foreign
we have one more thing left for this
morning
benno is one of my favorite people at
the conference
um I once described him as the kindest
and most empathetic [ __ ] troll I've
ever met
um
words for that effect that was his that
was your Twitter bio for like a year I
think I wear it as a badge of Pride he
does but he is lovely he has some ideas
about ideas and shockingly he's going to
be able to he's going to talk about them
for 45 minutes
uh please make my band I feel welcome
with the terrifying longevity of ideas
um I think I just got one question
before I started how does this all work
again
um anyway
um so yes my God I I am on a thing again
it's um
I worked out just before it's been about
I think three and a half years since
I've been up here and so uh just before
I get started I just really like to
thank um Daisy and Lily and everyone's
involved for giving me the opportunity
to get back on my [ __ ]
um I will say before I start I do have a
couple of content warnings I will be
discussing the covid-19 pandemic but in
very general terms I will also be
discussing culture War issues
um so including hate speech I'm trying
not to get too deep into it but
yeah if that's too much for you I
absolutely do not mind if you decide
that you need to be somewhere else for a
bit
um
and the other thing that I'll say is I'm
not an expert in a lot of things I'm an
expert in some things I know a lot about
other things
um but I think that it's wise to sort of
take to heart a thing that Tom Eastman
once said about me which is um
that
you know he sees me as someone whose
judgment he trusts but whose words he
does not
um
and that's partly because I am as Daisy
described me a troll to some extent but
also you are free to come up with your
own ideas about ideas and all this kind
of stuff but you know the other thing is
I did tweet or toot
um this slide
um I'm fortunately deleted it but I just
wanted to share it with everyone because
I thought it was really cool
anyway
so this talk started with a phrase that
got stuck in my head once uh when I was
thinking about a different talk idea
which is that ideas have a shape
and the shape lingers
which sounded cool and you know as with
all these things it sort of took up
residence in my head and I sort of
understood what I was getting with it
but I figure I should explain it to
everyone else first so we can start with
the first bit but I think we even need
to start with the first part of that
even
um so I could do the usual stick of
putting up a dictionary definition or a
Wikipedia screenshot or something but
the thing with ideas is that they fall
into one of those you know I knows that
when I seize it kind of categories where
the response to someone trying to put
words around it to Define it is to
squirm and escape and go and gallivant
off somewhere else in abstract
philosophical thought land
um and so for the purposes of this talk
I'm just going to Define an idea as an
abstraction because abstractions are
things that you know as people who are
involved in Tech we understand you know
we create a thing yeah we take a thing
we create a representation of it and
then we come up with a way to realize
that in software or whatever else and
but the thing with abstractions is that
they're definitionally not complete uh
they're simplified or idealized or
whatever you know some or all of the
detail or Nuance is gone because part of
the you know part of the point is we
don't want to have to have them in our
head all the time because they just
don't fit
um you know I can't speak to your brain
but I know that mine can't hold all of
reality all in in it all at once not
that I've tried
um but you know I know that when I'm
trying to hold even a moderately
complicated system in my head it can get
pretty tricky you know ask anyone who's
interrupted me while I'm trying to debug
something
um and so you know you naturally try to
smooth things down and simplify them to
the bits that you need
um the bits that you consider important
um and one of the most obvious things
that we come across as you know techies
software types whatever is an API
um and the most common way you see this
is you know it's an expression of the
important parts of a piece of software
by virtue of it being the way you're
supposed to interact with it you know
some things are Made Easy other things
are made harder other things are
notionally impossible
um some some things are obvious some
things are hidden some things are
documented most aren't
um some abstractions make hard things
easy some make easy things hard
um you know some are vital some whatever
you know but that all of them Express
something about not only the world at
least the bit of it they're concerned
with but often something about the
people that made them or the context
they were made in at the time and the
other thing about apis is that they're
composable
in theory you can put them together to
make bigger things you know things that
then take on their own complexities and
also may need to be simplified
so that you can then reason about
whatever part of the system needs work
at that point and so you build
abstractions around abstractions built
out of abstractions and it all just gets
abstract
um until it doesn't
because somewhere underneath all of that
is a reality
and
you know that reality generally picks
either the worst or the funniest or both
times to stick his head up and point out
all the places where your glorious
abstract Tower of ideas leaks like a
sieve
so with the most tenuous idea of what an
idea is let's talk about why some of
them seem to stick around for so long
there's a famous quote from the
screenwriter John Rogers solidarity with
the Striking workers of the writer's
Guild of America by the way of whom he
was the president at one point there are
two novels that can change a bookish 14
year old's life the Lord of the Rings
and Atlas Shrugged
one is a childish fantasy that often
engenders a lifelong obsession with its
unbelievable Heroes leading to an
emotionally stunted socially crippled
adulthood unable to deal with the real
world
the other of course involves Orcs
I've I've never read Atlas Shrug and I
don't really intend to
um but this was you know in terms of the
books that hit me at the hardest when I
was doing all that world view
development stuff in my younger years is
more of it's like a book length Zine
masquerading as a religious text
masquerading as a joke masquerading as
all of the above it's called um
principia discordia or how I found
goddess and what I did to her when I
found her which professed itself to be
the holy book of religion worshiping
Eris the sort of Greek slash Roman god
of chaos and Discord and this thing blew
my mind mainly because I hadn't
discovered post-modernism yet
um the main thing I liked about it
though was it had this sort of
relentlessly kind of joyful and
irreverent vibe to it while also feeling
very Earnest at times and I can't see
why that's relevant to me now
but anyway one of the passengers that
stuck with me was they talked about the
difference between reality and our ideas
about reality
they Define reality as pure chaos
which our minds can't cope with and so
we kind of construct a set of ideas
about reality that they call a reality
grid
and so we can look through look at the
chaos through that and use it to make
sense we kind of map bits of the chaos
to points on the grid and these grids
are often shared often at a cultural
level they're often also misperceived as
being the actual reality itself
and that's part of their explanation for
the difficulties of cross-cultural
communication and it was the first time
I'd come across this kind of notion and
it just made a lot of sense at the time
it still does and
thinking about that is part of how I get
to this idea that you know grids shapes
we get to Big notion of an idea having a
shape
so some shapes fit together well others
don't sometimes you can overcome the
lack of fit by introducing more shapes
other times you can't uh you you know
your Tower of abstractions has to be
built out of shapes and the shapes have
to fit together well enough
that it does it's stable and doesn't
fall over all the time ideally
um so this kind of construct allowed me
to kind of express some of the ways that
ideas get locked into place
when you're dealing with physical space
you're constrained by things if you're
constructing a building in an urban
environment you're constrained by the
shape and the size of the the lot that
you're building on or by various
regulations or laws or other
requirements that pertain to the
jurisdiction you're in similarly if you
want to change or replace an idea you
can be constrained by the other ideas
that have been placed around it
which forces the new idea to have to
take on aspects of the old one either in
itself or by the affordances that you've
had to make around it and a great
example of this involves CPU design
um
digital equipment corporations PDP range
of mini computers weren't the first
computers ever made but the PDP 7 was
the system on which Unix was developed
originally
and then it got ported to the pdp-11
and on these machines is where we get
the beginnings of a little language
called C
um and the the PDP systems are also
where you get really good examples of
you know the beginnings of what we have
as computer CPU architecture today at
least in part
they have a CPU although although and
oftentimes it wasn't integrated into a
chip at that point you've got some
memory you've got various Communications
buses out to other things cpu's got some
registers and whatnot
um but the primary storage is in Ram
rather than in the registers so on so
forth we're talking significantly
simpler designs though this critically
they're strictly in order they do one
instruction at a time
um and they've got no like the ram is
flat there's no caching there's no
um like Ram that's here or Ram that you
have to talk through someone else to get
to or anything like that
um it's all just that and the thing is
that this is the environment that c was
developed in and it works well there
and it works great there if you're
talking about c as a low-level language
this is where it is a low-level language
um but the thing is it encodes all of
the assumptions and the realities that
were present in this system
and namely that instructions are run one
after the other and that memory is flat
and updates immediately
and those don't hold when your CPU looks
like that
um that's not even the most recent Intel
Core that's I think Sunny Cove which is
about 2018 2019 but
the thing is that's not even the only
core in that system there's multiples of
them like you can't find systems these
odds unless you're going very small you
can't find systems that only have one
core in them anymore and even within
those cores there's just this Cavalcade
of execution units that can run things
in parallel to make things go faster and
to make use of all the tiny little
transistors we can make now and we have
multiple levels of cache to cover for
the fact that CPUs got faster but the
RAM interfaces didn't keep up and all of
this has to present the abstraction
that it's a PDP
um it has to present the the illusion
that it's an in-order flat memory system
so that c doesn't fail
and so you get a huge amount of really
impressive magic going on under the hood
managing the cache hierarchy dynamically
reordering instructions so as to keep as
much of its resources busy as it can uh
guessing Which Way upcoming branches are
going to go so there's not going to be
sitting there twiddling its registers
and then reality turns up to point out
that how all of these layers of
abstraction leak like a sieve in the
form of Specter and meltdown this is a
logo that someone came up with respected
because it's holding a branch
uh anyway
um
thing is that wasn't the intended
outcome
um these things are Crete over time the
designers of the PDP were making the
best system they knew how to for the
time I mean they were also trying to
come in as being very simple they didn't
even call it a computer at first because
their backers didn't want them to
because computer made people think big
and expensive and room sized whereas
they were making simple and like desk
sized
um
and
the trouble is that when you start out
on something like this your ideas your
ideas may be unfettered and free and
able to change at will at the start
but the more people who share your ideas
and the more fixed they become in the
form of you know physical objects or
stuff like that the harder they are to
change and the further down underneath
all of the the top level ideas the
harder they are to move it just gets
worse over time and all of this could be
fixed
if you are willing to change a bunch of
stuff
um you know you could unlock to unlock
the full potential of the way modern
CPUs work if they weren't spending so
much of their time trying to look like a
PDP you would have to have a completely
different language or a completely
different way of expressing your
programs to tackle the fact that they
were going to be trying to run
sequentially and Intel tried this
um the the titanium one of the features
of it was that it had an instruction set
that was explicitly parallel you told it
which instructions could run at the same
time the trouble was that Intel said and
then the compiler will handle that bit
and the compiler said no I won't
um but you know you can also look at
other like architectures out there
Digital Signal processes for example
have a completely different way of
programming them although they do have
an assembly language but you generally
can't do as much looping or branching in
them
um and uh even recently the Raspberry Pi
RP 2040 microcontroller has a
programmable i o unit that has its own
little instructions set and these don't
generally use C for programming because
it just doesn't make sense there modern
GPU programming however does use C but
it's still very weird and has more in
common with almost the older sign of
cray style
um super computer kinds of things but
you know either way when you change
things you have to change a lot of
things and so the things don't tend to
change very much
for example python started out as an
untyped language
objects knew what type they were but
that type wasn't advertised as part of
the variable they were bound to
or variables and this was almost durager
at the time that python came about
um
a whole bunch of areas of languages
design were moving away from the
strictness of compiled languages into
this glorious Dynamic elegant expressive
future that was permitted by the fact
that computers have gotten fast enough
that you could run all your code inside
an interpreter or a VM
um and you know so you know Java came
out only a couple of years after the
first release of python for example and
even and python itself was only about a
year after Pearl five and so all of
these kind of dynamic languages were
showing up and a lot of them well Python
and Pearl at least kind of rejected the
notion of types
um as being kind of slightly irrelevant
um
and you know as with all hot new ideas
it was just everywhere and until it
wasn't
um but being able to say conclusively
what type of thing a variable points at
can be useful
um but abandoning the way that you did
that made it less fiddly and you're able
to write your code faster it just felt
nicer in some ways but then later on we
discovered those kind of middle paths
you can take through you know types and
no types mainly things like type
inference
and just sort of more expressive types
um I mean if you wanted a truly sort of
bewildering example of that rust's type
system is incredible and terrifying at
the same time
um
and so it became somewhat cool to start
adding types back into things and so you
see that with things like typescript and
with the typing mechanisms that got
retrofitted into python 3.
um but adding types to python is not
just a straightforward thing because
they weren't there before typescript had
the benefit of starting as effectively a
whole new language even if it was
getting transpiled back to a language it
looked very similar
um rust is also a whole new language and
so it can do its own thing in contrast
Python's type hinting is getting
retrofitted and got retrofitted in 3.5
and by that point you know backwards
compatibility was something we did not
break
and they were purely optional and then
you've got to contend with the fact that
a huge amount of python code out there
just didn't have any of those Tire pins
and if you want more sort of discussion
of that I can recommend this talk by
some guy called Chris nog about
um
but that's not the biggest problem that
Python 3 in itself had let's talk about
text
you see python along with its peers at
the time was developed in C
mostly on things that were sufficiently
Unix that we can call them that and as
such a Stringer is a sequence of
characters hopefully terminated by a
null
a character is a byte and a byte was
well and truly eight bits by that point
eight bits is plenty you see because
there are only 26 characters
um oh sorry that if you had capitals is
52 I guess and you know then there's
numerals and punctuation and you know
all that kind of stuff but even when you
add those that's that's like 100 or so
and you've still got some room for magic
control sequences and stuff so eight
bits is tons right
um
but by the time we realized this was
rubbish
um which we should have a lot earlier
than we did but we didn't it was all a
bit late Unix and C's relationships with
alternate encodings especially ones that
require more than one byte to represent
a character has always been a bit
fraught
and a large part of this comes down to
an assumed fungibility between a
sequence of characters and a sequence of
bytes
the only real difference between those
two kinds of types in C is that the C
library routines that handle strings
expect a null at the end whereas those
that handle bites expect you to tell you
them tell say how big the buffer is
so many bugs
um
the problem for python is that it made
this assumption too python 2 treats a
sequence of characters in a sequence of
bytes as the same thing
and while you can convert from one of
these to a Unicode string eventually
um if you want to that's entirely
optional and when the decision was made
to allow compatibility breaks between
Python 2 and Python 3 changing that
model from a type that represented both
text and bytes with an optional extra
type supporting Unicode to a type that
only supported bytes that could be
converted via an encoding to a type that
only represented text this was one of
the reasons why the the comparative
compatibility break was made
because it wasn't clear that that kind
of shift could be made any other way
incidentally Python 3 was released in
December 2008 which is closer to the
founding of Amazon than to today also to
the theatrical release of The Lion King
though not to python 1.0
but not by much
anyway as you can imagine this whole
change caused a bunch of issues some of
those were simply because everything had
changed and now everyone's cheese had
been moved and um and but you know some
people relied on that equivalent
equivalence they baked it into the way
that they did it notably web developers
because while HTTP at least up to
version 1.1 is made up of things that
look like strings it's those are defined
to be bites
and on initial release Python 3 didn't
have a bunch of the affordances that
made dealing with byte strings easier
and so it just made it really tricky but
I mean a whole bunch of the other stuff
was just a whole bunch of people going
why
why did you need to do this
everything worked fine before
me
you know why did you need to do that and
I mean most of those people probably had
English as a first language or at least
a close one because
the reason why you needed to do that is
the alternative is giving a huge amount
of preference to languages whose
character set fits in ASCII I.E English
and making all text by definition a
Unicode string meant that now a string
in Python meant any string of any text
if nothing else it makes an explicit
distinction between bytes and text and
that kind of explicitness is you know
far more pythonic than the implicit
distinction that was there before
and the push back against this is one of
the reasons that Python 3 took a long
time to get moving like python 3.5 I
think is when when the the motion really
started to take hold in terms of uh
moving away from python 2.
and for a lot of time there was a lot of
talk that python wouldn't survive the
transition and I think that if it wasn't
for the community that we have around
python like conferences like this and uh
and also you know the sort of the happy
accident of the scientific Community
picking up Python and running with it
um python may be may have been where
Pearl and Ruby are now which is while
they're still used and there's they've
still got communities around them you
don't see a lot of new projects or at
least a lot of not a lot of visible new
projects getting started in them
um you know but I'm really glad that
python did survive primarily because of
the community around it like this
community
um
but as this kind of points out
when you've got you know for the C and
CPU examples you've got these two things
that sort of lock together and make
either of them hard to move and then the
Python 3 example is very much showing
you that when you do try to move them
it all gets a bit fraught
and so the shapes of these things
locking together just makes everything
hard to change
um
but with that now for a brief tangent
in 1994 I joined a choir
um
what you need to what you need to know
about me at the time sorry this is the
Flinders University Choral Society
um we wore orange t-shirts by choice
um
and our acronym is deliberate I'll let
you work that one out yourself
um but what you needed to know about me
at the time is that I was socially
awkward as I was very socially awkward
what I probably needed to know about me
at the time is that I was neurodivergent
but that's in the past
um anyway I was confronted with this
group of people who were just
wonderfully accepting
um very noisy very fun very open about a
bunch of things lots of fun to be around
but I had no idea at all how to
integrate with them or even how to start
and so I approached it in a way that now
I realize is exactly the same way that I
approached learning new systems or
debugging them
um I just sat back and I watched it
um
and I watched how they interacted with
each other I learned the songs that we
sang at the pub after rehearsal
um I watched how in-jokes played out
even though I didn't understand it I
just worked out sort of the calls and
the responses uh so I memorized bits of
Law and history that I heard people
talking about and eventually I had
enough of that in my head that I felt
confident taking part in it myself
riffing on it at times combining bits
and pieces in ways that seemed funny and
I did that so effectively that people
have told me that they thought I'd been
around for even longer than I had been
because I just seemed to fit in so well
um and this whole experience was just
vital to how I developed as a social
person I wouldn't be up here talking
like this in this kind of environment
without that and so much of my sense of
humor and my way of interacting with
people is based on having far too much
vaguely relevant social context stored
in my head that I could make quick
connections between things and find
something funny or interesting in there
and just get it out there quickly
so it pisses me off to no end that AI is
going to steal my job
AI is interesting
um interesting in the sense that I'm
fascinated by the technology and the
mechanics and the thought going into it
but appalled at the way that a lot of
people seem to want to use it
um
it also ties back into the general sort
of gist of the sort of the shapes of
ideas I was talking to but in a slightly
different way
the main type of AI that we refer to at
the moment
is some form of trained neural network
model I will flag here I do not know
what I'm talking about
um this means that what it's doing is
using a prompt to generate a starting
Edition and then repeatedly selecting a
next token in chat gpt's case a word to
put next and this is where the snarky
description of spicy autocorrect comes
in it's very much a growth of the same
idea of as the Markov chain Bots that we
used to have all over Twitter all of the
ebooks accounts
you know back when Bots were a thing on
Twitter and back when Twitter was a rest
in peace hellish bird site
um
but to generate this they need a lot of
content and so you just have to shovel
as much content as you can into them and
then they build up a model of what words
follow what other words in a given
context and the main distinction is that
the Markov model Works purely on on
working out the frequency of which word
follows which other word whereas these
are
significantly more complex
the bits that I find interesting
personally are sort of the design and
the mechanics of training the models and
the technical aspects of making it
usable you know the API aspect of it but
you know the less cool bits like the the
Gathering of the content to feed them
um and sort of the ways in which a lot
of companies are saying oh all that
content that you are generating that's
ours now and we have a Perpetual license
to it or they just go out and take it
um that's stuff that other people have
covered really well and so I'm not going
to go too far into that in this one
but I will say that you know if your
business idea requires people giving you
things for free uh or worse you just
taking them whether that be content or
labor or anything so that you can then
profit from it your business idea kind
of sucks
um
but I do have one excellent AI business
idea
um there's a story that did the round
several years ago where a company
decided to try and improve hiring and
what they did is they fed all of the CVS
into a model along with the the hiring
outcomes
and you know design and this would make
them hire better people right
um
is anyone shocked that it turned out to
be sexist and racist
um my pitch is to lean into that though
if you think that there's bias in your
system we'll train a model on it and
show you how biased it is
so that you can then go oh where that's
sexist
um if anyone wants to do this talk to me
after my idea can't have it
um but anyway
um
and it brings me back to the topic at
hand
bias is a representation of one of these
kinds of ideas it's been lodged
somewhere and dealing with that requires
self-evaluation
we're familiar with the notion of things
being you know familiar we get used to
things they become part of the scenery
part of a routine even annoying things
can become just something we deal with
like init systems
ideas do the same kind of thing if
they're left alone for too long they can
become assumptions or even beliefs and
those things can be dangerous especially
if you forget or you don't realize that
they're there
um one of one of my issues with these AI
models is they can't they can't
introspect they can't evaluate
themselves content goes in gets turned
into a thing from which content can
emerge but the ability of that system to
understand why it made that content is
not there
um not only that it doesn't know if it
was if the content either the content
that it generated or the content that
it's using is good
for any of multiple definitions of good
um hence all the effort that they have
to put around put into it making guard
rails around what they'll output and all
of the hilarious you know my grandmother
worked in a Napalm Factory ways that
they used to get around it
um being able to evaluate the Worth or
the value or the goodness of our ideas
is critical and our assumptions because
uh
and we even need to be able to
reevaluate what idea our idea of worth
is you know or goodness
because those ideas are forming part of
the broader sort of geometry and
topography that influences what other
ideas that we'll accept or find Value in
lacking that ability is what makes these
AI systems unable to produce anything
truly new except in as much as they're
constructing new things from the
dismembered parts of other things
but I think I can sense someone thinking
very loudly that they've come up with
the perfect well actually for later on
didn't AI just make a new sorting
algorithm
and it did but not that kind of model
this kind of model
is there might be some of that large
language model generative stuff going on
under the hood but it's got the
particular model that they're using for
this one which is the same one that they
use to play go and Starcraft and several
other things
it has a notion of what good is for it
it knows in this case that it's been
given a list of unsorted items and the
thing that it makes has to turn that
into a sorted list
and it'll end up taking less time or
fewer instructions to do that is better
and so
you know it's a very simplistic
definition of what good is though and
the thing that really worries me is that
if when or if AI gets used in the
development of policy or law or hell
even the next Marvel movie
who gets to Define what's good
um
because you and I can re-examine our
ideas we can look at these things and
say hang on this one isn't working for
me anymore and if we can if not outright
discard it we can at least sort of flag
it as saying this not this one anymore
or something like that
and
you know that we get
um sorry
and if we don't do this as a it's
dangerous because we can end up with
these ideas that stick around for too
long and those ones can be at a personal
level or they can be really they can be
at a societal level which can be even
more pernicious
and just ha
so many people can end up assuming that
these ideas are immutable that they are
for lack of anything else they are
um and as with all the ideas these ideas
have a shape and that shape has an
effect on the kinds of ideas that we can
put with them
I mean going back and through and
digging through all of the things in
your head can be confronting as hell
but it can be really important in my
case I was looking at the stories of a
bunch of my friends
um and that they were telling about
their experience of discovering that
they were or they weren't neurotypical
and realizing that they mapped far too
well onto what I thought was just a form
of laziness or distractedness on my part
um you know for other people it might be
a realization that no matter how hard
they try they just don't fit into the
gender they were born with
or even just a realization that they're
in the wrong career
um all of these things are ideas with
shapes that have been built up around
them and changing them it can be
massively disruptive
um but that's not the only thing that
can go wrong if we fail to sort of
examine the foundational ideas that are
around us
and because you can end up taking them
for granted
um we get used to things we get used to
being able to get what we need when we
need it from the supermarket
we get used to being able to get
together every year for conferences
we get used to a whole lot of these
things
and then it stops
um
one of the most
fascinating things about how the
pandemic affected Society was just the
exposure of how much of it had come to
rely on global logistics
um not only had a lot of manufacturing
moved offshore
but companies have become so allergic to
keeping stock on hand both for reasons
of not wanting to be exposed to
inventory that might become hard to sell
or because they didn't want to pay for
the space to store it that they were
just existentially dependent on the
ability to move things around and when
that stopped working they were stuffed
you couldn't get tinned tomatoes not
because of a lack of tomatoes but
because of a lack of tins
industry had assumed that Global
Logistics was something that couldn't
fail because up till now it never had
and then like a container ship getting
wedged in a canal reality came along and
pantsed them
but
there was an odd positive to this kind
of things changing as well
we suddenly discovered that social
welfare was something we could actually
do
um I mean we've probably forgot it again
or at least anyone involved in it tried
to and absolutely don't remind the labor
party that we could do that
but in general
you know there's this nasty sense in the
capital classes that were in the end
game of a particularly nasty round of
Jenga where they keep trying and often
succeeding and knocking out parts that
they don't think that we need anymore
because they prevent them from hoarding
more and more resources and assuming and
they just assumed that the whole edifice
isn't going to collapse or that if it
does that they've got enough resources
that they that'll insulate them from a
result
I'd like to hope that we can reverse
this
but we have to face our own assumptions
that these things can't or won't change
um and I'm thinking very loudly at the
Australian labor party but we'll get
back to them in a sec
um because I've got one more bit to go
through
so another thing that we can show using
the whole kind of notion of ideas is
shapes
is the way that the same idea or similar
ideas can show up in multiple places
independently there are some shapes that
are very similar and you can also have
shapes that end up constructing
themselves and leaving a similarly
shaped Gap and at that point a similarly
shaped idea can slot in there
and you know that's somewhat an obvious
thought but I think there's a couple of
things that can be drawn out of it the
first one that is talking about when you
decide to burn everything down
um
deciding that something is not or is no
longer fit for purpose and just having
the ability or the resources is to Yeet
the thing feels great
until you're standing among the rubble
of the thing you just demolished and
then you realize you have to start
building its replacement
because all of the ideas that influence
the thing you just you know torched are
still there
and they have the potential to influence
what you build to replace it that may
not be a problem sometimes just you know
taking something out and fixing the
internal plumbing and putting it back is
you know worthwhile in and of itself but
there's a lot of cases where you know in
like socio-political revolutions have
happened and entire you know systems
have been knocked over and then replaced
by the exact same thing but with
different people at the top
um if you want more info more examples
of that there's an entire podcast about
it
um really worth listening to
um even if you don't listen to all of it
the first part of the last season gives
one of the best explainers of Marx and
Marxism I've ever come across
um but there's a more pernicious form of
this kind of parallel construction
though and it's where someone helps you
construct or indeed obstruct the space
for an idea to form
often Without You realizing it and both
forms are endemic especially in the
media
but let I'm going to talk about the
obstructive form of it first using the
language of information security
uh let's say you have an idea
an idea can be a complicated thing and
especially communicating that idea can
be tricky the way we tend to deal with
this is that we give it a name
and after we've explained it once we
don't have to explain it again we can
just give you the name and you'll know
what I'm talking about
um that the trouble is that when the
idea becomes more widespread especially
within a group people start using the
name assuming that people know the
detail behind it and I suspected anyone
with any kind of exposure to offensive
infosec practice is starting to see
where this might be going because yes we
just made a pointer
and in the head of anyone who hasn't
been given the full detail of what we're
talking about we've got a dangling
pointer
and Dems be dangerous
especially an environment where you're
constantly having to evaluate
potentially malicious inputs
um
this also tends to look a bit like DNS
cache poisoning attack
where an attacker tries to plant
incorrect records into for example a DNS
resolver so that when you go to a given
website you end up going to the attacker
controlled version instead and the human
space equivalent goes a bit like this
um socio-political ideas are both a
nuanced detailed and often contentious
and let's say for example that you feel
that successive ways of a story
austerity-driven cuts to Social Services
have engendered an over-reliance on
police forces as a kind of universal
First Responders despite the fact that
not only do they often not have the
right training to deal with a lot of the
situations in which you need a first
responder but they also have
well-documented biases against certain
sectors of the population that lead to
not great outcomes let's say you're
incensed that the police budgets at best
seem to be quarantined from these cuts
and at worst seem to be hoovering up all
the money that used to support a much
broader set of social supports you might
Advocate to for argument's sake divert
police funding to Social Services or you
might decide to make it even shorter and
just say defund the police
um
which is a great pithy name for a thing
it charts well you know good on signs
but the trouble is that
a whole bunch of um
chuckle heads
with columns or TV shows or YouTube
channels or Twitter accounts or whatever
X account
um or say what you really meant is that
we should just get rid of the police
entirely we should not have that kind of
law enforcement arm that must mean
you're a criminal or you love criminals
or something like that but the critical
idea here is that that idea with that
name is now in a whole bunch of people's
heads and so you can't use that name
anymore without not only having to
explain all of the detail behind it but
also defending yourself from but doesn't
that make you a criminal
and this gets used over and over again
black lives matter is racist don't you
know
trans want trans people want more rights
than everyone else don't you know
and unfortunately
the only way that I know to get around
this is to actually give people the
detailed version of what's behind this
and and in a lot of cases these people
just don't have enough of the context
and now I'm going to do the bit of this
talk I really don't like very much
let's say you've not met many people
from Adelaide
you've got no idea what adeladians are
um you're a bit suspicious of them
though maybe you're from Sydney or
something I don't know you hear they
drink a lot of wine for some reason
they've got way too many churches they
worship these weird balls
um and then you're on YouTube one day
and the algorithm coughs up a video to
you on the add a lady and agenda
um some person in a well-lit studio with
a very expensive looking microphone
um and but a very kind of I'm just a
regular person kind of vibe tells you to
like share subscribe don't forget to hit
the Bell to receive notifications of new
videos but did you know that all
adelaideans are serial killers
they love the stuff they just do it all
the time they want to make it normal
they want everyone to do it the vote
left is just won't let us say this
anymore we have to put a stop to it I
used to be a lefty but now I vote for
Peter Dutton it's not that I like him
you see it's just that it's worth
accepting some of this other stuff that
he does as long as we can deal with the
adelaidean Menace
I'm really sorry to anyone who's been on
the receiving end of anything like that
um like that is the culture of War stuff
I was warning about
um
and it's superficially funny when you do
it like that
but it's the exact Playbook run by so
many people with platforms from
colonists and editors at newspapers to
cross media paleoliths like most of Sky
News
um
to YouTube grifters and everyone in
between it's designed to encourage
people especially those with
pre-existing concerns whether they're
reasonable or not to start their Journey
down the path to radicalization by
taking those concerns and building on
them with lies and half truths
um there's multiple tragedies here one
is that these people don't need to go
too far down that path to get to the
point where they will at the very least
stand by
while those who are far more committed
to this plan
um do the Nastia work another is that if
they talk to someone else about their
concerns first then those concerns might
have been delayed instead they get used
as a foundation upon which other ideas
are built and it can be really hard to
get at those foundational ideas again to
take to get them out
and the biggest tragedy here is that it
means they either have or have been
taught the tendency to view certain
groups as less worthy or less human
based on who they are
it may be a bit simplistic but there's
at least an axis along which a given
aspect of someone is who they are versus
what they do they are a man but they do
programming they are cisgender but they
do big thinky opinion piece France
at least in my world view it's okay to
judge people for their actions
especially when it's clear that those
actions were by their own choice
it's not fair to judge people based
purely on who they are or are not
and all of these groups are encouraging
you to judge people based on who they
are they'll find one or two stories that
show someone who they claim and can
claim as a member of that group doing
something bad and try to use that to
construct ideas in people's heads that
encourage them to see everyone in that
group are somehow bad or wrong
and the despondency that this generates
can lead to lead us to forget that
progress has been made
things now at least when it comes to the
rights of people who aren't at the
center of white patriarchy are better
than they were when I was a kid but all
of that progress is one of those things
that we can get used to and forget that
it's there and that it needs to be
defended and pushed further
and that means we need to bring as many
of these people on side as we can even
if that means trying to figure out how
to break them away from the bad ideas
that they've become stuck in
which leads me to another one of these
ideas with a neat name but a malleable
concept meet them where they live
most of the people who use this phrase
use it to mean more centrism please
um there existed that they did they say
that there exists a body of people who
are turned off by the constant debate
and especially by the implied strident
demands of the woke left or anything
like that and their formulation the way
to re-engage them is that we should stop
demanding respect and rights for these
people and focus purely on things like
economics
um but I say we steal that name
because I think the way that we need to
meet people where they live is to go to
them and treat them as humans rather
than demographics
these people have their own concerns and
may indeed be turned off by the strident
nature of socio-political debate when
all it is to them is abstract things
I have to believe that these people can
be reached though and in the same way
that it's a win for the regressive types
to merely get people to tune out and sit
things out it's a win for us to purely
get them to care
to see all humans as humans even the
ones they might find challenging to
handle
and this to me is one of the great
failures of the emotionally true the
traditional notionally Progressive
political parties
labor the Democrats in the US so on so
forth they've got so used to campaigning
by demographics and the tools that
they're used in that that they've
mistaken the abstraction the idea for
reality they're so locked into not only
the shapes within their own
organizations but they've locked
themselves into a way of thinking about
their role in society and their ability
to affect change that's drifting further
and further from the reality of what
Society actually wants
and at some point reality is
figuratively going to punch him in the
face
thank you
[Applause]
you know that was fantastic
thank you so so much for uh coming today
and sharing all of that with us
um and I look forward to
watching that again and sharing it with
everybody else as well because I think
it was very needed so thank you and
thank you on behalf of the event thank
you very much
better rice
[Applause]