ChatGPT, Addiction Treatment in Alberta, Russian Military Failures, The NordStream Explosion - Dinner Table Digest № 41
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Sections: ChatGPT and Dataism / The Alberta (Addiction) Model / Russian Military Strategy Failure / Who Blew Up the NordStream Pipeline?
ChatGPT Strikes at the Heart of the Scientific World View - Blayne Haggart - Centre for International Governance Innovation
All around us, Chicken Little calls us, telling us that ChatGPT is the sky falling all around us. This essay peels back the curtain on the hysteria, suggesting that AI will only become our Overlord if we bow to the false god of Dataism. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit for effect, but the piece is damn good:
ChatGPT isn’t automating the writing or research process. It’s creating a completely new form of knowledge, one in which correlations confer legitimacy, and in which the evaluation of the truthfulness of these correlations occurs behind the scenes, embedded in programming decisions and hidden labour. It is an approach that places scientific understanding in a secondary, and at best, an evaluative, role. The issues raised by ChatGPT are about more than a single technology. Meta’s and Tesla’s share values may be cratering, but the race to master machine learning and deploy related technologies in government and industry highlights how ingrained dataism has become. As José van Dijck remarks in her 2014 article, businesses, governments and scholars are all deeply invested in the idea that digital data sources provide us with an objective and neutral, even “revolutionary,” means by which to better understand society, make profits and conduct the business of the state.
The Way Out: Addiction in Alberta - Judy Aldous - CBC News
As my readers already know, I’m sitting in on a grad-level class at the University of Waterloo this semester called ‘The Ethics of Drug Policy,’ taught by Mathieu Doucet. The class readings and discussion mixes important normative and meta-ethical conceptions about drug use with the practical realities of the experiences of actual people who use drugs. One of the concepts that has come up repeatedly is the role that paternalism plays in relation to personal autonomy. At its simplest, the question is thus: does the state have the right to tell us what we should/can put into our bodies because of known harms, or does the individual retain the right to choose what goes into their body, with the state’s role being to help manage and mitigate harms?
These are complicated questions that are playing out in real-time in Canada. At the same time as British Columbia is decriminalizing small amounts of hard drugs including opiates, methamphetamines, and others, placing an emphasis on managing and reducing the harms of drug use, Alberta is choosing to invest millions in residential treatment centres that aim at ending individual drug use altogether. The architect of the Alberta strategy, Marshall Smith, is a British Columbia transplant, and a former drug user himself.
He says when he discovered the B.C. government was not interested in his vision, he looked east and accepted the offer of then-premier Jason Kenney to move to Alberta in 2019 and work in the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction.
When Danielle Smith took over the leadership of the UCP, he moved to the premier’s office as her chief of staff. …
“What is going on in British Columbia and what has been going on in Alberta has not been working,” he said.
“We have had 20 years of this ideology, which has now spread to places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, all up and down the Western Seaboard with devastation…. We have to start doing things differently.”
Smith says there has been an outsized focus on what he calls “boutique interventions around opioids,” including all the hallmarks of harm reduction: supervised injection sites, access to safer supply and not enough focus on recovery.
His “recovery communities” change that, he says. …
Smith tries to avoid any discussion of whether or not this is abstinence-based programming, knowing how charged a topic that is.
At the Red Deer treatment centre, people addicted to opioids could be transitioned onto other drugs to help manage withdrawal, but the goal is to live without the use of drugs.
“This is about getting off of drugs and moving on with your life. So all of the programming that happens here is aimed to support the client in the pursuit of a new life for themselves and that is usually drug-free life.”
NSFW - Why Russian fighters in Ukraine are being Decimated - COMBAT VIDEO
One of the morbid novelties of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the steady drip drip of war footage that is theoretically free from propaganda spin. We don't need war movies to sanitize and valorize the violence anymore, we can watch clips taken mere hours ago and see the violence in all its brutality for ourselves. What we find, if we're willing to look long enough and hard enough is that war is, by definition, ugly and grotesque. In this clip, we see Russian soldiers fold their positions into each other in order to care for the wounded, which has the effect of giving the Ukrainians a larger target to win aim at. Josh Brooks, in the description, explains,
… You're looking at a deeper problem with the entire Russian military in this one ten minute video clip.
There's one consistent thing the Russians have had working against them since the beginning of this conflict, and that's a distinct lack of small unit leadership on the ground. At the end of the day, when you get punched in the face, the only way out of it is through instinctively fighting back with aggression and initiative. Small unit leaders, or non-commissioned officers, are what you need on the ground fighting individual squads, and when you don't have that you end up with troops reacting to contact just like this.
Let me break it down shotgun style. There are three main tasks happening for a squad in a gunfight. The individual rifleman is down his sights fighting the fight through aggressive and directed individual actions. Right above the individual rifleman, you have the team leaders coordinating and directing the aggression of the individuals in his fireteam through the direct example of his own aggressive actions. His head comes out of the scope long enough to receive orders and ensure his fireteam is executing them. In the absence of orders, that team leader finds a job for his team and gets to work by setting the example through his own decisive actions. Above the team leader is the squad leader.
The squad leader is wielding the most deadly weapon on any battlefield anywhere, and that's the aggression of his team leaders. The squad leader isn't controlling one rifle, he's controlling all of them. He understands the commander's intent, and is left to find a path to success through his own independent initiative based on the situation he is presented with. It's not uncommon for the squad leader to have his head pulled completely away from his rifle while he simply yells into a radio and points at the point of friction that needs to be handled. A squad leader is usually the guy you see handing out all of his magazines at the consolidation phase of combat, because he's often not fired a single round through his own rifle.
The Russians have no capability of fighting this way, because they have little to no non-commissioned officers who are entrusted to lead the fight. In the absence of orders from their officers, or in the presence of a deviation from the plan, the Russian Soldier is tasked with radioing in for guidance from commanders who are not present to see the fight unfolding in real-time. The individual actions of the riflemen are present, but the combat leadership to direct those individual actions doesn't exist. No one is out of their optic. No one is looking for the point of friction. No one is taking the initiative to direct the violence. Everyone is standing around waiting to be told what to do. As a result, everyone freezes in place and waits for someone to take charge of the situation.
Unfortunately, Jesus doesn't take the wheel for you in combat. The non-commissioned officers are supposed to do that. You can't win a professional boxing match without calling your own hits, and you certainly can't win it by having your coach call the shots for your while he's sitting in the locker room.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline - Seymour Hersh
The heterodox journalist that broke the My Lai Massacre story from Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib Torture allegations lays out his theory about how the Nord Stream Pipelines in the Baltic Sea were blown up by a covert American deep-sea diving unit:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
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