Staying well out of this beef, but I've spent the last 48 hours in hysterics since I learned that an influencer has been getting fans to give her money by calling it "individual reparations."

That's the joke line I use when I want one of my white mates to get a round in!

I get how this dynamic emerges. Social media blurs the distinction between influencer and activist. Individuals are seen as totemic of a wider political struggle, so you want to see them succeed. And of course, supporting people's work is meaningful.

But it's not reparations.
Reparations isn't an individual white person giving money to an individual black or brown person (apart from when I'm broke and want a cocktail, in which case it's very much that).

It's about recognising that

a) colonialism and slavery have had a lasting economic impact
b) this impact is not just a legacy, or a long tail.

It has been reinforced by the underdevelopment and debt servitude of the Global South, and the exploitation of labour and resources from the Global South.
And unless you're a billionaire or a central bank, it's unlikely that your PayPal activity is going to make much of an impact on the root causes behind the Global Movement for Reparations..
(Also, if you're a billionaire or a central bank, you're probably why there needs to be a Global Movement for Reparations, but I don't think that's my core audience tbh)
If you, as a white person, want to give money to a black or brown person because you like their work or you think it's politically useful, that's great.

But if you're serious about wanting to support reparations, it can't be an individual thing. It's about movement building.
I think what's going on is that there a lot of young, socially conscious white people for whom the last few years have been a big wake up call. Which is good!

But they're not necessarily politically active - more that they're avid consumers of political content.
That means people who produce politically-flavoured social media content can equate supporting them with supporting the politics.

And it works because social media encourages us all to see individuals with a platform as totemic of the values we want to see in the world.
There's room for influencers to cynically exploit that, and come up with what is essentially intersectional Thatcherism.

The solution to that, imo, is better movement building. White people shouldn't just be supporters of antiracist struggle - they should be participants too!

More from For later read

Wow, Morgan McSweeney again, Rachel Riley, SFFN, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, JLM, BoD, Angela Eagle, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Lisa Nandy, Steve Reed, Jon Cruddas, Trevor Chinn, Martin Taylor, Lord Ian Austin and Mark Lewis. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut 24 tweet🧵

Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, launched the organisation that now runs SFFN.
The CEO Imran Ahmed worked closely with a number of Labour figures involved in the campaign to remove Jeremy as leader.

Rachel Riley is listed as patron.
https://t.co/nGY5QrwBD0


SFFN claims that it has been “a project of the Center For Countering Digital Hate” since 4 May 2020. The relationship between the two organisations, however, appears to date back far longer. And crucially, CCDH is linked to a number of figures on the Labour right. #LabourLeaks

Center for Countering Digital Hate registered at Companies House on 19 Oct 2018, the organisation’s only director was Morgan McSweeney – Labour leader Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney was also the campaign manager for Liz Kendall’s leadership bid. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut

Sir Keir - along with his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney - held his first meeting with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). Deliberately used the “anti-Semitism” crisis as a pretext to vilify and then expel a leading pro-Corbyn activist in Brighton and Hove
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.