of Ontario and Quebec. They tend to be from the upper-middle class families and be secularized.

Many will have been educated in the same private secondary schools; most will have attended a smattering of universities in Ontario and Quebec: the University of Toronto, Queen’s, and McGill (which Johnston headed when Trudeau was a student there).

A large number of them are bilingual, in a country where real bilingualism remains the exception.

Many have post-graduate degrees, often from abroad; something like a quarter of Mr Trudeau’s cabinet ministers have degrees from Oxbridge alone, a shocking figure given how uncommon they are among the population at large.

They then tend to gravitate into the same professional occupations, and they even live in the same few neighbourhoods in the same few cities. Sometimes, like the prime minister and his special rapporteur, they even end up sharing adjoining vacation cottages literally in the Laurentians region.

How to make a Shaker Candle Box | Episode 1

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 11 Nov 2022

Many new to woodworking find the concept of hand-cutting dovetails intimidating, and yet it is one of the most fundamental joints used in woodworking. Dovetails are the joints we use for making all kinds of boxes, large and small. They are designed to take certain pressures throughout their lives as drawers, cabinets, and boxes of every shape and size.

The methods of squaring and preparing stock are the critical preface to laying out the joints, so in this episode we show you the steps we take to that end. Following the stock-prep, we focus on a method of layout and making that makes the process fast, efficient, and accurate, after which we cut all four dovetail corners.
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QotD: The education racket

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… one of “capitalism’s” great ironies is that it creates several different breeding grounds for the ideology-addled idiot parasites that eventually destroy it. Politics is the most obvious example, but there are lots of others. The “education” business, for instance, is little more than make-work for idiots. You’ll never get rich as a teacher, of course, but a nice middle-class salary, great bennies, a nuclear-armed union, guaranteed lifetime employment, and fucking summers off is a very sweet gig indeed. The red tape and routines and meetings, endless meetings, are infuriating to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together, but for a certain type of person — the kind of dull, vapid, lazily malicious person who would volunteer to be a Block Warden in the USSR — it’s heaven.

Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that these types of institutions are designed to chase off anyone brighter, more honest, or more hardworking than the average member. If you haven’t had any experience with teachers or school boards lately (you lucky bastards), think back to your last encounter with Human Resources, or your neighborhood’s Homeowners’ Association. The only person who can stand to work for HR or be part of the HOA is … well, is the kind of person who works in HR or is part of the HOA — dull, vapid, lazily malicious busybodies. They’re as lazy as they are dumb, as dumb as they are malicious. The key to dealing with them, like the Sovietologist’s key to predicting the Politburo, is figuring out which of their lovely personality traits is likely to come to the fore in a given situation.

Severian, “How Dumb Are Liberals?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-31.

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