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Success! pdotb has read 59 of 52 books.
An insider’s account of the videogame industry telling how gaming can become a force for good
Everything To Play For …
I will just add that it probably wasn't a good idea to read this right after Hayek's Bastards (unfortunately both have a ton of holds on them, so I feel under pressure to get them back to the library). There's only so much endurance I have for reading about so many awful people...
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies …
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing …
I'm not really sure I want to write a review, per se. There's bits I really like, especially the explanation of how LLMs work, and the analogy with T9 I found particularly helpful. I also really liked the description of the groups "AI Doomers" and "AI Boosters", and why it's all bullshit. I think the problem I have is that I'm not really the ideal target audience for the book -- I read "Weapons of Math Destruction" some years ago, and that overlaps pretty heavily chapter 4 of this book, and I even read Weizenbaum's book (a lot of years ago), so I'm familiar with the debates about what (artificial) intelligence is. I think there really is lots of good stuff here, but it's best as a first introduction to the topics of the current AI hype, and I'm not really well suited to judging that.
For anyone interested in knowing more about the book, I was inspired to request it from the library by an episode of the Politics Theory Other podcast, e.g., soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/hayeks
@tofuwabohu Yes! Degussa is definitely there, though it's a pretty lengthy section with a whole cast of horrors, most of whom I (fortunately) wasn't familiar with.
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies …
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the …
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they …
Interesting book that draws the connections between portions of the neoliberal right and the alt-right/far-right, arguing for connections between many members of the MPS and anti-immigration, race science, and gold-hoarding survivalism. I was going to quote more but the first two were just so grim I felt like I needed a shower. The chapter on gold took an interesting turn into the origins of the AfD that I wasn't aware of.
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they …
As one person involved wrote, "the mid-1970s witnessed a tremendous increase in 'hard money' books, newsletters, seminars, coin companies, survival retreats, food storage, and related businesses. The mixture of topices is captured in an issue of Libertarian Review from 1976. It included selections from German neoliberal economist Wilhelm Röpke alongside advertisements for a cassette program on "basic relaxation and ego-strengthening" by Ayn Rand's designated heir Nathaniel Branden and fine print offerings of "survival information" from Inflation Survival Letter.
— Hayek's Bastards by Quinn Slobodian (Page 133)
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they …
Content warning racism, ukpol
The topic of immigration arose intermittently at Mont Pelerin Society meetings. The leading opponent of nonwhite immigration, British Conservative MP Enoch Powell was a member and spoke at several of its meetings. In Hong Kong in 1978, the same year Hayek wrote to the editor, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter (and later editor of the National Review) John O'Sullivan gave a talk called "Migration to Utopia", reflecting on the recent episodes of settlement in Britain.
— Hayek's Bastards by Quinn Slobodian (Page 77)
Powell is best know today for being very racist, but it's worth remembering that he was an early neoliberal and, in many ways, Thatcher's intellectual predecessor.
Born to a petty thief in London’s notorious Newgate prison and determined to make her way in a rapacious and …
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the …
Content warning Gaza, genocide, canpol
Starts with a quantitative analysis of Canadian media, illustrating both the quantity of reporting on Palestinian and Israeli deaths, as well as the emotiveness of the words chosen. Not a huge surprise that the National Post is the worst, followed by the Globe and Mail, but even the supposedly 'progressive' Toronto Star fares poorly. Much of the rest of the book is accounts of individual journalists' experiences inside newsrooms, facing pushback and stalling when trying to propose stories or changes of emphasis. There's a powerful account of the effects of HRC, including quotes from the major journalists' unions, and also illustrative stories of how the truth can be distorted to create conspiracies. The first chapter mentions Herman's and Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent', and it's hard to feel that's not what's going on in Canada.
