https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3z4ALYgAAAAJ
https://esennesh.github.io/
http://il.linkedin.com/pub/eli-sennesh/b/126/412/en
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/esennesh; my proof: https://keybase.io/esennesh/sigs/NuqWm_UNtFpwi4_sqptISYgMr6f7bZx7te1rwC8U8qQ ]
- eli_gottliebWhy do you find that attribution surprising?
- I'm an American citizen born on American soil.
- Right, now I'm not South African so I can't speak to that angle of what he's writing. I can speak to the angle of Jews in post-WW2 Europe. Mamdani's thesis here has the problem of rather dramatically, in fact insultingly, ignoring the most basic fact: almost nobody in the displaced-persons camps for Jews after the war wanted to go back into post-war European societies, and most of those who tried were murdered or faced state repression (eg: from the Soviet Union) for their trouble. After surviving the Holocaust and/or the war, everyone was much more interested in getting the hell away from people they perceived as their murderers than in a theoretical project of "denationalization" that wouldn't be invented for several decades more anyway.
> After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.
And this is, de facto, Nazi apologia on Mamdani's part, because he willfully refuses to see significant differences between alternative regimes within the paradigm of the nation-state, as against the post-national ideal he wants to realize in post-colonial Uganda (but which, of course, post-colonial Uganda has never actually implemented).
>It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.
I would also say Mamdani is an entire paradigm behind the times here. Whether you define it via educational credentials, income, or relation to the means of production, politics has been repolarizing around class, not identitarian belonging. "Who benefits from the state" is a deepity concealing Mamdani's social-democratic imaginary in which nation-states rule nations, rather than network-states administrating international markets in labor, capital, and goods.
- I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.
- One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.
- I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...
- My impulse is to agree, and I'm almost wondering whether Disney figured that they'd have more restraining influence by getting in legitimately than by having generative AI companies wink and look away from rampant trademark violations because Disney won't pay them to care.
- Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!
- It's called congestion pricing because you can measure the opportunity cost.
- So a business account is one belonging to a business, right?
- I would have thought that corporations are elements of the capitalist class, not a facade.
- The state? Palantir isn't the state.
- We should perhaps say profit when we are talking about revenue - cost and revenue when we only mean the first term in the subtraction.
- > The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
- As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.
- So you're saying that working-class living standards are a zero-sum competition across capitalist countries, even negative-sum as competing national economies grow their total output and hourly productivity?
That sounds like a really shitty system.
- Harvard isn't frozen anymore?
- That sounds like a category mistake to me. A proof assistant or logic-programming system performs deduction, and just strapping one of those to an LLM hasn't gotten us to "AGI".
- > probabilistic graphical models- of which transformers is an example
Having done my PhD in probabilistic programming... what?
- For most people, most of the time, jobs are a lot closer to "just business" than "marital intimacy".