Looks like a timely read:<br><br>Predatory Data<br><p>Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future<br></p><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/predatory-data-eugenics-in-big-tech-and-our-fight-for-an-independent-future-anita-say-chan/21312207" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="bookshop.org/p/books/predatory-data-eugenics-in-big-tech-and-our-fight-for-an-independent-future-anita-say-chan/21312207"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">bookshop.org/p/books/predatory</span><span class="invisible">-data-eugenics-in-big-tech-and-our-fight-for-an-independent-future-anita-say-chan/21312207</span></a><br><br>There's a nearly straight line from 20th century eugenics to 21st century big data and data science. Google, the bastion of big data, was founded by two Stanford graduate students; Stanford was founded by a eugenicist and instituted eugenics principles. Francis Galton--inventor of the regression analysis that forms the backbone of data science--was "hot or notting" London with a counter hidden in his pocket long before Harvard-age Zuckerberg recuperated the same with the favorite quantification technology of our day, computers.<br><br>"The measured life" is a eugenics concept. All these doohickeys that collect data with the promise of making your body a bit more "fit"? Eugenicist in origin. Eugenics is about "optimizing" the physical "fitness" of people. Apps that help you learn, make you more mentally "fit"? Also have origins in eugenics. Eugenics is also about "optimizing" the mental "fitness" of people. Hence the obsession with IQ.<br><br>This isn't to say you shouldn't take care of your body and mind in whichever ways you want. I do think it's important, though, to periodically reflect on, and ask yourself hard questions about, what's driving those efforts and what the goals really are. Part of understanding why eugenics thinking is resurging so hard and fast in the US is understanding its roots, where that type of thinking comes from. It's also important to reflect on where the apps and devices you use to achieve these goals come from. How many come directly or indirectly from Stanford, which was built by eugenicists to achieve eugenic goals, and its offshoots?<br><br>Trump and Musk are literally repeating themes from Francis Galton's eugenics out in the open now. They're confident they can get away with it without pushback because the ground was laid long ago. But eugenics didn't suddenly become bad again because coarse people started saying the quiet part out loud. It's always been bad thinking, bad science, and bad morality.<br><br><a href="/tags/datascience/" rel="tag">#DataScience</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/bigdata/" rel="tag">#BigData</a> <a href="/tags/fitness/" rel="tag">#fitness</a> <a href="/tags/us/" rel="tag">#US</a> <a href="/tags/iq/" rel="tag">#IQ</a> <a href="/tags/trump/" rel="tag">#Trump</a> <a href="/tags/musk/" rel="tag">#Musk</a><br>
eugenics
<p>The present perspective outlines how epistemically baseless and ethically pernicious paradigms are recycled back into the scientific literature via machine learning (ML) and explores connections between these two dimensions of failure. We hold up the renewed emergence of physiognomic methods, facilitated by ML, as a case study in the harmful repercussions of ML-laundered junk science. A summary and analysis of several such studies is delivered, with attention to the means by which unsound research lends itself to social harms. We explore some of the many factors contributing to poor practice in applied ML. In conclusion, we offer resources for research best practices to developers and practitioners.<br></p>From The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions here: <a href="https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00160-0" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00160-0"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext</span><span class="invisible">/S2666-3899(24)00160-0</span></a>. It's open access.<br><br>In other words ML--which includes generative AI--is smuggling long-disgraced pseudoscientific ideas back into "respectable" science, and rejuvenating the harms such ideas cause.<br><br><a href="/tags/ai/" rel="tag">#AI</a> <a href="/tags/genai/" rel="tag">#GenAI</a> <a href="/tags/generativeai/" rel="tag">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="/tags/llms/" rel="tag">#LLMs</a> <a href="/tags/machinelearning/" rel="tag">#MachineLearning</a> <a href="/tags/ml/" rel="tag">#ML</a> <a href="/tags/aiethics/" rel="tag">#AIEthics</a> <a href="/tags/science/" rel="tag">#science</a> <a href="/tags/pseudoscience/" rel="tag">#pseudoscience</a> <a href="/tags/junkscience/" rel="tag">#JunkScience</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/physiognomy/" rel="tag">#physiognomy</a><br>
Edited 127d ago
Mel Andrews on the connections between a naive belief in scientific objectivity (facts and data are "real" and "correct" and "neutral") and eugenics:<br><p>Francis Galton, pioneering figure of the eugenics movement, believed that good research practice should consist in “gathering as many facts as possible without any theory or general principle that might prejudice a neutral and objective view of these facts” (Jackson et al., 2005). Karl Pearson, statistician and fellow purveyor of eugenicist methods, approached research with a similar ethos: “theorizing about the material basis of heredity or the precise physiological or causal significance of observational results, Pearson argues, will do nothing but damage the progress of the science” (Pence, 2011). In collaborative work with Pearson, Weldon emphasised the superiority of data-driven methods which were capable of delivering truths about nature “without introducing any theory” (Weldon, 1895).<br></p>From The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal.<br><br>I've lost the reference, but I suspect it was Meredith Whittaker who's written and spoken about the big data turn at Google, where it was understood that having and collecting massive datasets allowed them to eschew model-building.<br><br>The core idea being critiqued here is that there's a kind of scientific view from nowhere: a theory-free, value-free, model-free, bias-free way of observing the world that will lead to Truth; and that it's the task of the scientist to approximate this view from nowhere as well as possible.<br><br><a href="/tags/ai/" rel="tag">#AI</a> <a href="/tags/genai/" rel="tag">#GenAI</a> <a href="/tags/generativeai/" rel="tag">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="/tags/llms/" rel="tag">#LLMs</a> <a href="/tags/science/" rel="tag">#science</a> <a href="/tags/datascience/" rel="tag">#DataScience</a> <a href="/tags/scientificobjectivity/" rel="tag">#ScientificObjectivity</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/viewfromnowhere/" rel="tag">#ViewFromNowhere</a><br>
A few inchoate thoughts on Gas Town, since I think this example has more to it than “it’s just a meth binge/crypto scam/one-shot AI poisoning”. Part of the reason I think this is that some of the rhetoric it deploys dovetails perfectly with broader trends and phenomena, and I think it's worth pulling those out.<br><br>1. Economists from the physiocrats (18th century) onward promised society freedom from material deprivation and hard physical labor in exchange for submitting to an economic arrangement of society<br>2. In a country like the US, material deprivation and hard physical labor have been significantly reduced since then:<br><p>Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter<br>The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)<br>In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled</p>3. Having to think hard is one of the service economy’s analogs for hard physical labor. If the promise of economics is to be continually pursued--meaning it maintains the promise that if we collectively submit to it, in exchange we will enjoy a freedom--a natural target of the promise is providing freedom from the need to think hard<br><p>It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you<br>It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets<br>Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good<br>This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)<br>Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard</p>4. Expending significant resources is viewed as a good in itself from a (naive) evolutionary perspective<br><p>Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint<br>Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically<br>See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s <a href="https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html" rel="nofollow">Commission on the National Defense Strategy</a>: “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)<br>The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produce organized outputs “at scale”, while avoiding having human beings think too hard to produce those outputs, an indication that the power was burned to produce useful organization<br>LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use<br>It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This rhetoric dovetails perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept</p><a href="/tags/computerscience/" rel="tag">#ComputerScience</a> <a href="/tags/ai/" rel="tag">#AI</a> <a href="/tags/genai/" rel="tag">#GenAI</a> <a href="/tags/generativeai/" rel="tag">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="/tags/llm/" rel="tag">#LLM</a> <a href="/tags/gastown/" rel="tag">#GasTown</a> <a href="/tags/economics/" rel="tag">#economics</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/maximumpowerprinciple/" rel="tag">#MaximumPowerPrinciple</a> <a href="/tags/evolution/" rel="tag">#evolution</a> <a href="/tags/evolutionarytheory/" rel="tag">#EvolutionaryTheory</a> <a href="/tags/darwinism/" rel="tag">#Darwinism</a> <a href="/tags/uspol/" rel="tag">#USPol</a> <a href="/tags/us/" rel="tag">#US</a><br>
Edited 68d ago
<p><a href="/tags/giftarticle/" rel="tag">#GiftArticle</a></p><p>America Is on the Cusp of a Two-Tier <a href="/tags/vaccine/" rel="tag">#Vaccine</a> System</p><p><a href="/tags/poor/" rel="tag">#Poor</a> kids will be hardest hit by <a href="/tags/rfkjr/" rel="tag">#RFKJr</a>'s <a href="/tags/antivax/" rel="tag">#AntiVax</a> crusade.</p><p><a href="/tags/publichealth/" rel="tag">#PublicHealth</a> <a href="/tags/health/" rel="tag">#Health</a> <a href="/tags/vaccines/" rel="tag">#vaccines</a> <a href="/tags/science/" rel="tag">#science</a> <a href="/tags/medicine/" rel="tag">#medicine</a> <a href="/tags/policy/" rel="tag">#policy</a> <a href="/tags/law/" rel="tag">#law</a> <a href="/tags/trump/" rel="tag">#Trump</a> <a href="/tags/conspiracytheories/" rel="tag">#ConspiracyTheories</a> <a href="/tags/disinformation/" rel="tag">#disinformation</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/socialcleansing/" rel="tag">#SocialCleansing</a> <a href="/tags/healthyifyourewealthy/" rel="tag">#HealthyIfYoureWealthy</a> <a href="/tags/aporophobia/" rel="tag">#Aporophobia</a> <a href="/tags/economicdiscrimination/" rel="tag">#EconomicDiscrimination</a> <a href="/tags/plutocracy/" rel="tag">#plutocracy</a> <a href="/tags/uspol/" rel="tag">#USpol</a> <br><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/09/acip-vaccine-for-kids-rfk-jr/684284/?gift=guxsrl_dAdXUP9zqbQPWxe20JdbfQeb-MVvQASQIPyc" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/09/acip-vaccine-for-kids-rfk-jr/684284/?gift=guxsrl_dAdXUP9zqbQPWxe20JdbfQeb-MVvQASQIPyc"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">www.theatlantic.com/health/202</span><span class="invisible">5/09/acip-vaccine-for-kids-rfk-jr/684284/?gift=guxsrl_dAdXUP9zqbQPWxe20JdbfQeb-MVvQASQIPyc</span></a></p>
Compare and contrast<br><br>This:<br><p>In the year of the city 2274, the remnants of human civilization live in a sealed city beneath a cluster of geodesic domes, a utopia run by computer. The citizens live a hedonistic lifestyle, but when they turn 30 must enter the "Carrousel", a public ritual that destroys their bodies, under the pretense they would be "Renewed" or reborn.<br></p>(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run_(film)" rel="nofollow">Logans Run</a>)<br><br>and this:<br><p>In the year of the city 2274, the colony of human beings on Mars live in a sealed city beneath a cluster of geodesic domes, a utopia run by generative AI. The citizens live a hedonistic lifestyle, but when they turn 30 must enter the "Cloud", a public ritual that destroys their bodies, under the pretense their consciousness would be uploaded to a computer and live forever.<br></p><a href="/tags/ai/" rel="tag">#AI</a> <a href="/tags/genai/" rel="tag">#GenAI</a> <a href="/tags/generativeai/" rel="tag">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="/tags/llm/" rel="tag">#LLM</a> <a href="/tags/mars/" rel="tag">#Mars</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/logansrun/" rel="tag">#LogansRun</a> <a href="/tags/sciencefiction/" rel="tag">#ScienceFiction</a> <a href="/tags/dystopia/" rel="tag">#dystopia</a><br>
<p>"Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation"</p><p>~Epstein-funded tech fascist Joscha Bach</p><p>Big Tech has long discussed which of us are worth saving. Their answer is "the richer the worthier."</p><p>Via Musk, Thiel, et al, this fascist eugenics is now operating as US Trump govt policy</p><p><a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2025/12/05/how-epstein-channelled-race-science-and-climate-culling-into-silicon-valleys-ai-elite/" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="bylinetimes.com/2025/12/05/how-epstein-channelled-race-science-and-climate-culling-into-silicon-valleys-ai-elite/"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">bylinetimes.com/2025/12/05/how</span><span class="invisible">-epstein-channelled-race-science-and-climate-culling-into-silicon-valleys-ai-elite/</span></a></p><p>Millions are dying every year from govt inaction on climate:</p><p><a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2025-climate-inaction-is-claiming-millions-of-lives-every-year--warns-new-lancet-countdown-report" rel="nofollow" class="ellipsis" title="www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2025-climate-inaction-is-claiming-millions-of-lives-every-year--warns-new-lancet-countdown-report"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">www.who.int/news/item/29-10-20</span><span class="invisible">25-climate-inaction-is-claiming-millions-of-lives-every-year--warns-new-lancet-countdown-report</span></a></p><p><a href="/tags/uspol/" rel="tag">#USPol</a> <a href="/tags/eupol/" rel="tag">#EUPol</a> <a href="/tags/epsteinfiles/" rel="tag">#EpsteinFiles</a> <a href="/tags/eugenics/" rel="tag">#Eugenics</a> <a href="/tags/climatepurge/" rel="tag">#ClimatePurge</a> <a href="/tags/news/" rel="tag">#news</a> <a href="/tags/racism/" rel="tag">#racism</a> <a href="/tags/bigtech/" rel="tag">#BigTech</a> .</p>
Edited 39d ago