Quotulatiousness

March 20, 2024

Google’s unmissable leftward biases

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tom Knighton on a recent New York Post article calling out Google for their strong political biases and how they inform everything that Google and its subsidiaries and affiliates do:

Once, the company was well-known for having the phrase “Don’t be evil” painted on a wall in their headquarters. It’s a noble sentiment, but apparently, it’s now more like “Don’t be evil.”

That’s pretty clear after what we learned from the New York Post:

    Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.

    The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.

    The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”

    The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.

    Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.

Now, Google denies the claims and someone close to the company took issue with the methodology used to detect this supposed interference.

But the truth of the matter is that there’s absolutely no reason to believe Google on this because we’ve seen enough of it previously to know better.

For example, YouTube has a profoundly leftward bias. The site is notorious for silencing right-wing voices while allowing leftists to get away with trampling community standards willy-nilly. YouTube is owned by Google, which means they’re at least tacitly endorsing the strategy.

From there, it’s not difficult to see the mothership taking on a similar role, if not originating it. They’re just able to hide it easier.

But even there, we can see it.

I use Google’s news feed regularly, particularly for my work at Bearing Arms. It’s common for me to look up “gun rights” and the first article that shows up, unless I set it for the most recent stories, be one treating them as a negative thing.

So yeah, I have no doubt that Google is playing favorites.

The worst part is that there isn’t anything that can be done through the legal system as far as I’m aware. But that doesn’t mean someone there didn’t realize what they are doing is wrong.

Most probably didn’t, though. They believe the Holy Progressive Cause is so vital, so unerringly good, that they can and should do anything to serve it. That includes displaying a staggering degree of bias in the service of what you believe to be the greater good, your business be damned.

But they knew it would be considered wrong by a great many people, which is why they’re hiding it.

This “should be a reality check for the technocracy”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the SXSW audience reaction to being presented with full-quill AI enthusiasm that didn’t match the presenters’ expectations at all:

Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology.

And the audience started booing.

At first, just a few people booed. But then more and more — and louder and louder. The more the experts on screen praised the benefits of artificial intelligence, the more hostile the crowd got.

The booing started in response to the comment that “AI is a culture.” And the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise (as is often the case in the tech world nowadays).

Ah, but the audience booed the loudest at this statement:

    I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.

The event was a debacle — the exact opposite of what the promoters anticipated.

And it should be a reality check for the technocracy.

If they were paying attention, they might already have a hunch how much people hate this stuff — not just farmers in Kansas or your granny in Altoona, but hip, progressive attendees at SXSW.

These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff.

It’s more than just fears about runaway AI. Prevailing attitudes about digital tech and innovation are changing rapidly in real time — and not for the better. The users feel used.

Meanwhile the tech leaders caught in some time warp. They think they are like Steve Jobs launching a new Apple product in front of an adoring crowd.

Those days are gone.

Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule — something Steve Jobs never experienced.

This is the new normal. Not long ago we looked to Silicon Valley as the place where dreams came from, but now it feels more like ground zero for the next dystopian nightmare.

He’s not just a curmudgeonly nay-sayer (that’s more me than him), and has some specific things that are clearly turning a majority of technology users against the very technology that they once eagerly adopted:

They’re doing so many things wrong, I can’t even begin to scratch the surface here. But I’ll list a few warning signs.

You must be suspicious of tech leaders when …

  1. Their products and services keep getting worse over time.
  2. Their obvious goal is to manipulate and monetize the users of their tech, instead of serving and empowering them.
  3. The heaviest users of their tech suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal impulses, and other negative effects as a result.
  4. They stop talking about quality, and instead boast incessantly about scalability, disruption, and destruction.
  5. They hide what their technology really does — resisting all requests for transparency and disclosure.
  6. They lock you into platforms, forcing you to use new “features” and related apps if you want to access the old ones.
  7. They force upgrades you don’t like, and downloads you don’t want.
  8. Their terms of use are filled with outrageous demands and sweeping disclaimers.
  9. They destroy entire industries not because they offer superior products, but only because as web gatekeepers they have a chokehold on information and customer flow — which they use ruthlessly to kill businesses and siphon off revenues.

Every one of those things is happening right here, right now.

We’re doing the technocracy a favor by calling it to their attention. If they get the message, they can avoid the coming train wreck. They can return to real innovation, with a focus on helping the users they now so ruthlessly exploit.

Jointing on a Bandsaw | Paul Sellers

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

Paul Sellers
Published Dec 1, 2023

This bandsaw hack is one you have never seen before because I invented it.

Planing dead flat for hand planing or power planing can take time, but this bandsaw method takes only a few short minutes to do, and you are on your way to your work faster than blinking.
(more…)

QotD: Ancient Greek tyranny

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rulers and generally makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutionally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what separates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.

We see the first major wave of tyrannies emerging in Greek poleis in the sixth century, although this is also about the horizon where we can see political developments generally in the Greek world, still our sources seem to understand this development to have been somewhat novel at the time and it is certainly tempting to see the emergence of tyranny and democracy in this period both as responses to the same sorts of pressures and fragility found in traditional polis oligarchies, but again our evidence is thin. Tyrants tend to come from the elite, oligarchic class and often utilize anti-oligarchic movements (civil strife or stasis, στάσις) to come to power.

Because most poleis are small, the amount of force a tyrant needed to seize power was also often small. Polycrates supposedly seized power in Samos with just fifteen soldiers (Hdt. 3.120), though we may doubt the truth of the report and elsewhere Herodotus notes that he did so in conspiracy with his two brothers of whom he killed one and banished the other (Hdt. 3.39). I’ve discussed Peisistratos’ takeover(s) in Athens before but they were similarly small-ball affairs. In Corinth, Cypselus seized power by using his position as polemarch (war leader) to have the army (which, remember, is going to be a collection of the non-elite but still well-to-do citizenry, although this is early enough that if I call it a hoplite phalanx I’ll have an argument on my hands) expel the Bacchiadae, a closed single-clan oligarchy. A move by any member of the elite to put together their own bodyguard (even one just armed with clubs) was a fairly clear indicator of an attempt to form a tyranny and the continued maintenance of a bodyguard was a staple of how the Greeks understood a tyrant.

Having seized power, those tyrants do not seem to have abolished key civic institutions: they do not disband the ekklesia or the law courts. Instead, the tyrant controls these things by co-opting the remaining elite families, using violence and the threat of violence against those who would resist and installing cronies in positions of power. Tyrants also seem to have bought a degree of public acquiescence from the demos by generally targeting the oligoi, as with Cypselus and his son Periander killing and banishing the elite Bacchiadae from Corinth (Hdt. 5.92). But this is a system of government where in practice the laws appeared to still be in force and the major institutions appeared to still be functioning but that in practice the tyrant, with his co-opted elites, armed bodyguard and well-rewarded cadre of followers among the demos, monopolized power. And it isn’t hard to see how the fiction of a functioning polis government could be a useful tool for a tyrant to maintain power.

That extra-constitutional nature of tyranny, where the tyrant exists outside of the formal political system (even though he may hold a formal office of some sort) also seems to have contributed to tyranny’s fragility. Thales was supposedly asked what the strangest thing he had ever seen was and his answer was, “An aged tyrant” (Diog. Laert. 1.6.36) and indeed tyranny was fragile. Tyrants struggled to hold power and while most seem to have tried to pass that power to an heir, few succeed; no tyrant ever achieves the dream of establishing a stable, monarchical dynasty. Instead, tyrants tend to be overthrown, leading to a return to either democratic or oligarchic polis government, since the institutions of those forms of government remained.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIa: Politeia in the Polis”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-17.

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