4 Chan.

sus

Well-known member
thx

I'm familiar with Kilcullen. he was one of the great names during the COIN fad. I read some of him as well as Galula back in the late 00s.

Yeah, T Greer who blogs at Scholar's Stage was involved in the 00s Iraq war strategy blogosphere scene and from what I hear, it was a really good one. I only know about it second-hand, though
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
DW Padraig I respect your perspective, also @beiser is very unschooled I believe, I was messaging him and he mentioned he only did 2 years of community college
that's interesting. I have 1.5 years of CC - which I loved - and a year of 4-year, which I hated. I also didn't go in the first place til I was 25.

and yeah Linebaugh is around your age. there's early-mid 20s guys, me, and Leo who is I think around 50.
 

sus

Well-known member
Kilcullen passage that gets at the heart of how man-made models rely on deep local context:

Afghanistan is an agricultural economy, and crop diversity varies markedly across the country. Given the free-market economics of agricultural production in Afghanistan, risk and cost factors—the opportunity cost of growing a crop, the risk of transporting it across insecure roads, the risk of selling it at market and of transporting money home again—tend to be automatically priced in to the cost of fruits and vegetables. Thus, fluctuations in overall market prices may be a surrogate metric for general popular confidence and perceived security. In particular, exotic vegetables—those grown outside a particular district that have to be transported further at greater risk in order to be sold in that district—can be a useful telltale marker.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the 00s Iraq war strategy blogosphere scene
the main person I read from that scene was Abu Muqawama aka Andrew Exum

I didn't know enough to participate but I recall the comments sections - this was the heyday of blospot - being fucking wild

like serious military ppl, think tank ppl, mercenaries cheek by jowl with random internet weirdos
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
And as I said earlier, I don't believe ads mess with your self-determination. I don't think they "hijack your decision-making" any more than any other informational display does.
We must be using different definitions of self determination here then. And Ive never suggested ads hack your decision making process. Im saying ads affect the field of data that one draws decisions from. Its about framing.

We agree more than you think. Ive never read the NYT or guardian, I swear it, you gotta believe me. Im just saying I dont think advertisers should be given every trick in the book, same logic extends to the markets place in governance.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It'd be interesting to think about what kind of "stereotyping" we're OK with and what kinds we aren't—and I mean stereotype just in the inductive, pattern-forming sense.

We can imagine a camera + ML system set up around an elementary school that is in charge of sending the school into lockdown in the case of emergencies. The actual details of this thought experiment are probably iffy, but I don't think they matter in painting the contours of the problem at hand.

Now, e.g. statistically black Americans commit violent felonies at higher rates, and a perfectly well-tuned, sensitive facial threat-level indicator might tic up a little coming from a statistical place. That seems pretty scummy and gross. But realistically, if you were trying to profile school shooters, you'd probably actually start profiling white teenagers with greasy hair, acne, and military jackets, because non-white school shooters are pretty damn rare. Would this be OK?

Then there's the next level—let's say there are certain colors that especially violent subcultures wear, like white long-sleeve Ts. And there've been a couple prominent school shooters with white long-sleeve Ts, lots of people on 4chan are wearing white long-sleeves and talking about shooting up schools, so if a teen in a white long-sleeve is walking around campus with a giant dufflebag, maybe that threat level indicator should go up.

Then there's really explicit symbolism—what about a kid with Nazi tattoos on his knuckles, that the camera system picked up getting into a fight last week with a bullying jock. At that point, you're working off strong statistical precedent, and more precise correlations than phenotypic descriptors. And yet, this is still the same premise—statistical correlations between appearance and behaviors, or between life histories and actions.

And of course, everything I just described can be, and is, a "threat indicator" to administrators who run these schools already.

So where do you draw the line, between prejudice and statistical correlations? You can't, they're the exact same thing mathematically.
A side point, maybe, but this post is extremely depressing and makes me very glad I'm not bringing up a child in the USA.
 

sus

Well-known member
We must be using different definitions of self determination here then. And Ive never suggested ads hack your decision making process. Im saying ads affect the field of data that one draws decisions from. Its about framing.

Sure but so does all information. All communication is manipulation of futures. Some manipulation is mutually advantageous.

Ads, in theory, are in that sweetspot more often than not.

And where do you draw the line on litigating? Am I allowed to mention a band? Am I allowed to send influencers on Instagram my product? These too are manipulations of the information field, but so are all PSAs telling people to wash their hands during pandemics, or getting out good messages about Trans Awareness Week.

Which is to say, if you accept that ads are just informational displays, then there's no clear way to regulate them separate from all other informational displays (which are omnipresent & the basis for communication, interaction, socialization, etc).
 

sus

Well-known member
A side point, maybe, but this post is extremely depressing and makes me very glad I'm not bringing up a child in the USA.

Which of the problems are absent in the UK? Maybe there are less school shootings, but that's besides the point—you could change it to "monitoring for terrorist attacks on the tube" and it pans out the same.
 

sus

Well-known member
We agree more than you think. Ive never read the NYT or guardian, I swear it, you gotta believe me. Im just saying I dont think advertisers should be given every trick in the book, same logic extends to the markets place in governance.

Okay I'm sorry I believe you I love you Linebaugh
 

sus

Well-known member
I guess what I'm saying is I *want* advertisers to know more about me, so they can show me better ads, so they can make more money per ad displayed, so I can see less ads while still paying for the Internet infrastructure that runs off them! That might be a little utopian, and it probably will pan out more messily than any of us'd like, but I think the broad strokes hold.

I wish I had a form I could fill out with all the things I care about and want so that every product I saw I bought, that would be a perfect advertising system. Once a week I get an ad and every time I go "I wanted this my whole life and never knew!" and then I one-click order it to my house. Five seconds of interaction total plus a constant stream of useful shit.
 

sus

Well-known member
Alright I'm logging off this website I took a modafinil to try and work and what did I end up doing shooting the shit on here

I apologize to EVERYONE but especially Linebaugh
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
The Best and the Brightest has a hundred amazing passages about failures in institutional decision-making - its best parts are all about the actual bureaucratic process by which the U.S. government drifted into the Vietnam War, in fact I think it's probably one of the best books ever written about bureaucracy in action

here's a particularly good one
David Halberstam said:
Harkins [U.S. military commander in Vietnam 62-64] began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA, and to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting. Nolting [U.S. Ambassador] would change State's reporting, and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed, and highly erroneous, under the new commander's belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface. In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which decisions were being made, because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself [italics mine].
 
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beiser

Well-known member
I don't mean beating heart in the sense of market cap, I mean in the sense that it's the creation of want
i don’t think it even does that, the surveillance is a sideshow, if you did the exact same thing with no surveillance it would be slightly worse at it but ultimately the same.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Which of the problems are absent in the UK? Maybe there are less school shootings, but that's besides the point—you could change it to "monitoring for terrorist attacks on the tube" and it pans out the same.
The problems aren't even remotely comparable in scale.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Sure but so does all information. All communication is manipulation of futures. Some manipulation is mutually advantageous.

Ads, in theory, are in that sweetspot more often than not.

And where do you draw the line on litigating? Am I allowed to mention a band? Am I allowed to send influencers on Instagram my product? These too are manipulations of the information field, but so are all PSAs telling people to wash their hands during pandemics, or getting out good messages about Trans Awareness Week.

Which is to say, if you accept that ads are just informational displays, then there's no clear way to regulate them separate from all other informational displays (which are omnipresent & the basis for communication, interaction, socialization, etc).
Im not concerned with the manipulation per se, just concerned with regulating the extent of the manipulation, what fields it has access too. Which I get has is its own quagmire of philosophical questions. I'm just weary of another Edwards Bernays type meet up between new tech and the influence of advertising. If we can get 'better ads' without that I'm for it.

Also not completely convinced on better targeted advertisements improving user experience. its the old/new youtube problem. Engagement, not enjoyment, is the goal. Another reason Id rather not be 'followed around;' the claim of mutual advantage is dubious
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
that's interesting. I have 1.5 years of CC - which I loved - and a year of 4-year, which I hated. I also didn't go in the first place til I was 25.

and yeah Linebaugh is around your age. there's early-mid 20s guys, me, and Leo who is I think around 50.
mvuent is also a mid twenties American I believe.
 

beiser

Well-known member
i dunno where he got the community college thing, maybe he’s trying to anonymize me, it’s entirely false, I actually dropped out of high school and several years later got a masters. no undergrad.
 

beiser

Well-known member
while we’re talking about his fictionalization, his name isn’t actually Gus, it’s Anthony. “Tony,” if you will.
 
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