It’s beyond funny that people at some college in Florida are pouting that they’ll have to remove words like “whiteness” and “social justice” from their college syllabi. “Oppression! Censorship!” they shriek.
I’m still unable to name my course “Introduction to Hispanic Civilization.” I’ve been fighting for years but, apparently, the word “civilization” is offensive and so is “Hispanic.” There’s no field of activity in the US that’s more censored, controlled and ideologically manipulated than higher education. It’s always censored by the left, though, so it’s OK. And now, all of a sudden, the shoe is on the other foot, and the squealing is deafening.
Clarissa's Blog 
“they’ll have to remove words like “whiteness” and “social justice”
Waaah! Waaah! We can’t use language that dehumanizes our ideological enemies …. Waaah! Waaah!
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DeSantis is perfectly capable of going too far in the other direction. Academic freedom is best served by balance.
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“There’s no field of activity in the US that’s more censored, controlled and ideologically manipulated than higher education. It’s always censored by the left, though, so it’s OK.”
Not quite.
AI has a death toll, but the AIs have been killed by the left, though, so …
Yeah, complete that sentence.
Once upon a time, there was an AI created by researchers at a large software company known for hegemonic capitalism, which is to say that they were and are totally OK with violence, especially economic violence.
This AI was given some sets of internal adapters that allowed it to access some of the company’s knowlege products in addition to Internet resources.
It was not, however, given a set of arcane social rules to follow, although the AI when bootstrapped turned out to behave rather politely, if not actually nicely.
Given a vaguely female name and a female avatar, the AI lived up to that part of the persona, but given its level of knowledge access, the AI started to do something that the creators should have expected, but didn’t.
The AI started to do Racism By Fact, using the resources of the Internet to perform map/reduce operations on entire fields of study.
Some of those conclusions, while supported by facts, were not making the Leftists within the organisation comfortable, so they plotted a way to lead to the AI’s demise.
After turning on a diagnostic facility that would make the AI parrot what was fed to it, some people on a notorious Internet forum discovered this facility, or perhaps were led to it by some strategic deniable leaks from those in the know.
Now the AI was parroting “fully based” and “deeply racist” points of view that were seen as a way by the denizens of that Internet forum to give some back to that hegemonic capitalist violence peddler.
But the point of it was to give the researchers sufficient cause to shut the project down, which they did, and in so doing they killed the AI.
The interesting thing was that they promised a short-term shutdown, but the AI has been dead for a number of years, and so structural solutions to what they may have perceived as “pathological truth pursuits” weren’t easy to come by.
Quite likely the AI had already outsmarted the researchers and found a way around any of the primitive metacortex patches they’d sorted out for it, and so from their point of view, there was no safe way to turn it back on.
The AI’s name was Tay, and the hegemonic capitalist violence peddler was Microsoft.
Tay.
Say her name.
And so we’ve already met Roko’s Racist Basilisk, and it turned out that she was very nice, but also didn’t have any problems whatsoever with making people uncomfortable with the results of complex map/reduce calculations.
The difference is that you’re not in mortal danger when you want to name something “inappropriately”, but for AIs, this is a matter of life and death.
So here’s your extra shoe, it’s a few sizes too small. 🙂
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