et cetera – News For Wombats

The inevitable next level

In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”

As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.

No war, no ICE

Here’s a thing I wrote to my senators:

It’s important to resist the unprovoked war with Iran, especially on the heels of the unprovoked incursion into Venezuela. Reckless and indiscriminate overthrow of governments is just a recipe for chaos.

It’s also important to resist funding ICE. I mention this in the same e-mail because I’ve seen rhetoric online trying to use our foreign wars as an excuse to fund domestic security. Murder and oppression abroad cannot be an excuse for murder and oppression of our own citizens, however. The archipelago of detainment camps that ICE is attempting to build, the extradition of people that courts have ordered should not be extradited, and untrained officers given financial incentives to sweep in as many people as possible… All these things show that ICE must not be given money to grow.

Vaccinated yesterday

I’m feeling a bit achy today, in part because I got my covid and flu shots yesterday. It’s weird that this rudimentary bit of public health is also deeply political.

To paraphrase Voltaire

Set aside the fact that Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot.¹ Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.²

It is a performative contradiction to claim simultaneously that his legacy is one of free speech and open debate but that anybody who says bad things about him should be fired from their job. Such vehement rhetoric is incoherent on its face.

A true champion of free speech might wholly disapprove of what someone says, but would defend in their death the right to say it.

Four!

A correction to an earlier post, confirming my suspicion from the post before: A recent collaboration, when published, will reduce my Erdős Number to 4.

This required running the query on a different database, one which included more of computer science connections.

Five degrees of separation

In a footnote to the previous post, I suggested that a recent collaboration would lower my Erdős Number to 5.

On the basis of having checked a long time ago, I knew that my Erdős Number was at most 6 on account of having coauthored with Craig Callender.

Since then, however, Craig has also collaborated with more people. So his Erdős Number went down to 4 years ago, meaning that mine was already 5 or less. The new paper just means that there are multiple paths by which I’m entitled to an Erdős Number of 5.³

A Trumpian fallacy redux

During the first Trump administration, I pointed out that his thinking about immigration committed the fallacy of conflating within-group and between-group differences. In an on-line discussion today, I realized that Trump’s tariff policy is guilty of it as well.⁴

The futility of fine distinctions

It is now commonplace to point out that economic exchange can and should be positive-sum: When it works well, both buyers and sellers get more value than they would by not participating. This is followed up by saying that Trump thinks of exchange as zero-sum: Any time one side gets value, then they must be taking it from the other. It now seems to me that this is wrong about Trump— not unfair, but wrong.

The current tariff strategy is, even in his vision for it, a negative-sum gambit. He is willing to crash the whole plane, because he thinks that he and the USA will be on the top of the hierarchy among the people scrambling for survival among the wreckage.

The ones who walk away from sound medical advice

Someone goes to the doctor. Patient says: Doc, I’m depressed. Life seems harsh and cruel. I feel alone in a threatening world.

Doctor says: You should go to Omelas. They have this kid chained up in the basement which makes life awesome and great in the city. Some time there will pep you right up.

Patient says: But Doctor… I am the kid chained in the basement.

Everybody laughs. Drum roll. Curtains.

Death by a thousand cuts

It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.