indubitable

From my perspective you seem to be trying to rebuke data by yourself ironically playing quite fast and loose with sourceless data and conclusions. For instance you imply that because people elected politicians that supported slavery, people must therefore have liked or supported slavery. I take it you support, or think it's justified, killing hundreds of thousands in the Mideast in wars waged primarily over oil and geopolitical control? What, how could you not? Every single politician America has elected for the past several decades has been all about this, so surely most Americans must support it? Again if you can provide objective data and facts, with so much context as possible, I'd love to discuss these - but I have little interest in facile speculation.

I think our entire worldview should be shaped by facts. To do otherwise would be to appeal to misconceptions, bias, and prejudice. As a consequence of this there is literally no scenario in which I would consider the submission of facts and data to be unacceptable. Language policing is one of the first step towards moving into a world where facts themselves begin to be unacceptable. In all of the worst examples of fascism and oppression in the past one of the first things to go is the ability for people to speak freely. Consequently, any time I see somebody attempting to police language - I am certain to go sharply in the opposite direction regardless of my personal views on the issue at hand. As for what that makes you think of me? Well let's put it this way, on a scale of 0 to 100, how much do you care about what I think of you? Now why would you expect it to be any different for me?

Regardless of the above, I'll indulge you because this is a topic I find particularly interesting - and there is also a moral. It seems many people in society are starting to view things as caricaturizations of reality. There are the good guys, and there are the bad guys. And the person I was responding to, I suspect, likely viewed the transatlantic slave trade through this lens based on his apparently significant offense as somebody daring to use the word 'just' in reference to a time frame of slavery. I think this is surprisingly dangerous.

The reason for this is that in reality things are not caricaturizations, but changes that might not seem so severe to many. For instance back on the slave trade I hope you'll indulge a few more of those condemnable facts. In the entire transatlantic slave trade about 12.5 million slaves were bought from Africa, with 10.7 million surviving the voyage. Of the 10.7 million 388,000, or about 3.6% [1], ended up in what would be the United States. Many people in the US seem to think that slavery ended, more or less, after the Civil War. That's obviously quite a poorly informed view, but it's built upon this caricaturization of slavery. In reality today there are more slaves than ever before in history with an estimated 45.8 million people enslaved worldwide [2]. That includes an estimated 57,700 slaves even within the United States.

Rather than judge people and events, I try to understand them - try to put myself in their shoes and see how things played out. And in this case, it's not hard to see. Slavery was likely a story of apathy and cognitive dissonance. In the US about 1.4% of free Americans owned slaves, about 8% of families. [4]. Obviously more owned slaves in states where slavery was legal, but I'm considering the entire population as slavery was a rich man's game - and getting involved in the business was little more than a carriage ride away. Similar to today how California's ratio of entrepreneurs cannot be considered in isolation as the lucrative opportunities there draw in people from across the entire country.

And those that did choose to own slaves likely convinced themselves it was morally fine since they were buying people who were already enslaved. In Africa at the time slaves were even subject to things including human sacrifice. [5] Just in West Africa there were events including the regular sacrifice of hundreds of slaves and on rare occasion even thousands at once. The cognitive dissonance there is not really hard to see.

And this behavior of cognitive dissonance and apathy continues to this day. Do you really care about slavery? I imagine we'd all like to think so, but reality paints a less favorable picture. What if the president started implicitly condoning slavery for his own benefit? You might think you'd care, but that has already happened very recently. Malaysia is one of the worst places for modern slavery. You can see from the aforementioned link [2] that about 0.4% of their population is a slave. That's one out of every 250 people for 129k slaves in a country of 30million people. In 2015 Obama chose to remove Malaysia from a list of the worst human traffickers. He did this just so he could squeeze them into a trade agreement he wanted to pass (the TPP). This was the same year that more than numerous mass graves and trafficking camps were discovered in Malaysia. [3] A few media outlets ran the story, but for the most part people showed they couldn't really care less. And so it almost certainly was during slavery as well.

What if I told you a list of companies or products that are still generated using slavery? Like chocolate? West Africa supplies about 69% of the world's cocoa. [6]. And unsurprisingly, slavery and even child slavery, is involved in its production. Companies funding the practice include Mars, Nestle, Hershey, and others. Will you now stop buying their products? Probably not. Think about that for a minute. A sweet treat is more important to you ("you" in this case is rhetorical, as even if you in particular would/will give up the companies - few would) than taking a stand against not only slavery, but child slavery. Slavery is incredibly offensive until it provides something we want, or when doing something about it might cause you some inconvenience. It's quite phenomenal isn't it? This disconnect between what we think we think, and what we actually seem willing to do based on that?

The point of this all is that I think if people were more aware of reality, and understood that the line between good and evil is far closer than any of us would like to admit, that we'd be much more inclined to concern ourselves with actual events and happenings - instead of taking faux offense at somebody using the word 'just' in a way you find offensive.

[1] - http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cro...

[2] - https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/

[3] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/malaysia-migra...

[4] - http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#West_Africa

[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor_in_cocoa_productio...

Similarly the first link tries to downplay chattel slavery at one claiming that "Precise evidence on slavery or the political and economic institutions of slavery before contact with the Arab or Atlantic slave trade is not available." And almost immediately following, "Chattel slavery had been legal and widespread throughout North Africa when the region was controlled by the Roman Empire (47 BC – ca. 500 AD). ... Chattel slavery persisted after the fall of the Roman empire in the largely Christian communities of the region. After the Islamic expansion into most of the region, the practices continued and eventually, the chattel form of slavery spread to major societies on the southern end of the Sahara (such as Mali, Songhai, and Ghana)."

Wiki does not tend to deal with issues that are contemporary, or involve social issues. And I think this is probably an instance of that. I think instinctively some want to demonize our actions so much as possible even if only as a sort of self flagellation. And so appealing a spin on the myth of a noble savage would certainly do as much. In reality we utilized, incentivized, and adopted an inhumane system, but it was not our direct creation in this case. And while we have learned from the past and moved on, these systems of inhumane exploitation which existed before us continue to exist without us.

Slavery to this day still continues in Africa and especially west Africa. Niger was the first West African nation to create a law penalizing slavery [1]. That happened in... 2003. Unsurprisingly there is also still slavery in Niger. So yes, I do think "just" 5 years of slavery, sometime from the 19th century, is an extremely apt phrasing.

Conditions for these slaves are illustrated in the 'Mani v. Niger' entry in that wiki entry. A man purchased a '5th wife' (he's allowed 4 under local Islamic law, and then the 5th is a slave) for $400. She was 12 years old and endured a decade of physical and sexual abuse bearing 4 children before he married and then 'freed' her. But since now she was his wife, he had the right to demand she not be able to leave his house. This made it all the way to their supreme court, where they ruled in favor of the 'husband' - though he was charged with bigamy which carries a 6 month sentence.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Niger

--Edit--

Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic.

That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess.

[1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...

Children like to think they're special. Parents of children like to think their child is special. And we're doing more than ever to try to convince children that they're special. But reality is not so kind. The vast majority of people, by definition, are not special and never will be. The internet emphasizes this truism. Whether your personal desire is intelligence, strength, beauty, music, or some other skill - the internet will emphasize that, even for your age, you suck.

That explains the useless part at least. As for joyless, I think the huge number of apps designed to give you that constant burst of something, ostensibly dopamine, that gives that feeling of joy (and more importantly from their perspective, addiction) is something that I think will have, almost with complete certainty, unforeseen consequences. Look at casinos and you see people that who are 'happily' inserting their pennies and pulling the rod - yet they look, and mostly are, completely miserable. Their addiction we consider negative because money is directly involved, yet is the addition to notifications, numbers, and all the sort of bells and whistles modern social sites use to trigger addiction truly that different? If anything, the insidious nature of it all makes it seem even worse.

For instance I can buy antibiotics, or things like prozac at most any pharmacy. Pharmacies being a bit different than in the US. In many places prescriptions are not filled at pharmacies, but at the hospital itself. Pharmacies are often stores that sell only drugs, usually without prescription, as opposed to the US thing where you have a general goods store with a pharmacist filling prescriptions in the back.

And all the regular stuff acetaminophen/ibuprofen/etc are also of course available, though there is a difference that generally it is sold in blister packs rather than in the huge bottles of it you can buy in America.

The Falcon Heavy is looking at a cost of around $85 million. The Delta-4 Heavy starts at $400 million. Compare price per kg and it's quite insane. For low earth orbit that's $1,332/kg for a Falcon Heavy and $13,893/kg at the low end pricing for a Delta-4 Heavy. The Falcon 9 weighs in at $2,684/kg.

Each cut in price opens up possibilities that were not there before. Make it $1/kg and that'd be rather self evident, but each price decline opens up the doors for companies and individuals who previously were only being held back by price.

"The implication of your comment is that the wisdom of the masses is little more than incorrect answers canceling out on average leaving nothing but a survey of experts. Yet I think there's no evidence for this (even if it may be a perfectly logical 'kneejerk' reaction) as it works even on things where nobody is an expert, and if this were the case then we ostensibly should be able to get comparable answers from coordination - yet coordination causes the entire system to collapse. ... "

I'm not sure if you even realize all the assumptions you're making. You are assuming, for instance, that 'guesses' are regularly distributed. That assumption may be correct in some cases - I expect in many it is not. Alternatively there is the possibility is for you to claim that you're referring not to the individuals in question as the estimators, but the entire group. In that case you've spent a lot of time saying nothing as it boils down to "people are only correct if they're correct."

An officer asks you, "Do you know why I pulled you over today?"

- Yes = admission of guilt. You're screwed.

- No = indication of disregard for law, recklessness, and no situational awareness. You're even more screwed.

- Good afternoon officer, I'd rather not answer any questions. Would you like to see my license and registration? = Bingo.

The vast majority of people will never change their default settings on the vast majority of things. The ability to change something does not contradict the view that a company is engaging in that behavior, and persisting it, for money. E.g. Mozilla/Firefox recently swapping to Google as their default browser would be the same thing, even if they know it's likely somewhat antithetical to many of their users - they will profit from those who are too lazy, or too ill informed, to change it.

Where it works phenomenally well is in areas where biases have not been directly instilled into people. This does not mean people are unbiased, however. Again the knowledge of trivia is a good example since while the crowds can generally do phenomenally well even at very esoteric questions where biases would lead them to individually come to very different conclusions, yet they will invariably fail to answer ostensibly trivial questions like 'What is the capital of Australia?' You'll get Sydney, it's not. You'd likely get a similar result for things like the capital of Pennsylvania.

In a way I view the wisdom of the masses as analogous to machine learning systems. They do an oddly good job of providing extremely precise answers to a wide array of questions even when trained with models that do not directly represent the 'questions'. Yet you can also break the systems, at times comically, with certain types of queries designed to do precisely that.

And as was the case with machine learning for quite some time, I think people remain reluctant to utilize it due to the black box nature of it. The implication of your comment is that the wisdom of the masses is little more than incorrect answers canceling out on average leaving nothing but a survey of experts. Yet I think there's no evidence for this (even if it may be a perfectly logical 'kneejerk' reaction) as it works even on things where nobody is an expert, and if this were the case then we ostensibly should be able to get comparable answers from coordination - yet coordination causes the entire system to collapse.

For another example of it consider things like the television show, 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' It's a quiz show where one of the choices is for the participant to ask the audience. And the audience tends to do absurdly well on even the most esoteric questions, though independently they are certainly far from trivia experts. But very few are randomly guessing - their own experiences and biases leads them to entirely different conclusions. Yet somehow it produces the correct result time and again.

It's a strange phenomena and one that has to be constantly guarded against in anything involving sampling of people. This is a text book example of a study that gets destroyed by it.

Not paywalled.

So when you ask 'x' people to independently judge something, let alone something that is multiple choice with a correct answer, you're going to get answers that are far more accurate than a single individual would give you. So looking at the average answer of 'x' people, comparing it to an AI system, and arguing that they're relatively close so individual people are relatively close to the AI is completely fallacious.

---

As a tangential aside, there's another quirk to the wisdom of the masses. When you let the people communicate and try to intelligently organize and use expertise to come to answer, this effect disappears and the final answer again tends to be very wrong. Kind of an interesting perspective on the current zeitgeist of society and work.

===EDIT===

The authors were obviously aware of the wisdom of the masses. Quoting the paper itself:

To determine whether there is “wisdom in the crowd” (7) (in our case, a small crowd of 20 per subset), participant responses were pooled within each subset using a majority rules criterion. This crowd-based approach yields a prediction accuracy of 67.0%. A one-sided t test reveals that COMPAS is not significantly better than the crowd (P = 0.85).

That's a quite silly p-value and on top of that I'm not sure how they claim their system actually controls for the wisdom of the masses.

And similarly the explosive growth of the products of these make-a-game kits renders the skill almost entirely worthless. What would have been a very viable publishable product 25 years ago, is now considered shovelware. I think the only way this would end is if we somehow reached a skill cap in development (you've officially made the best bridge that's at all possible!), but if such a thing may exist we're certainly nowhere even remotely close to getting there.

Simplifying the medium of something (in other words making it so somebody could genuinely learn a programming language, from nothing, in 5 minutes) does not necessarily make task implementation any easier. Consider writing. It's something that anybody of mean intelligence is more than capable of. And writing a novel requires nothing technically more than just writing, yet somehow there is this entirely different skill set there that is not really learned and one that many people for whatever reason seem incapable of developing.

Even if I could get 24/7 attention from Dostoyevsky, Stephen King, and George R.R. Martin for years on end - I'm not going to be a strong novelist. This could be genetic issues, but even if we want to discount that (which is not really a reasonable thing to do) - my potential would certainly be killed off my by my interest. I simply don't get pleasure from writing.

Programming is very much the same thing. Even if you make the 'human interface' to programming as trivial as possible, you've barely scratched the surface of actually creating desirable things. And unless you get pleasure from this creation and have this sort of 'feel' for doing as such, it's going to be a low involvement grind with a mediocre final product.

I think the thing we're fooled by is the confounding issue that programming languages are not easy. And so it's easy to think that if we just make the languages easy, that programming would thus be easy. But I see absolutely no reason to think that this is where the 'real' barrier to entry is. Making a tool easy, does not make the task that tool is used for easy.

Of course this goes all the way back to all the programming language that used to be used around the time of SQL's development, such as things like COBOL. They're just really tough to work with, even for those of us who learned it as one of our first languages. Anecdotally at least C structure languages now feel 'natural' to me, whereas the natural language programming languages always felt (and feel) like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind of makes you wonder. Do we dramatically overestimate our abilities, or does the efficiency of companies like Google truly diminish as much as this little thought experiment would seem to suggest?

Even then, I think you have keep things in perspective. 'Just stagnation' understates the situation here. In the late 80s many thought Japan was literally going to take over the world economically. Their GDP today is now lower than it was 2 decades ago. And ultimately there is still no clear path for them out of this decline.

If a geneticist were to state that some gene or another were linked to the unibrow [1] would you consider this scientifically dubious? After all, in that case all they did was look at people who have unibrows and look to find characteristics that were more common to this group than others. What if that genetic indicator did show up disproportionately among all people with unibrows and was relatively less common among those without a unibrow?

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10815

However, we're not in "deep doo-doo" just because you happen to think these organizations have value. When we would be in "deep doo-doo" is if we became monolithic in thought. It's great that you think Seymour Hersh has no credibility. It's great that I think your preferred sources have no credibility. It ensures we remain a critical audience which helps work as a safeguard against falsehoods. As your preferred sources are regularly outted, it is in large part thanks to people like me. And should Seymour indeed be shown to be generating fake news, it will be largely be thanks to people like you.

The only thing that's really changed in society is this fear of conflict. Disagreement, or the belief that 'others' are being misled by fake information, is hardly a novel thing. It's the self righteousness and fear of disagreement, arguably driven by social media echo chambers, that is the novel thing -- and that is the thing that, if anything, might leave us in "deep doo-doo."

At the same time, hailing them as beacons of integrity and truth is unreasonable. They increasingly routinely print news that later turns out to be entirely fake with corrections and updates often tucked away from site of their readers - though we also certainly contribute to that in that a million people may share a sensationalized story that turns out to be fake, but only a handful will share the correction stating it was all false. In a world where many receive their news through social media and implicitly virally, one thing I would certainly agree with you is that America is having an increasingly challenged "relationship with facts."

Another issue is that the US is obviously not monolithic. Speaking poorly of the US in one way or another will be either widely hailed or widely condemned depending on the person speaking and whom they're speaking of and to. This sort of split in society has become particularly true in the media today. All organizations you listed, for instance, are intermingled to the point of incestuousness and you will rarely find disagreement between them, in no small part due to this. See, for instance, things like JournoList [1] turned CabaList in which participating journalists at times conspired to kill stories that reflected poorly on their own personal biases, and at other times they even discussed ways they could conspire to try to kill off media outlets that did not conform to their biases. Perhaps it's fit to conclude there that the creator of JournoList was none other than Ezra Klein, the founder and now editor in chief of Vox.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList

By contrast, imagine all oil producing nations suddenly stopped exporting any oil tomorrow. Once domestic reserves of countries ran out the entire world would grind to an incredibly rapid halt. Electricity, transportation, shipping, and everything would stutter and then come to a near complete stop. And society itself would likely break down in very short order. It's not about the dollar value of oil, but about its relevance to society. You'd think those two would be strongly correlated, but they're not.

This is why oil and the petro-dollar have so much inherent value. Without oil society collapses, and USD is the gateway to oil. That 'is' may be changing to 'was.'

Currency inflates due to inflated supply -> foreign countries take more of the currency out of supply -> inflation decreases. And it doesn't end there. The additional revenues from the oil producing nations are then invested into US securities and taken completely out of circulation. The vast majority of money is not brought into circulation through printing, but leaving the specifics of creation aside, this -in part- helps buffer any harm caused by the excessive 'printing' of money.

Haven't you ever wondered how it is that the US is going deeper and deeper into debt, how we increased the US Monetary Base 400% since 2008 [1] with no economic consequences, how we 'printed' (not really) trillions of dollars in quantitative easing, or more generally how now we're only paying off old debts by taking on even greater levels of new debt with no reversal anywhere in sight? If a private organization was doing that, it'd be called a Ponzi Scheme. Yet we engage in all of this with minimal to no economic consequences.

But none of this matters because the USD represents access to oil. Oil is the most in demand resource in the world. And when the price of oil is pegged to the dollar, it makes USD the most in demand currency in the world. But China recently has been making huge strides in getting nations to swap to the yuan for oil. Rather than give any links go search for 'china oil yuan' and you'll get countless articles all within the past couple of months about what China has been doing. In particular China is attempting to even get Saudi Arabia to start pegging their oil to the Yuan, which would be an enormous blow to the US. If they succeed here, it may mean that the USD will need to stand on its own weight. And at that point, we may have to answer for our own economic decisions.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BASE

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-a...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-mi...

Stratfor, something like a private intelligence organization - well beyond a think tank, also has written a vast amount on Syria to the point that I think just googling for 'strator syria' would be more productive than me listing a slew of articles. In general I find news that's from first party analysts tends to be vastly more informative than the filtered drivel that you end up getting from most US news sites.

As an aside, I am not suggesting that that the above directly support OP's hypothesis. What it does support is the fact that what's stated in most US mainstream outlets is a childlike misrepresentation of the war over there framing it as the 'good guys' (which is naturally us) are trying to take out a pure evil 'bad guy.' I'm not sure if that's propaganda or just something that gets clicks. In either case, it's false. The interactions are complex, motivations rarely benevolent, and the whole thing an entire mess in general.

Ultimately the reason I stopped reading about Syria is because I think it's futile to try to 'truly' understand what's happening. We'll only be able to begin to actually dig into the truth 50 or so years from now when the documentation around the war is declassified.