Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Admiral Yi]

While relevant, I don't really care for point 3. Money and time aren't endless and so allocating budget to the psychology of why people become terrible feels less deserving.

Agreed.  It also smacks of magical thinking.

[Jacob]

I'm not sure I follow the insertion of point 1. I mean that is of course what we all want but if it is already happening, make pariahs out of the perpetrators.

Point 1. is there to keep the focus on actual results rather than getting distracted by the personal preferences towards punishment/vengeance on one hand or wishy-washy conflict aversion on the other.

While relevant, I don't really care for point 3. Money and time aren't endless and so allocating budget to the psychology of why people become terrible feels less deserving.

It's not about deserving, it's about what's effective.

Understanding why people do bad stuff and taking actions so to minimize those conditions - combined with proper consequences for transgressing - is more effective than either of those to strategies taken in isolation.

If you don't want nneonazis, providing a path out of neonazidom is going to help reduce those numbers. Same with gang membership, same with any other affiliation. That path is going to be more effective if you understand why people are nazis/ gang members/ whatever to begin with. And that path is also going to be more attractive, if there are consistent negative consequences associated with being a neonazi / gang member / whatever.

[Jacob]

While relevant, I don't really care for point 3. Money and time aren't endless and so allocating budget to the psychology of why people become terrible feels less deserving.

Agreed.  It also smacks of magical thinking.

Look, I've spent years of my life as an anti-racist activist. I've also hung out with some fairly radical folks of various stripes over the years. I've known ex-nazis, people who were active nazis at the time, as well as a collection of leftist-radicals both current and ex. The topic of racism, bigotry, and racist attacks is something I've followed very closely for years, and I've done a solid amount of reading - academic and non-academic - on the topics of radicalization, de-radicalization, racist activism, and anti-racist activism.

I'm pretty confident that the research - as well as the anecdotal observations of people engaged in the subject as activists or professionals - bears me out.

The most effective way to counter radicalization - whether it's Islamic radicals, young white men joining various white power groups, ghetto dwellers joining gangs, or whatever - is a combination of carrots and sticks:

1. Understanding what leads folks to join those groups.
2. Programs to lessen those factors and/ or providing alternative ways to meet those needs.
3. Available ways to exit for those who want to exit.
4. Strong, predictable negative consequences for engaging in radicalized behaviour.

Incidentally, this is true independently of the merits of the radicalization you're trying to counter - it applies equally well if you're trying to prevent your youth from radicalizing against your Islamic Theocracy or Communisty One Party State as well.

The point is, however, that it is the most effective approach.

EDIT: the magical thinking is "it feels good to punish them and not give a shit, therefore that is also the most effective thing to do."

[Josquius]

You don't have to give a shit about those horrible smelly poor people who join neo nazi gangs.

Purely just thinking of selfish upper middle class self interest  tackling the root causes behind people falling into criminality is a better use of money than just letting things degrade and have the police play whack a mole with eternally increasing difficulty.

You obviously need to tackle what crime is there already. But at Pareto principle numbers the cash is best spent elsewhere.

[Sheilbh]

Care then to explain all the posts in this thread discussing antisemitism as the reason people are outraged by the actions of Israel?

Which ones do you mean?

I've said but my view is that you can have any view on Israel from outrage, or support for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire all the way to an anti-Zionist perspective without being anti-semitc and also without doing anything that makes British Jews feel unsafe or alone.

Incidentally, this is true independently of the merits of the radicalization you're trying to counter - it applies equally well if you're trying to prevent your youth from radicalizing against your Islamic Theocracy or Communisty One Party State as well.

The point is, however, that it is the most effective approach.

I agree with all of this but I'd make a distinction between the people who are on the path to violence where I think there is a need for that sort of intervention - regardless of ideology - and the more casual, join-in forms of racism or other bigotries. I think there social pressure is probably the main thing because I don't think they're on that path - and this is possibly where motive matters (soz Jos - all is forgiven ).

For them I think the social pressure on what is and isn't acceptable is more relevant because I don't think they're internalising an ideology or it becoming part of their identity. I think they're probably responding to/mimicking their context (how many times have we all seen this with, say, misogynist remarks from young men) and so if you just change the context then their behaviour will change because it's not that deep. Basically political correctness gone mad

[Jacob]

... all that said, I think Josq's desire to focus on Israel as part of "understanding" antisemites is wrong and sterile and should be discarded.

[Sheilbh]

Agree.

Totally different subject but I spoke to people who work in the area and despite very low expectations they shared this take of being pretty impressed by Sunak's AI summit - in particular getting something agreed that the US and China can sign up to. He was attacked by the China hawks in the Tory party for even inviting China but, bluntly, as with climate if China are not at the table on AI then you're missing half the action.

Also I think modelling it on the IPCC is a really interesting idea that I think might actually be useful - with an expert group doing a "state of the science" and regular summits (hopefully annually) for states to assess AI frontier risks etc. There was a lot of grumbling (including from me) over the focus on those "frontier risks" rather than the near term ones but I think strategically it was possibly the only way to get China and the US on the same page and provides a structure of where states, at the minute, can work together. It also reminds me of recent climate summits where specialist environmental reporters like Fiona Harvey have been pleasantly surprised and think there's signs of real progress, while political reporters think it's a failure

From the Guardian tech writer's newsletter:

Why Sunak's 'vanity jamboree' on AI safety was actually ... a success
Against the odds, world leaders agreed on a landmark declaration to bring stronger oversight to AI. Plus, Sam Bankman-Fried's very bad week
Dan Milmo    

For Max Tegmark, last week's artificial intelligence summit at Bletchley Park was an emotional moment. The MIT professor and AI researcher was behind a letter this year calling for a pause in development of advanced systems. It didn't happen, but it was a crucial contribution to the political and academic momentum that resulted in the Bletchley gathering.

"[The summit] has actually made me more optimistic. It really has superseded my expectations," he told me. "I've been working for about 10 years, hoping that one day there would be an international summit on AI safety. Seeing it happen with my own eyes – and done so surprisingly well – was very moving."

Clutching a £50 note with the face of Bletchley codebreaker Alan Turing on it, Tegmark added that the computing genius – a foundational figure in the history of AI – had been proven right. "I agree with Turing – the default outcome if we just rush to build machines that are much smarter than us is that we lose control over our future and we'll probably get wiped out."

But Tegmark thinks progress was made at Bletchley. Here is a quick summary of what happened.

The Bletchley Declaration

The summit began with a communique signed by almost 30 governments including the US and China, along with the EU. Rishi Sunak described the statement as "quite incredible", having succeeded in getting competing superpowers, and countries with varied views on AI development, to agree to a joint message.

The declaration starts with a reference to AI providing "enormous global opportunities" with potential to "transform and enhance human wellbeing, peace and prosperity" – but the technology needs to be designed in a way that is "human-centric, trustworthy and responsible". There is also an emphasis on international cooperation, including a reference to an "internationally inclusive network of scientific research" on AI safety.

But the most noteworthy section referred to the summit's central purpose: making sure frontier AI – the term for the most advanced systems – does not get horribly out of hand. Referring to AI's potential for causing catastrophe, it said: "There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models."

That attention-grabbing sentence was preceded by a reference to more immediate harms like cyber-attacks and disinformation. The debate over whether AI could wipe out humanity is ongoing – there is also a belief that the fears are overplayed – but there did appear to be a consensus that AI-generated disinformation is an immediate concern that needs to be addressed.

Sunak's ambition to make the summit a regular event has been met. South Korea will host a virtual event in six months and France will host a full-blown summit in 12 months.

So will those carefully assembled words lead to regulatory or legislative change? Charlotte Walker-Osborn, technology partner at the international law firm Morrison Foerster, says the declaration will "likely further drive some level of international legislative and governmental consensus around key tenets for regulating AI". For example, she cites core tenets such as transparency around when and how AI is being used, information on the data used in training systems and a requirement for trustworthiness (covering everything from biased outcomes to deepfakes).

However, Walker-Osborn says a "truly uniform approach is unlikely" because of "varying approaches to regulation and governance in general" between countries. Nonetheless, the declaration is a landmark, if only because it recognises that AI cannot continue to develop without stronger oversight.

State of AI report

Sunak announced a "state of AI science" report at the summit, with the inaugural one chaired by Yoshua Bengio, one of three so-called "godfathers of AI", who won the ACM Turing award – the computer science equivalent of the Nobel prize – in 2018 for his work on artificial intelligence. The group writing the report will include leading AI academics and will be supported by an advisory panel drawn from the countries that attended the summit (so the US and China will be on it).

Bengio was a signatory of Tegmark's letter and also signed a statement in May warning that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. He takes the subject of AI safety seriously.

The UK prime minister said the idea was inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was supported by the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, who attended the summit. However, it won't be a UN-hosted project and the UK government-backed AI safety institute will host Bengio's office for the report.

International safety testing

A group of governments attending the summit and major AI firms agreed to collaborate on testing of their AI models before and after their public release. The 11 government signatories included the EU, the US, the UK, Australia, Japan – but not China. The eight companies included Google, ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta.

The UK has already agreed partnerships between its AI safety institute and its US counterpart (which was announced ahead of the summit last week) and also with Singapore, to collaborate on safety testing. This is a voluntary set-up and there is some scepticism about how much impact the Bletchley announcements will have if they are not underpinned by regulation. Sunak told reporters last week that he was not ready to legislate yet and further testing of advanced models is needed first (although he added that "binding requirements" will probably be needed at some point).

It means that the White House's executive order on AI use, issued in the same week as the summit, and the forthcoming European Union's AI Act are further ahead of the UK in introducing new, binding regulation of the technology.

"When it comes to how the model builders behave ... the impending EU AI Act and President Biden's executive order are likely to have a larger impact," says Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at the company Forrester.

Others, nonetheless, are happy with how Bletchley has shaped the debate and brought disparate views together. Prof Dame Muffy Calder, vice-principal and head of the college of science and engineering at the University of Glasgow, was worried the summit would dwell too much on existential risk and not "real and current issues". That fear, she believes, was assuaged. "The summit and declaration go beyond just the risks of 'frontier AI'," she says. "For example, issues like transparency, fairness, accountability, regulation, appropriate human oversight, and legal frameworks are all called out explicitly in the declaration. As is cooperation. This is great."

FWIW I helped write a submission on a consultation for work broadly opposing new stand-alone AI regulation which is basically the approach the UK has taken. But I am aware that lots of people seem to disagree so...

[Josquius]

... all that said, I think Josq's desire to focus on Israel as part of "understanding" antisemites is wrong and sterile and should be discarded.

You really think anti semitism on the left would take the same shape were it not for Israel being a thing?
The politics in that part of the world are pretty core to the problem..

[The Brain]

The antisemite creates the reason, not the other way around. If it isn't "they murdered Jesus" then it's "they're rich and influential" or "they're poor and filthy" or "they're genetically inferior" or "they poisoned our wells" or "they murder babies" or "they support evil Israel" or whatever. You can certainly understand antisemites, the same way you can understand a rabid dog.

[Jacob]

You really think anti semitism on the left would take the same shape were it not for Israel being a thing?
The politics in that part of the world are pretty core to the problem..

I think the Israel existing is a contributor to anti-semitism on the left, yes. Israel's excesses also contributes, on top of the fact that Israel merely exists.

However, "Israel existing" is a different category than "lack of employment", "lack of positive male role models", "no opportunities to interact positively with members of the [target group of the hate]", "overabundance of people preaching hate within the community", "lack of truthful information to counter the hate narratives", "lack of authority figures engaging in a positive, supportive way in the community", "lack of alternative outlets", "lack of vision of a positive future and path towards it", "underdeveloped sense of empathy" etc that typically are what allow hate and bigotry to flourish and violent radical groups to recruit.

All of those things I listed are things that a country or community can take action to alleviate, and which are effective.

Attempting to stop Israel from existing to counter anti-semitism is simply inane. Taking a national stance against any perceived Israeli excess may be the morally correct thing to do, but it is not going to lessen anti-semitism either (and may in fact increase it). Those are completely different categories of causes.

Flipping the scenario - there is a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment on the right. Some of it is most definitely driven by the excesses of radical Muslims. Nonetheless, when a local Mosque is vandalized or when someone drives a car into a local Muslim family out for an evening stroll killing grandparents and children the proper response is not "well it's understandable because Hamas killed some babies / Iran executes homosexuals / whatever else even if it's true." That's just asinine. And the line of reasoning is just as asinine when discussing anti-semitism and Israel.

[Razgovory]

... all that said, I think Josq's desire to focus on Israel as part of "understanding" antisemites is wrong and sterile and should be discarded.

You really think anti semitism on the left would take the same shape were it not for Israel being a thing?
The politics in that part of the world are pretty core to the problem..

If it wasn't for antisemitism many people wouldn't care.  We don't see mass marches about Syria, we are for the most part, okay with that.  There were plenty of protests when the US intervened to destroy ISIS, but massacres committed by Syrians against Syrians aren't worthy of mass protest.

[Admiral Yi]

Look, I've spent years of my life as an anti-racist activist. I've also hung out with some fairly radical folks of various stripes over the years. I've known ex-nazis, people who were active nazis at the time, as well as a collection of leftist-radicals both current and ex. The topic of racism, bigotry, and racist attacks is something I've followed very closely for years, and I've done a solid amount of reading - academic and non-academic - on the topics of radicalization, de-radicalization, racist activism, and anti-racist activism.

I'm pretty confident that the research - as well as the anecdotal observations of people engaged in the subject as activists or professionals - bears me out.

The most effective way to counter radicalization - whether it's Islamic radicals, young white men joining various white power groups, ghetto dwellers joining gangs, or whatever - is a combination of carrots and sticks:

1. Understanding what leads folks to join those groups.
2. Programs to lessen those factors and/ or providing alternative ways to meet those needs.
3. Available ways to exit for those who want to exit.
4. Strong, predictable negative consequences for engaging in radicalized behaviour.

Incidentally, this is true independently of the merits of the radicalization you're trying to counter - it applies equally well if you're trying to prevent your youth from radicalizing against your Islamic Theocracy or Communisty One Party State as well.

The point is, however, that it is the most effective approach.

EDIT: the magical thinking is "it feels good to punish them and not give a shit, therefore that is also the most effective thing to do."

You're right.  I withdraw the magical thinking comment.  And I have read about Saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists and more interestingly, efforts by the PLO to not exactly deprogram Palestinian terrorists but at least de-escalate them by finding them wives, which, at least acccording to the article were successful.

The crux is the cost efficiency of the methods.

[Jacob]

You're right.  I withdraw the magical thinking comment.  And I have read about Saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists and more interestingly, efforts by the PLO to not exactly deprogram Palestinian terrorists but at least de-escalate them by finding them wives, which, at least acccording to the article were successful.

The crux is the cost efficiency of the methods.

I think it's one of two cruxes. The other crux is how goddamn attractive it is to say "you've transgressed against morality so fuck you. You don't deserve anything, so we're not going to expend any resources on you you damn piece of shit."

But yeah, cost efficiency is definitely a key point as well. I expect it varies significantly across time and place. The challenge, of course, is also that it is very hard to accurately quantify the success of such programs (especially the preventative ones). If your social and friendship club for young men provides meaning to the lives of five dudes who otherwise would've become terrorists and carry out successful attacks, how will anyone ever know?

[Gups]

... all that said, I think Josq's desire to focus on Israel as part of "understanding" antisemites is wrong and sterile and should be discarded.

You really think anti semitism on the left would take the same shape were it not for Israel being a thing?
The politics in that part of the world are pretty core to the problem..

 I balme anti-semites for their antim-semitism. You appear to blame the Jews.

[garbon]

Is she a super strategist?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/08/tory-insiders-suggest-suella-braverman-trying-to-get-sacked

Is Braverman trying to get sacked? Some Tory insiders think so

Suella Braverman has been accused of daring No 10 to sack her with provocative comments designed to cement her position as the rightwing frontrunner to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader.

Former ministers and Tory insiders claim that the home secretary is deliberately making unauthorised statements on homelessness, demonstrations and multiculturalism to woo the party's hard-right base.

The prime minister has refused to endorse Braverman's claims that rough sleeping is sometimes a "lifestyle choice" and the flagship criminal justice bill has been delayed amid resistance from some cabinet ministers over her measures to stop tents being given to homeless people. Ministers have also refused to repeat Braverman's description of pro-Palestinian demonstrations as "hate marches".

Colleagues suspect Braverman has calculated that she has little to lose by making hard-hitting statements that appeal to the party membership.

One former minister told the Guardian: "It is as if she wants to be fired so she can get on with a leadership bid ... If she is tied to the government for too long, she will have to carry some of the blame for Rishi's failure – and few people think he will win a general election outright."

Another former Tory frontbencher said Braverman's decision to make statements that have not been signed off by No 10 shows that Sunak is weak. "She is employing a self-preservation strategy which is not going down well inside the parliamentary party outside of the 40 or so MPs who might support her."

On Monday, Colin Bloom, the former director of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, said Braverman was "goading" Sunak into sacking her. "It is not just that it is the comments about people sleeping in tents. I think she is goading No 10 into getting rid of her because she wants to launch her leadership campaign," he told Newsnight.

Sunak last month refused to repeat Braverman's claims that a "hurricane" of migrants was coming to the UK and that the country faced an "invasion", and previously refused to repeat her statement that multiculturalism was a "misguided dogma" that had allowed people to "live parallel lives".

However, Braverman is closely tied to Sunak through his promise to "stop the boats" and the court battle, expected to conclude in mid December, which will decide whether the government can deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

If the government loses, there will be pressure from Braverman's backers in two hard-right Tory factions – the Common Sense Group and the New Conservatives – to leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR). At this point, it is possible Braverman could call on Sunak to make it a pre-election promise and quit if the idea is ruled out.

Braverman's supporters say she is not undermining Sunak, but is instead speaking her mind, and is not pursuing a high-risk strategy that could easily backfire.

One MP said: "If she was sacked it would not be the end of Suella Braverman, but why do so? If you are sacked, people assume that it is for all sorts of reasons. It would make much more sense if she resigned on principle over an issue such as leaving the ECHR – and that scenario might arise in a few weeks."

...