[Plura-list] Australia caves on "robodebt"; Locus Award shortlist; Why I haven't written about CDA 230

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Australia caves on "robodebt": Dialing down the automated performative
cruelty by a single notch.

* Locus Award shortlist: Some of my 2019 favorites made the cut.

* Why I haven't written about CDA 230: Life is too short.

* Bus drivers refuse to take arrested protesters to jail: And they're
unionized, so they don't have to.

* AI has been stagnating for a decade: "The high-water mark was set in
2009."

* This day in history: 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🤦🏿‍♂️ Australia caves on "robodebt"

The Australian government used an automated system to detect "welfare
overpayments" from the Centrelink Agency. The system tormented
Australia's poorest, most vulnerable people for years by insisting that
they had been overpayed and demanding repayment with interest.

These "robodebts" became notorious, but successive Australian
governments insisted that all was well, any problems were isolated
incidents, and the tales of torment and misery were just moaning from
workshy shirkers who'd been bathing in government money.Now, the
government has admitted that at least 373,000 people were billed for
AUD721,000,000 that they didn't owe, and has promised to refund them.
The victims of this automated system had been targeted through a
"discredited income-averaging scheme."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/29/robodebt-government-to-repay-470000-unlawful-centrelink-debts-worth-721m

Government services minister Stuart Robert, who helped create the
robodebt crisis in 2015, did not apologise, insisting that the system
"was developed to make identifying welfare overpayments more efficient."

Neither Robert nor the Scott Morrison regime would say whether the
people who'd been defrauded of $721m would be paid interest on the money
that had been taken off them under false pretenses. Nor would the
government confirm that it was scrapping the system.

Leaks seen by The Guardian reveal that the government's own assessment
of the programme is that it is only viable because people must find
years-old payslips in order to challenge robodebt notices - if the
system was required to establish debts on its own, it would collapse.

Administrative arbitrators working for the Australian state repeatedly
told the government that the scheme is illegal. Nevertheless, the
government has pressed on, doubling down, even after it was forced to
admit that it had stolen money from hundreds of thousands of people.

It's easy to understand why. Australia is an oligarchic, neoliberal
place of increasing inequality, housing insecurity, and waves of climate
emergencies that threaten the habitability of much of the continent's
landmass.

To preserve the status quo in the face of these catastrophic threats,
Australian elites need to make scapegoats of others - to find ways to
get working people to fight amongst themselves, rather than turning on
the few at the top.

They've been mashing the "scapegoat aboriginal people button" for
centuries and its efficacy started to wane. The "scapegoat asylum
seekers" button started to wear out after a few decades too.

Now it's "scapegoat disabled people, poor people, single parents and
other people on benefits."

In that logic, *all* welfare payments are overpayments, because the
Australian state owes *nothing* to those people, who should have the
good graces to dig holes, climb in and pull the dirt in after them.

Their stubbourn refusal to stop needing food, shelter and care is just
evidence of their moral failings.

Seen in that light, there's no reason to ever let up on robodebts.

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🤦🏿‍♂️ Locus Award shortlist

The shortlist for Locus Magazine's annual Locus Awards for science
fiction, fantasy and horror is out, and it's full out outstanding reads
from 2019.

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/2020-locus-awards-finalists/

Some of my favorites, with reviews:

The Grand Dark, Richard Kadrey (Best Horror Novel):

https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-richard-kadrey-grand-dark-20190611-story.html

Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer (Best YA Novel):

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/19/setec-astronomy-kitteh.html

Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey (Best First Novel):

https://boingboing.net/2019/06/04/magic-r-us.html

Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan (Best First Novel):

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/04/gnu-slash-apocalypse.html

Congrats to all the nominees!

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🤦🏿‍♂️ Why I haven't written about CDA 230

People have asked me why I haven't written about Trump's executive order
on social media and CDA 230. Here's why.

As everyone who understands the law knows, this will not survive contact
with the judiciary. It's unconstitutional and incoherent and just stupid.

It's as if Trump declared up to be down, and then threatened FAA
sanctions against anyone caught standing on the ground. This will
doubtless inflict pain and chaos, but the first judge that hears the
case will tell him to knock it off and stop being an idiot.

The real purpose - tissue thin, totally obvious - is to get us to stop
paying attention to white nationalism, pandemic genocide, 101,000 dead,
and corruption and start talking about whether up is down.

And life is short.

We've got things pretty good, all things considered. My family is
solvent and healthy (for now) and I'm working and writing, but like
everyone, I'm in a pretty brittle place - both very sad and very scared,
and often very angry. It's not a good way to be.

And writing explainers about why up isn't down, watching my mentions
fill with cultists who are one purple shroud away from a pudding cup,
insisting that down is actually up, all of that, it fills me with despair.

It's not that I don't see the point of it. It's not to change minds in
the death cult, it's to ensure that the vast majority of people who have
sensibly never bothered to fill their brains with the minutiae of
Clinton-era internet laws don't get misled.

The point of setting out bait for the Zombies From the Planet of
Motivated Reasoning isn't to talk to the zombies, it's to play to the
gallery. It's to fill the data void.

https://datasociety.net/library/data-voids/

The people who are filling that void are doing important work, but some
days, I just can't.

If you want to know why up is not down, here's some reading:

Sarah Jeong (always excellent, now more than ever):

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1266140577692651521

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1266158913554051072

On Techdirt, Mike Masnick:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200528/01321044592/two-things-to-understand-about-trumps-executive-order-social-media-1-distraction-2-legally-meaningless.shtml

And most comprehensively, my EFF colleagues Aaron Mackey and David Greene:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/trump-executive-order-misreads-key-law-promoting-free-expression-online-and

Thank you all, you brave void-fillers, for your service in the
up-and-down wars. I'll see you on the other side.

-Cory

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🤦🏿‍♂️ Bus drivers refuse to take arrested protesters to jail

As US police forces express solidarity with their murderous colleagues
by effecting mass arrests of protesters, they have a logistical
challenge: how do you cart away all the people you've arrested?

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266527358531469312

One traditional solution: commandeer a city bus, fill it with prisoners,
and have the bus driver take them to the police station for processing.

But this requires the cooperation of bus drivers, and in most cities,
the drivers are both racialized and unionized, and that means they don't
want to help arrest protesters, and they don't *have to*.

So in Minneapolis, drivers are telling cops they're on their own.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/bv8zaw/minneapolis-bus-drivers-refuse-to-transport-george-floyd-protesters-to-jail

New York drivers, too.

https://paydayreport.com/bus-driver-unions-nationwide-refusing-to-work-with-police/

“ATU members live with similar fears on a daily basis. ATU members face
racism daily. Our members live in and work in neighborhoods where
actions like this happen, and where this took place, now watched in
horror across the globe,” ATU Local 1005 said in a statement.

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🤦🏿‍♂️ AI has been stagnating for a decade

MIT CS PhD student Davis Blalock undertook a review of papers
documenting progress in "pruning" for machine learning (a critical means
of eking out performance improvements), and found little progress for a
decade, despite the authors' claims.

https://proceedings.mlsys.org/book/296.pdf

Rather, the improvements could be chalked up to variations in
measurement - the papers' authors were choosing to benchmark their
systems using metrics that made them look good, but when these
benchmarks were normalized, the improvements largely vanished.

His work confirms the 2019 ACM SIGIR meta-analysis that confirmed that
the field's "high-water mark … was actually set in 2009."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3331184.3331340

Writing in Science, Matthew Hutson documents a series of these analyses
that find little support for AI hype. Rather, the progress in AI seems
to be an artifact of publishing bias from scientific journals.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/eye-catching-advances-some-ai-fields-are-not-real

This is a well-understood problem: journals like to document dramatic
improvements, not incremental ones. So researchers who create new ML
systems that perform existing tasks more efficiently are published with
fanfare.

Researchers who tweak existing systems to match those performance gains
languish in obscurity. Academic career advancement is predicated on
publication, so research agendas are distorted to match publication
bias, producing the illusion of a run of spectacular breakthroughs.

To maintain the illusion, researchers shy from comparisons with existing
systems, creating bespoke benchmarks that cast their work in a good
light. And since the field is growing fast, there aren't enough skilled
reviewers to flag this stats-juking prior to publication.

These methodological issues are not limited to AI journals. As Ben
Goldacre's 2012 book "Bad Pharma" documents, the most widely prescribed
class of drugs is statins, and statins are (were?) not tested head to head.

https://boingboing.net/2012/11/06/bad-pharma-account-o.html

Rather, each new statin was compared to placebos. That means that there
were several statins on the market, and yet we didn't know which one
performed best, and this is the most widely prescribed class of drugs!

To their credit, many scholarly and scientific publishers are taking
steps to fight publication bias.

My favorite is "registered reports" where researchers approach journals
*before* they experiment.

The journals pre-commit to publishing the outcomes based on the salience
of the research agenda and the rigor of their methodology - rather than
basing their publication on how spectacular the finding is.

https://www.cos.io/rr


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🤦🏿‍♂️ This day in history

#5yrsago The PATRIOT Act is uglier than you thought, and what to do
about it
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-2015-05-29

#1yrago How the "prosperity gospel" convinces poor people to give
everything to grifty millionaire preachers
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47675301

#1yrago Wealth is correlated with greed, dishonesty and cheating -- are
these effects or a causes?
https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/opinion-why-do-rich-people-lie-cheat-and-steal-more-than-those-on-low-incomes-4647197-May2019/

#1yrago New Amazon patent application reveals "solution" to missed Alexa
instructions: always on recording
https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

#1yrago Now that Uber and Lyft are public, their inevitable financial
collapse is much clearer
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/hubert-horan-will-the-train-wreck-uber-lyft-ipos-finally-change-the-public-narrative-about-ridesharing.html

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🤦🏿‍♂️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Asher Wolf (https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf),
Tor.com (https://tor.com/), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 522 words (21565
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 03)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/18/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-03/

Upcoming appearances: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla


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