Approximating Intelligence: Conversation Starters

This follows on from a post I did about the topic of 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' but the overall theme of these ideas is how less intelligent people mitigate the advantage of more intelligent people such that intelligence is not a 'winner take all' trait. The topic of this post is some variation of ye olde 'never let the truth get in the way of a good story.' and is really about how unintelligent ideas can effectively hobble intelligent people by draging them into conversations and arguments that don't merit starting.

My best attempt to put it succinctly is that there are conversations that are complete wastes of time, they do not merit embarking upon. Something simply is the case, and as such there's no point speculating on what isn't. A Conversation starter is to exclude the necessary fact that obstructs the possibility of conversation.

Examples: The world is an oblique spheroid. Cryptocurrency isn't currency. Homo sapiens are dimorphic. There is no compelling evidence of the supernatural. etc.

Now when I worked in a call center, I would ask my coworkers ridiculous hypotheticals, and one style of answering an absurd or ridiculous hypothetical took the form: 'Well I just wouldn't be in that situation so I would never have to make that choice...' which is to entirely miss the point of a ridiculous hypothetical and that is entertainment.

I'm not the fun police. Questioning a vegan as to whether if nobody was around they would pay $2 to ride a unicorn that was crying over its captivity, may be inconsequential on account of unicorns not existing (sorry mum) but it is still entertaining.

In an attempt to be brief, I'm going to be blunt. I spent 3 months corresponding with an anti-vax friend. It was a long exchange. It ran into the arse-end of the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Dr. Malone. I found it easiest to respond to a podcast with a podcast, namely Sam Harris interviewing Nicholas Christakis.

Anyway, what happened was that in the interview Nicholas casually mentions that the mrna vaccines are something like 5 times more effective than natural immunity. And this was rejected by my correspondent as a baseless claim. I conceded that this claim was asserted without any allusion to the studies that produced the conclusion, but gave it a quick google. And found that if you looked at the mortality rates of unvaccinated people it's something like 1% or thereabouts, and if you look at the mortality rates of the vaccinated it drops to 0.2% or less. So 5x more effective than natural immunity.

Here is the powerful pull of the rabbit hole. I should point out my correspondent friend lives in Australia. Roughly 21 million Australians were fully vaccinated at that point, or 8 in every 10. (and over 9 in 10 when you exclude the child population of Australia). Like to be hesitant about a vaccine at that point, would require morgues to be backed up, hence the appropriate term is anti-vax.

And really, that's it. The conversation can't really take place anymore, unless you find some way to dismiss the evidence.

Which my correspondent did. It was like 'we can't trust any research that is publicly or privately funded' and to be clear I am interpreting/condensing here. 

But this is the principle that is the subject of this post. 

An Argument for Flying

Say you want to fly under your own power. You come to me and say "If I can just jump off something high enough I think I can escape earth's gravitational pull" and then I throw a rock off a cliff and it plunges straight down to the ground below. 

Conversation, argument, over. Without introducing technology, people just can't fly.

You say "well who says that all mass is going to fall to earth every time."

And I'm like 'motherfucking physics that's who.'

And you're like 'I don't believe in physics.'

This might seem like a stupid example, but this shit is happening all the time.

Capital Punishment

A long time ago I was sitting around a table in a Fitzroy apartment discussing the plight of pedophiles. For the sake of argument, we'd all agreed to assume that pedophiles can't be "rehabilitated" in the sense of being cured of their paraphilia. Basically, once a pedophile always a pedophile, this was a premise we'd all agreed to regardless of whether it turns out to be true or not.

Then came the trouble of sentencing, paroling, releasing. My friend, one of my best friends made this extremely frustrating argument it went like this:

Capital punishment is fucked, it would never work, too many problems with it. But it would be good if we could just line pedophiles up and just shoot them.

So I'm no expert on writing syllogisms, but it would translate to something like this:

Premise 1: Capital punishment is overdetermined to be ineffective aka it's fucked.

Premise 2:  There are pedophiles.

Conclusion: We should use capital punishment on pedophiles.

This argument, or more accurately non-argument still annoys me to this day. It's like an anti-begging the question, where your first premise is a rejection of the conclusion. Most people are not this obtuse though to make arguments of the form 'I don't have an argument, here's the argument.'

But it does illustrate the basic form of what I'm calling 'Conversation starters'

Basic Form Conversation Starter

"This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about."

Approaching intelligence it is rendered into the form "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about." that move from "if we can" to "we can" is often really tricky, as in buried under 30ft of word salad.

An Important Disclaimer

I'm likely to touch on issues that most people view very much through an 'Us-Them' prism. I have many friends that I would describe as 'Crusaders' for example, in which like the historical crusaders, they believe what they do is of paramount importance, don't understand what the actual crusades entail and have no idea that the texts the crusade is based upon are not descriptive of reality. 

As such, if for example I say 'Anti-racism has no real basis' you might be tempted to leap to the conclusion that I'm suggesting 'White supremacy' is the natural order of things, particularly if you've already signed on to the Anti-racist crusades. However, Anti-racism is but one approach to combatting racism and inequality in society, there are alternatives like humanism and importantly alternatives that have been far more effective historically that Anti-racism is now set about demolishing.

This is the unfortunate thing, if you have a rat poison that will maybe kill a bunch of rats in your house and definitely kill your own children, two parties are likely to object to you using that poison A) rats and B) people concerned for the wellbeing of your children.

Criticism doesn't just come from people who want you to fail, criticism can also come from people who want you to succeed.

Ryan Chapman

No more beating around the bush. From Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt's article in the Atlantic in 2015, to Brett Weinstein's talk 'How the Magic Trick Is Done' in 2018, to Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Andrew Doyle, Sam Harris, Coleman Hughes... hundreds if not thousands of hours have been spent by world-class minds taking far-left theory very seriously in order to understand and dissect it. Contemporary to writing this post, Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian sat down to try and concur as to why so many people are taken in by (here referred to as) Woke ideology? I would argue some parties like Brett Weinstein and James Lindsay have been driven insane in the pursuit to understand and overcome it.

In this sense and context 'conversation starters' as approaching intelligence have been a huge success.

I am a big and almost immediate fan of youtuber Ryan Chapman, who like me has time on his hands to look at phenomena like Wokeness as a cultural phenomenon. His breakdown of the intellectual roots of wokeness is (trust me relatively) succinct and simple. Clean like his mid-century-modern décor:

and as per the packaging on the box, it delivers on what it promises - the intellectual roots of woke ideology.

At my own peril of losing you, I'm going to switch to hopefully a simpler analogy: Bitcoin. There's a super excellent deconstruction of nfts and crypto made by youtuber Folding Ideas called 'Line Goes Up - The problem with NFTS' It is over 2 hours long and as at writing has been viewed 8.3 million times such that if you managed to find this, you've probably already seen it.

If you watch it, you wont have wasted your time, however I'm going to employ the dubious word 'should' which is: making a 2 hour well researched, argued and executed video on NFTs being magic beans shouldn't be necessary. The bitcoin conversation shouldn't even get started. Here's a shorter alternative that I'm fairly sure I bring up every time anyone brings up crypto or nfts with me:

The question that plagues me, with bitcoin and its spin offs, is "why don't people immediately notice that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and doesn't wear kimonos" aka Kramer is not actually describing reality.

Easily the best thing I got from 'Line Goes Up' was the sense-making revelation that in the early days of bitcoin, bitcoin enthusiasts were just slapping 'we accept bitcoin' stickers on businesses, whether they did or not (mostly not) and it was hard to validate because nobody used bitcoin to buy anything anywhere and nobody knew anybody who used bitcoin to buy coffees and muffins from the corner store that according to a sticker on its window accepted bitcoin.

And like Kramer, eventually we could see people get rich by virtue of not understanding reality, just as Kramer has his shiny new suit after bankrupting Japanese tourists.

In the same sense, Ryan Chapman traces a line from contemporary 'Wokeness' simply and directly back to the ideas of Karl Marx. One could take Marx back to Hegel too if you like. 

Marx is poignant, because he had his own intellectual produce and historically every one that has gotten excited by and attempted to implement Marx's ideas has brought about a disaster. 

Karl Marx is Kramer, Kramer is even correct about some stuff - the Japanese are big gift givers, Jerry's TV may well be Japanese. But Kramer is crucially wrong about the value of the Yen, and the viability of Jerry's sitcom in the Japanese market, leading all parties to disaster.

But if we ignore the fact that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and wear kimonos, that USD$300 was then the equivalent of Y30,000 and not "practically free" as a price point, then Kramer's ideas can really get cooking.

In the same way if we ignore the fact that nobody is really representative of the group to which they belong, then we can discuss identity politics. (And I do mean literally nobody is representative of any group you can identify with. Based on the 2011 ABS census data, the "Average Australian" was defined of which, not a single Australian in 23 million was statistically average.)

So much as I like Ryan Chapman's analysis, I think the emotional roots of Wokeness, Crypto, Flat Earth, Stop the Steal are a lot simpler to understand and summarize than the intellectual roots:

Enough people want it to be true. aka Motivated reasoning.

The Economics Joke

I got this from Australian Economist Steve Keen's old 'Debt deflation' blog:

A physi­cist, a chemist and an econ­o­mist are ship­wrecked on a desert isle, along with a con­tain­er full of cans of baked beans.

The chemist says that if they can start a fire, he can cal­cu­late the tem­per­a­ture at which a can will explode.

The physi­cist says that she can work out the tra­jec­to­ry of the baked beans after the explo­sion, so that they can gath­er the baked beans and eat them.

The econ­o­mist looks at them in dis­dain, and final­ly says Guys, you’re going about it the hard way. Let’s assume we have a can open­er.

This is a field I hold a qualification in, albeit a minor and unimpressive one. But there's actually a lot of this 'assume we have a can opener' shit going on.

Apples

I have four apples. Benny cries 'no fair!' to the chief. 

The chief makes me separate the four apples into two groups of two and Benny gets to pick which pair he takes home.

Benny demands the pairs be weighed. We weigh them, one pair is slightly heavier than the others.

'For fucks sake Benny just pick the heavier pair.' I say growing tired of this whole thing.

'You'd like that wouldn't you. The smaller apples will be sweeter.'

'I don't give a fuck, I'm hungry I want you to pick so I can eat my apples.'

'...but the larger apples have a greater flesh to skin and core ratio...'

'Yeah so pick whatever. Chief can you make him pick already?'

'I demand a 30 day cooling off period, in which tohm isn't allowed to eat his apples should I determine that the division of apples was unfair.'

'You can have all the apples. Just let me get out of here so I can buy a McMuffin.'

'I want a McMuffin too! Why do I have to eat apples while you eat McMuffins.'

'Fine I'll buy you a McMuffin Benny.'

'Oh what so you can have all the apples?'

'No so I can get out of here and eat something.'

'You're trying to swindle me out of the apples by bribing me with a McMuffin...'

Benny's mistake is that he thinks his problem is that I have all the apples and he has none. Benny's actual problem (because I made him up) is that he's miserable. He's miserable without apples, he's miserable with apples.

I don't make this analogy to trivialize economic inequality. Rather to illustrate the perils of misdiagnosis. Benny is motivated to believe that if he just had some apples, he'd be as happy as me. Probably my method of oppressing Benny in the dialogue above is that I don't care and he does. Likely a privileged position if I can give away apples and buy Benny McMuffins, but Benny has poisoned his own mind, such that while the chief as an independent arbiter may view it as fair that we each have two apples and a McMuffin, Benny won't see it that way.

Society probably does have problems if Benny needs to petition the chief to redistribute my apples. I'm not denying there is a problem. I am asserting that Benny has misdiagnosed that problem.

How does that happen in real world examples?

Epistemic Inclusion

I keep promising to myself I'll write a post dedicated solely to the subject of epistemic exclusion. This is not that post though.

An epistemology is a way we produce knowledge. Experimentation for one. Mathematics (a subset of rationalism) another.

Not all epistemologies are equal however. 

So this is my own basic conclusion on the question of including or excluding epistemologies - where epistemologies converge on findings, include them. This is largely to give credit where credit is due. 

For example, revelation, believe it or not, is an epistemology. This is like when God visits someone in a dream and tells them what they need to know.

So the gold standard of epistemologies is generally regarded to be empiricism, repeatable experiments that produce consistent results. 

In a scenario where an empiricist has a bunch of people coming down with cholera, does a statistical analysis of the cases and detects a behavioral pattern among patients that they are using three distinct water pumps in the London area, then samples that water and looks at it under a microscope and discovers microbial life in that water supply that isn't in other water supplies that aren't producing cholera cases, the empiricist determines that cholera is spread by these 'germs'.

Then someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, disease has nothing to do with a persons character, it is spread by these other life forms I created because unnecessary suffering is necessary' then yeah if divine revelation reveals things that turn out to be reliably true include that epistemology.

But if someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, these cholera cases are my punishment for legalizing same sex marriage in a country your citizens have no jurisdiction over, because I'm disappointed in your lack of holy war enthusiasm' then revelation should be an excluded epistemology.

Why?

Because it is my presupposition that what constitutes knowledge is predictive power. I can only claim to know how much money is in my wallet if I can accurately predict how much money I will find in there. 

Or as Matt Dillahunty of the Athiest Experience specifies - knowledge is a subset of beliefs, beliefs held with the highest degree of confidence. Athiest youtuber Paulogia offered me the criteria of 'adjudicated by predictive power.' 

"Confidence" comes etymologically speaking from the Latin "confidere" - to have full trust. In this sense mere confidence is insufficient by itself to establish knowledge. Confidence can be misplaced, my trust is predicated on predictive power.

But One Case Study: Standpoint Epistemology

Standpoint epistemology is basically as I can understand it, taking your subjective experience as sufficient to generate knowledge about reality. (This is complicated because I'm going to assume that standpoint theory is in the critical theory school that rejects notions like "objective reality").

Eye witness testimony is likely an example of standpoint epistemology. It is not a sound epistemology. For example, the biopic 'Hurricane' depicts a limitation of eyewitness testimony when witnesses are coached to identify Rubin Carter as perpetrator of an armed robbery. (and in reality all we know is that witnesses changed their accounts and were inconsistent with each other and their own testimony at different times). 

A more contemporary example is the witness testimony in the shooting of Michael Brown. 

I'm not sure that strictly speaking eye witness testimony is regarded in Academia as a subset or akin to standpoint epistemology. Regardless, witness testimony is something that has been heavily scrutinized through our judicial systems and by the field of psychology such that we know it is unreliable. Unsound.

For example there's Dr. Elizabeth Loftus' work on memory with the famous car collision experiments:

One of Loftus' first experiments, published in 1974, involved car accidents. In the lab she played videos of different incidents and then asked people what they remembered seeing. Their answers depended greatly on how she phrased the question.

For instance, if she asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, people estimated, on average, that the cars were going 7 mph faster than when she substituted the word "hit" for "smashed." And a week after seeing the video, those who were asked using the word "smashed" remembered seeing broken glass, even though there was none in the film. ~ sourced here

 There's inattentional blindness also. Which might combine with "What you see is all there is" Here's the famous invisible gorilla video:

and here's a scientific american overview of the limitations of eyewitness testimony relative to the weight given it by jurors.

How do we know about the issues with eyewitness testimony? Because it gets compared to sound epistemologies like empiricism. We can check its correspondence with reality. Its predictive power. For example an eyewitness identification of a perpetrator should predict their DNAs presence among the forensic evidence even decades after a trial.

Furthermore, as in the Michael Brown case, not only should witness testimony predict things like the amount and pacing of shots recorded on video devices, but it should also predict other eye witness testimony.

If you can keep witnesses independent before giving their statements, if this subjective measure was predictive of what happened, one eye witness account should largely predict the contents of another eye witness account. And as in the Brown case sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. There's a phenomena documented called 'The Rashomon effect' to add to the pile.

So standpoint epistemology in its attempt to produce knowledge faces all the above problems/limitations of subjectivity. But here's some specific examples of its limitations.

I meet Rhonda at a party. When she shakes my hand she finds my intense stare creepy and intimidating, she notices how much I am sweating and that I mumble 'nice to meet you' in a cursory manner. From Rhonda's standpoint it is concrete evidence of men's objectification of women and failure to see her as an equal. Another day as a woman living under the patriarchy.

When later this characterizations of events are brought to my attention, I give my own accounts from my own standpoint - 

Before arriving at the party I ate my dinner of a Nuclear burrito. It was harrowing I couldn't get my mind off the burrito which was now sitting in my gut like two rabid weasels. I recall Jenny introducing me to someone, but at that stage all I could think of was escaping to a bathroom.

To get around this problem of subjectivity, or 'he-said-she-said' which is a real problem, instead of appealing to a sound epistemology, like I could have produced a receipt or bank statement for my burrito, or the person who waited 20 minutes outside the toilet could have corroborated my account. 

Of course this solution would end the potential conversation about patriarchal oppression, so instead near as I can determine standpoint theory overcomes these he-said-she-said or Rashoman problems by designating "epistemic privilege". Namely that some subjective standpoints count, and others don't. Some examples:

Kristina Rolin states that "the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic advantage accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position."

The above is a fascinating excerpt, because to me it could read exactly as a description of why standpoint epistemology is unsound - it assumes essentialism and it assumes privilege. However I suspect it is meant to be descriptive. A counter example might be a passenger on a flight. The pilot of the plain has power over the lives of the passengers, who ultimately have to obey the pilot's demands - stay seated, fasten seatbelt, don't use the bathrooms, fit your oxygen mask first, abandon vessel etc. If geese fly into the jet engine and force an emergency landing, few people would recognize the subordinate passenger as having epistemic privilege over the pilot. Anyway, another example:

In Harding’s 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, she distinguishes the idea of a standpoint from the more generic idea of a perspective with the requirement of political engagement: She argues that due to the political engagement of feminists and their active focus on the lives of women, it allows them to have an epistemically privileged “standpoint.”

Which to me reads as 'feminists know women better than any woman does by virtue of their political engagement.' Which may periodically or incidentally be true, I would have to see the argument to be compelled by it. 

 Now to be clear, its not like we can't know anything from subjective accounts. Documenting people's standpoints is highly worthwhile. Where standpoint epistemology serves as a "conversation starter" is privileging it over empiricism. When people start talking about 'truths' 'realities' 'my truth' 'your truth' or 'alternative facts'.

For example, on the recommendation of Youtuber 'Just Some Guy' I read the comic book series 'Excellence' which can be summarized as 'Coming 2 America' meets Harry Potter. The artwork is excellent, and while casting spells with magic wands isn't my bag, there's worldbuilding in there. But I'd say it is worth reading because it is worth having the standpoint of the creative team as data, it's good to know that like they think they have a true analogy of contemporary US society and race politics.

Alas, regardless of it being a true reflection of what the creators believe, there's little to no insight beyond 'this is what some people believe' to be found in the chapters that have to date been released.

Where something like standpoint epistemology approaches intelligence as a conversation starter, is very few people are trained to say 'wait, what epistemology are we using here?' and can get bamboozled by being told that asserting their own counternarrative or appealing to evidence is a form of oppression etc. 

It's also an epistemology that permits things that have also been ruled out by social sciences subjected to empiricism, like mind-reading is a big one.

Remedy

The remedy unfortunately will require cumulative acts of intestinal fortitude, and people who want a better tomorrow may be social casualties along the way.

The key phrase to counter a conversation starter is:

I reject your premise.

There's probably softer ways to word this, a nice one is the question 'is your belief falsifiable?' this was literally the first thing I asked of my anti-vax correspondent. He claimed yes, but that belief was in turn falsified and it took about 3 months of back and forth. 

If I were to obtain some sort of public profile such that I wound up sitting down for 'an evening with Joey Soloway' there's juicy interesting conversations that could start (I single out Joey because of this assertion made in their talk with Hannah Gadsby for the New Yorker festival, it's a handy example that comes to mind):

There's this thing that happens at parties where there's a guy and this woman is passed out and the guy wants to have sex with her because she's passed out and he calls his friend first. What's that about? [asked of cis male podcast hosts] and they just like go silent. [mimics nonwords] "...I don't know"

 I'm like "yeah you know" it's what men do with the degraded half of the divided feminine. They use it as an excuse. They use her passed-outness as a conduit to connect with other men sexually. Her passed-outness, her unconsciousness demands that they experience something sexually with another straight man. And it's her fault for not guarding her egg. ~ transcribed by me, sourced here.

It's such a fascinating conversation starter, but there likely isn't a conversation actually there unless I as a cis man am so completely out of touch and Joey somehow happens to be in touch.

Where any and all conversation of these social-science type discussions probably need to begin with is the question:

Is literary criticism a sound epistemology?

Or something like that. My example seems to be more a kind of Freudian analysis that presupposes a universal experience, and of course standpoint epistemology and mind reading. This circles right back to the transition from the basic form of "This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about." to "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about."

In the above example we've skipped the part where we establish that this is a thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure date rape and taking advantage of drunk and passed out women is a thing. What is not established is that men who take sexual advantage over passed out women also habitually call their straight male friend and that with this addendum that's a universal male experience. 

But see! The conversation has started. 

What needs to happen is: 'fascinating insight, how did you establish any and all of the claims you just made?'

Afterword: Clarity

As near as I can guesstimate the real trick of conversation starters that approaches intelligence seems to be based on a propensity of some subset of people to render equal 'difficult to understand' with 'intelligent'. 

Here I have to posit, but cannot prove, the existence of a certain kind of person, that say when you try to explain the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun and how that translates into the transit of Venus across the sky from the perspective of earth, they are hearing something true and factual, but they don't necessarily understand the explanation. They believe you because you seem to know what you are talking about.

They are using a rule-of-thumb their own kind of epistemology, that is: if an argument is too complex to understand accept the conclusion.

Which leaves this hypothetical person vulnerable to bamboozlement or idea smuggling.

It's annoying to engage in conversation or argument with someone about the safety of vaccines when they reject all the best data available to lay people off-hand, and instead favor anecdote but not just any anecdote only anecdotes that support the conclusion that the vaccines are dangerous.

It's another thing altogether to be arguing with someone who is spewing out nonsensical word salad, whether they be New Age Spiritualist, Christian Apologist, Bitcoin Enthusiast or Radical Leftist.

It is worse to be sent onerous 'reading material.'

The sum total of my experiences with these started conversations is that with time and energy and intense concentration they all say 'Assume we have a can opener'

It's hard to stand your ground and say 'I reject your premise' when you have no idea what it is they are saying.

So I return to Ryan Chapman again with his video on what constitutes a Good Argument, which is refreshingly informal while still being insightful. The last aspect of a good argument is on the subject of clarity. 

He winds that section up with a quote from Karl Popper, here's an expanded version that I feel also captures that heuristic of equating incomprehensibility with intelligence:

Many years ago I used to warn my students against the widespread idea that one goes to college in order to learn how to talk and
write 'impressively' and incomprehensibly. At the time many
students came to college with this ridiculous aim in mind, especially
in Germany. And most of those students who, during their
university studies, enter into an intellectual climate that accepts this
kind of valuation - coming, perhaps, under the influence of teachers
who in their turn had been reared in a similar climate - are lost. They
unconsciously learn and accept that highly obscure and difficult
language is the intellectual value par excellence. There is little hope
that they will even understand that they are mistaken, or that they
will ever realize that there are other standards and values - values
such as truth, the search for truth, the approximation to truth
through the critical elimination of error, and clarity. Nor will they
find out that the standard of 'impressive' obscurity actually clashes
with the standards of truth and rational criticism. For these latter
values depend on clarity. One cannot tell truth from falsity, one
cannot tell an adequate answer to a problem from an irrelevant one,
one cannot tell good ideas from trite ones, and one cannot evaluate
ideas critically-unless they are presented with sufficient clarity. ~ The Myth of The Framework, Chapter 3: Reason or Revolution?

In that sense there's been a long conversation going on about alternate epistemologies and 'other ways of knowing' that in itself really should have been over a long time ago; maybe in 1994 with Popper's Myth of the Framework, or Chomsky saying postmodernism consists of nothing but truisms and has no real content. 

No doubt earlier, but because that conversation is ongoing it has enabled a lot of conversations to start that shouldn't have.

This post on the other hand is over.