warsawmouse on Pillowfort|Fandom.ink|Dreamwidth. Polish, 45, ADHD, grayace, demigender. (any pronouns) Fan, parent, compulsive reader & procrastinator extraordinaire. Serial stress reblogging, no original content. Doesn't tag for shit. Multifandom, multiship, defaults to OT3.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
Comic #355 : Chronic pain is isolating - Website links here ~
Here's a comic for the spoonies, the suffering and the lonesome. Let's take ibuprofen together 🐻💊 That's right it's a double length comic! I had a lot to say that wouldn't fit in 4 panels 🥲
“A Cloisonné Vase Mark of the Hayashi Kodenji Workshop, Meiji Period (late 19th century) Worked in various thicknesses of silver wire and coloured cloisonné enamels on a dark blue ground with a maple tree surrounded by a profusion of flowers including chrysanthemums, irises, wild pinks and grasses, the foot with floral lappets, the neck with a band of geometric pattern, silver rims.”
“If you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary. I ain’t giving up. I swear.”
[ if you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary.
I ain’t giving up. I swear. end caption ]
Okay, I know no one cares, but have a little bit of local lore:
That’s the 72, the most-ridden bus route in the entire state. It’s also the most-delayed bus route in the entire state, because half of its run is up and down 82nd Avenue, which is historically a high-traffic and high-crash “orphan highway”.
See, in its early days, 82nd Avenue was a state-owned highway outside of town – OR 213 – designed to carry high speed traffic across the state. Eventually the city of Portland expanded across it and it got renamed to 82nd Avenue, but the state continued to own it and manage it as a highway. The surrounding city neighborhood was heavily Asian and Asian-American, known as the Jade District, full of housing and restaurants and schools and community centers, but even though this vibrant community existed all along 82nd Avenue, the state continued to manage it as a highway, not as a neighborhood street. Unsurprisingly, it became the deadliest street in Portland, so many pedestrians were killed while trying to cross it. If you look at heatmaps of crashes in the city of Portland, there 82nd Avenue is, bright as day, lit up brighter than almost anything else on the map.
For twenty years, activists in the Jade District tried to get 82nd Avenue transferred from state to city authority, so that it could be managed as a street that ran through a neighborhood where people live, rather than a state highway. It was a major effort, which finally required getting an Asian-American caucus elected both to city government and the state legislature, but they finally did it! 82nd Avenue is finally owned by the city! And the first thing the city did–in consultation with the Jade District activists!–was put in a slew more lighted and signaled crosswalks. Already they’ve started building other things: medians, to slow traffic down and give pedestrians a safe place of refuge when they’re crossing the street. Protected bike lanes. And there’s plans for giving the 72 bus – the most-ridden bus and also the most-delayed bus in the state! – its own dedicated transit lanes, so it can run on time, without being delayed by traffic.
This is a major win, and it will absolutely save lives. All because two generations of neighborhood activists worked for it, and worked for it, and worked for it, and worked for it.
Or as someone wrote on this bus stop for the 72:
“If you promise to stay alive just a little bit longer I promise that we are going to make this world a place worth living in by any means necessary. I ain’t giving up. I swear.”
what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Genuinely though it is so frustrating that nonbinary rights and exorsexism are not treated seriously at all, even from within the queer community. It sucks that there's not even an option for an X gender marker in so many countries, including in more progressive queer-friendly ones. It sucks that if enben want to get gender affirming care that we're advised to lie about our gender (or lack thereof) in favour of a more binary trans identity lest we jump through a million extra hoops on top of the million already in place for binary trans people to prove we're serious in order to get the care we want/need. It sucks that in most cases we're still forced into some kind of binary and I wish that the issues we deal with were acknowledged more.
happy one year anniversary to this post getting marked as "potentially mature content" and then never leaving content review when i appealed. tumblr's own default loading graphic is considered by their own tos "potentially sexual" it seems.
@support you got any explanations for how this post got flagged? or why it never got reviewed? or what mature content might potentially be happening? believe me i am ALL ears
Edited to add: Since a lot of people are reblogging this original post, I'm adding the updated version I did that incorporates the intersex circle...
I know intersex people are still getting excluded in a lot of LGBTQIA+ spaces (let alone wider society) and I think it's crucial to show this group is included in the statement that we all deserve equal rights.
Bixia,
I your humble servant bring word from General Meng Tian at the Wall. There is a noble woman from the state of Qi approaching Your Most August Highness's Great Wall #yourmostaugusthighnessgreatwall, calling herself Lady Meng Jiang. She seeks her husband, named Wan Xiliang, whom you had personally summoned to, ahem, Work on the Wall. When we tell her that we cannot find him, she bursts into tears and these tears seem to be breaking the bricks when they hit the ground. We fear if she cries on the wall, she will break the wall. What should we do, O August Sovereign?
proceed as normal! some weepy broad lamenting her dead husband is no basis to halt construction!
Uuuuh, Bixia, you're not gonna believe this but, um, Lady Meng Jiang's tears seem to have, um, caused the Wall to collapse in one area. And she found her husband's skeleton in the rubble, along with a lot of other skeletons. What should we do now?
writing a canon divergent fix-it fic while also shaking my head to show that i actually really like the canon's tragic narrative and am not trying to say i think it would be better if canon was like this
tumblin' mouse @warsawmouse - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
