Linklist: December 25, 2022
Links (links with excerpts below):
‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village
Has the UN climate change conference gotten too big to work?
Inside the Wyoming Corner Crossing Case Everyone is Watching
100 years after his birth, Kurt Vonnegut is more relevant than ever to science
“Do Simpler Machine Learning Models Exist and How Can We Find Them?”
"Although these communities have been living in the forests for thousands of years, it wasn’t until 2006 that a law was passed to formally recognise their rights over their land. But that was not enough to preserve Kete. In order to reconstruct what happened, I tracked down and interviewed more than a dozen families who used to live there and are now scattered across Chhattisgarh. I also interviewed local shopkeepers and journalists, and government officers who worked in the area between 2009 and 2014.
“They came with machines,” said Patar, recalling the day in 2008 when he first saw outsiders arrive in the village. The survey equipment – the machines that Patar referred to – included a big camera placed on a yellow tripod. When the men told the villagers that they had come to survey the area for a proposed coalmine, they were met with anger. A couple of weeks later, the village chiefs told locals that the company that would be mining the coal under Kete was named Adani."
"What's going on? It's right there -- "Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing.." " Stanford announced was the introduction of a new housing system, designed to promote “fairness”.." The bureaucrat's vision of "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" cannot stand any self-organization by students. Voluntary association might not be sufficiently "diverse" and "inclusive" (except, of course, the "affinity" groups which are deliberately not diverse and inclusive.) The only way to be "equitably" "included," apparently, is to be equally, intensely, lonely and miserable. So even the most minor social organization, like having a party, must be policed by bureaucrats. And smothered in the process.
No wonder there is a mental health crisis! Living all alone in a faceless dorm with closed doors would drive any 18 year old nuts. I found my first years in a college dorm intensely difficult, and only the fellowship of the irreverent Burton Third Bombers got me through. (Thank you all!) I can't imagine living all alone in a motel-like silent dorm a thousand miles from home. I would have cracked too."
"In “Alphaville” (1965), a tyrannical dystopia, Godard used the newly concreted areas of Paris as a backdrop. Two years later, in the opening scene of “Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,” a wheelbarrow caked in concrete sat on a recently built motorway, surrounded by a deafening cacophony of traffic and construction. Everywhere the camera looked, Paris was full of holes and craters; cranes filled the sky and the new concrete tower blocks were portrayed as monuments of alienation and loneliness. Godard theorized that the city, like his female protagonist, had been forced to prostitute itself just to survive in an era of “progress.”
Concrete had been poured before World War II, but it was nothing compared to the scale of what was now taking place. In 1900, minerals associated with the production of cement accounted for only 15% of construction material; by the beginning of the 1970s, it was more than 60% and rising rapidly. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright described the amount of construction afoot as an “amazing avalanche of material.” In Lagos, the arrival of some 20 million tons of imported cement caused a traffic jam of ships that paralyzed the port for almost a year."
"Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day. But the fixations and personalities of digital-native communities are increasingly spilling out into the real world. Extremely online people are running for Congress. You can raise millions of real American dollars by posting memes. Or, as is the case for most people, you can go online to acquire a set of digitally-tinged delusions which, regardless of their content, feel like the most profound, true thing in the world at the same time they are incomprehensible to someone in regular society.
Trying to stay off the internet feels like pushing back against a wave."
"Maybe the conferences have just grown too large to tackle the issue. The directory mapping the venue shows how participation in the climate talks has ballooned over the years. It lists countries, regions within countries, cities within regions, associations of cities, associations of countries and industries, international associations of sub-associations, all of them bringing their own representatives to participate in the climate side events that seem to dominate the space at the expense of focusing on the actual talks."
"In early October, four hunters were pursuing elk and mule deer in the foothills of southern Wyoming. Brad Cape, Phillip Yoemans, John Slowensky, and Zach Smith, friends from Missouri, read on the Wyoming Game and Fish website that crossing adjoining corners of public land parcels was not in violation of hunting statutes, so they chose to use this method to hop from one public parcel to the next and get deeper into the hills, even using a stepladder they fabricated to make sure they didn’t trespass at one prominent corner."
"That December, the rainy season was in full force, with heavy downpours most afternoons, lasting sometimes long into the night. Never before had I, and never again would I, witness rains like those, where the water poured straight down, not in drops, but in globs and sheets. Standing in it felt like standing under a waterfall; I’d catch myself stepping forward or back, left or right, in an attempt to get out from under the flow, but it was everywhere. It seemed impossible that the sky could hold so much water, constricting summer’s broad daylight to a sodden gloaming.
One evening, during such a downpour, I left a teachers’ year-end potluck to return to my room—one in a row of tiny, concrete flats for the school’s single female staff. Mine was not much more than 100 yards away across an open lawn, which was now filled with ankle-deep water flowing gently down the long campus green toward the sea. As this was not my first deluge, I wasn’t concerned by the prospect of a routine water-logging; it was only water, after all, and not at all cold. The only problem was that the rains had washed away all light into a blind, enveloping darkness. I knew that once I stepped into it I would become disembodied, aware of my limbs only through my untrained sense of proprioception. How dependent we are upon the faculty of sight, even to know where we end and the external world begins.
Standing in front of the large, glaring light, which the principle had set up outside the classroom doorway, I pointed myself in the direction of my house. I held out my arms and stepped forward. Walking in perfect darkness feels like stepping in place, going nowhere. There’s only the light sensation of your feet tapping over a surface—or in this case, shuffling through a pool of water nearly indistinguishable from the cascade of water also flowing over my body. And at the time, I didn’t know that a person who tries to walk a straight line with no bearings will end up traversing an arc. But I continued moving, certain that after about a minute I would run into one of the papaya plants in front of my house. This did not happen."
"When American novelist Kurt Vonnegut addressed the Bennington College class of 1970—1 year after publishing his best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five—he hit the crowd with his signature one-two punch.
“I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist … would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine,” he said. “What actually happened … was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”"
"After decades of baroque theorizing, the American academy seems to be working itself into a lather of solidarity with the working class. Last October, a Columbia University “teach-in” brought together celebrated left intellectuals with leaders of the new, revitalized AFL-CIO, including recently elected union president John Sweeney. More than 1,700 people thronged to the event’s opening session; satellite events at campuses like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas at El Paso drew healthy turnouts as well. Then in December, the interdisciplinary journal Social Text—subject of much unwelcome press ever since it published a prank article by NYU physicist Alan Sokal purporting to refute the existence of reality—devoted most of its Winter issue to the “Yale Dossier.” This collection brought together testimonials and scholarly analyses denouncing the Ivy League school’s efforts to break the fledgling teaching assistants’ union, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), and Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), which represent Yale’s cafeteria and maintenance staffs.
It seems a thaw is under way in the long cold war that sundered organized labor and the American university during the fabled upheavals of the 1960s. And it would be churlish indeed to deny that this turn represents a welcome shift in the intellectual climate. Supporting the labor struggles of clerical workers, maintenance staff, and teaching assistants is a far better use of institutional time, after all, than writing another tortured defense of the wartime activities (and postwar lies) of Nazi collaborator/literary theorist Paul de Man."
"Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.
Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.
It didn’t."
"This led to a question on my part. Rudin writes, “Simpler, interpretable models would be better.” I wonder whether it would makes sense to separate the concepts of “simpler” and “interpretable.” I say this because in applications such as social and environmental science, a more complicated model can be more interpretable because they are adjusting for more factors. I guess it depends on the application. If I’m doing adjustment for survey nonresponse or imbalance in an experiment, I find a more complicated model to be more interpretable and explainable: if I use a simpler model, it can be harder to explain. For example, in political polling it is more interpretable if we are adjusting for education of respondents than if we’re not. Also in those settings it would not really be an advantage to be able to write the model on an index card!
I sent this question to Rudin, who replied:
'My definition of interpretability is totally domain dependent, so yes, of course I agree with you. Not every problem has the same type of model as the best solution, otherwise half of us would be out of a job and we’d all be working on that problem! I actually have a pretty broad scope for what I consider interpretable. For instance, I advocate for interpretable neural networks for computer vision. Our review paper goes through a pretty wide variety of problems that I think are interpretable, and we admitted in the survey that we didn’t even cover a small fraction of it. The talk I’m giving here just happens to be about sparse models (trees, additive models) because I find them useful for medical and criminal justice problems, as well as energy reliability.'"
"All of this raises a critical question: what can society do about this new threat? Where the technology itself can no longer be stopped, I see four paths, none easy, not exclusive, all urgent:
First, every social media company and search engine should support and extend StackOverflow's ban; automatically-generated content that is misleading should not be welcome, and the regular posting of it should be grounds for a user's removal.
Second, every country is going to need to reconsider its policies on misinformation. It's one thing for the occasional lie to slip through; it's another for us all to swim in a veritable ocean of lies. In time, though it would not be a popular decision, we may have to begin to treat misinformation as we do libel, making it actionable if it is created with sufficient malice and sufficient volume."
List also available on my blog