I’d like to add that the drive to promote local cultures was in large part formal, but very, very influential. I can talk about its repercussions in culture, for example.

Every national republic (and, note, all the Soviet republics were markedly NATIONAL republics, formed as a reflection of their ehtnic and cultural identity and ostensibly out of respect for such) was provided their own program for development of national culture.

Building or rebuilding this national ethnic culture was mandatory, and every republic was expected to institute local ethnic ensembles, orchestras, dancing troupes, theaters, and most importantly film studios that would create uniquely national, ethnic content, to preserve and promote their ethnic culture.

In practical terms, this meant that every republic, even small ones, could expect to have their own subsidied philarmony, a well-funded main national dancing and music ensemble, a national theatre, and a national film studio. These created employment opportunities both for just creative professionals and local ethnic culture enthusiasts. Their output was not consistent, but they were never out of work: the proclaimed support for ethnic cultures of the USSR meant that every national holiday or foreign visit, all of the republics had to send in their best (dancing troupes, orchestras, ethnic bands, performers etc.) to the capital to perform as a demonstration of the Friendship of the Nations (the core concept of the Soviet Union).

Also printing and editing houses, music schools, and museums got a lot of work out of it: they were obliged to regularly publish new compilations of ethnic songs, folklore, and other material, and develop the official ethnic culture in other ways. As for ethnic film studios, they made movies about the respective culture to the best of their abilities, some badly, some brilliantly. For example, Georgian cinema very quickly became its own idiosyncratic phenomenon for the film history books (I mean it, their cinema is georgeous), and, e. g. Buryatian national cinema remained a local curiosity (my own father was a prominent Buryatian film director, and not a bad one - I saw several of his movies and they’re proficient). Another weird example is the Moldovan national cinema: an enterprising director Emil Lotyanu (actually Lototskyi, an Ukrainian) who wasn’t actually ethnic Moldovan filmed an EXTREMELY popular drama about Moldovan gypsies there, with kickass songs, beautiful production design, and sexy leads, which cemented his place as THE Moldovan director for all time and launched a few Union-wide careers (like Sophia Rotaru, who is still popular in Russia).

All of this had a very mixed effect on the culture of constituent ethnicities of USSR. On one hand, it was a kind of celebration of their culture. On the other, the mandatory and restrictive nature of the government request for this ethnic culture also made it formal and stripped it of actual real ethnographic truth.

Even the Russian culture suffered the same fate. Every Russian song got shortened in popular reprintings and performances to 3-4 verses — even though most actual classic Russian folk songs last for dozens of verses. But this real ethnographic practice didn’t fit the official concert format. So the extra verses were cut. This led to songs that are basically meaningless: for example, a song “A lone birch stood in a field” is actually about a maid married off to an unloved older husband, with a long description of a pagan ritual of breaking an cutting birch branches and making flutes out of them, and then going to the house and offering various improper things to a husband to use, to mock him. And also a long circle dance song (so a performative song for a ritual). But the couple of verses you could actually hear in concerts and on Soviet TV and radio never told you that, you just knew that it’s a rather sad song about a birch that someone had broken. It literally lost all its meaning. And this was considered preserving ethnic culture. Similar things happened with non-Russian ethnic cultures in USSR: generously funded, supported, but only formally. Next article: 202005151928 Part 5 - Soviet union

February 22, 2023

To start, let’s look at some documentation– how did the Soviet Union set out, or at least claim to set out to address issues of discrimination as they relate to ethnic (again, non-Russian) minorities?

Well, according to the Constitution of the Soviet Union (1936), anti-discriminatory policy was a pretty big deal:

Article 123. Equality of rights of citizens of the USSR, irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law. [1]

Likewise, Trotsky, Stalin, and Lenin (among others of course) debated around this idea that they called the National Question. Essentially the matter is this: what role does nationality play in revolution? If you want to read about this debate in more detail, I talk about it at some length in this answer, but fundamentally, the entire early Soviet platform with respect to the National Question could be summarized by the terse statement that discrimination along ethnic lines was bad. I realize how blasé it sounds to put it like that, but the reason I mention it at all is simply to state again that racist, anti-ethnic, or otherwise similarly discriminatory policy was considered anathema to the Soviets before, during, and after the creation of their workers’ paradise. Coupled with the excerpt from the Constitution above, I think we can all agree combating racialized discrimination was at least on the Bolshevik radar if not completely at the fore (note though that that the racial equality clause doesn’t appear until Article 123). Again, I’ll point you to that aforementioned answer for more detail but the Bolsheviks more or less sought to eliminate the idea of ethnicity and nationality entirely because they saw it as a tool used by the bourgeoisie to divide the proletariat and thereby make the former easier to control– i.e. it’s ethnicity B’s fault ethnicity A is poor! That general line of thinking was challenged to some extent by Iosef Stalin who underlined the need for different ethnicities to ‘experience the revolution’ in their own way, but he was not openly a racist or a perpetrator of racial discrimination in his early years. Quite the opposite in fact. His anti-racist bona fides were so solid one of his early roles in the Bolshevik leadership was that of the head of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities– whose sole function was the reconciliation with and advocacy for non-Russian nationalities in the RSFSR and USSR.

Okay, so we have a document-based foundation, but I’m sure anyone reading this would rightly challenge the notion that just because something is written down in a constitution doesn’t mean it’s going to be enforced in any meaningful way. So now we have to consider some of the actual practices of the Soviet government vis-a-vis ethnic minorities writ large. In short, the evidence is fairly damning. This answer I worked on talks about the Holodomor specifically, but there is also mention of numerous instances of brutal, racialized oppression: mass deportations of minorities, effective enslavement for others, suppression of undesirable cultures, in short– racism in every sense of the word. The Holodomor alone, whether genocide or not– as discussed in that question, is a demonstration of targeted, racial violence. Nearly everything mentioned in that answer is specific to Stalin’s reign, though Decossackization was Leninist policy as well. To name a few others in no order of magnitude or travesty:

• Operation Ulusy: around 100,000 Kalmyks were deported from the north Caspian Sea region to Siberia for being anticommunist Buddhists. Resisters were shot.
• Operation Lentil: around 500,000 Caucasus peoples (like Chechens and Ingush, among others) were deported from their mountainous homeland to Siberia. Resisters were shot.
• Operation Priboi: around 100,000 Baltic peoples (like Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians) were deported from their homeland to Siberia. Resisters were shot.
• Though not given an official operational name, tens of thousands of Chinese were relocated to GULag sites or deported from the country altogether based on their supposed loyalty to the Republic of China (at war with the Chinese Red Army). Resisters were shot.

These are all examples of what we’d call today overt racism and those are just four, but you get the idea– I intentionally chose distinct ethnic groups as well: i.e. Baltic people would generally be identified as ‘white,’ Chinese people as ‘Asian,’ Caucasus people as ‘Turkic,’ and Kalmyk people as ‘native.’ Soviet racism was, to put it perhaps far too crudely, non-discriminatory. This was not an uncommon occurrence in glorious post-racial Soviet Union, and never once repeated unto ethnic Russians. There were never mass deportations of Russians based on their Russian-ness. There are plenty of other examples though that occurred both before and after Stalin’s reign.

You specifically mention African-Americans being propagandized to concerning the discrimination they faced in the capitalist United States and there’s a great incident at a factory in Stalingrad,1930, which underlines the apparent paradoxes of Soviet power vis-a-vis ethnic minorities. The background of the story is this: in the 1920s and 1930s, American industrialist Henry Ford (almost unbelievably) cooperated with the government of the Soviet Union to build Ford automobile factories in the latter industrializing nation, and even provided American engineers and workers to aid in the project. Other individual workers chose to emigrate of their own accord for a variety of reasons. To talk about all of the underpinnings and subtleties of the dealing here would take ages, but as it relates to this question, the key point is that a certain factory in Stalingrad employed a number of European American engineers as well as one African American engineer alongside Soviet engineers. Two of these (white) engineers had a significant physical altercation with the single darker-skinned employee on the job which was clearly racially motivated– slurs, targeting, repetition, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. They were arrested and the Soviet Union launched a huge, propagandized trial against the two men (identified as Messrs. Lewis and Brown). The USSR really went all out here. Robert Robinson (the victim of the attack) was portrayed as a proletariat hero who survived the oppression of his adopted homeland (he had immigrated from Jamaica), escaped to the Soviet Union, and even still was pursued by the racism of America. Not an unfair description at all actually. During the Great Depression, when the Soviet Union was still in its infancy, many (mostly, but not exclusively, black) Americans who sympathized with the ideals postulated by Lenin et al. or desirous for better opportunity than what the United States of the time had to offer had likewise fled the capitalist USA and expatriated to the socialist USSR. Some of these people had entered the Soviet political machine via party membership and they were brought to the fore (despite holding minor, if any, political offices) during the trial to show people in the west (and indeed, in the Soviet Union) how progressive the Soviet Union was (this was largely before much of the aforementioned racial violence had either occurred or become well-known). Lewis and Brown were deported from the Soviet Union back to America but not imprisoned. According to SUNY professor Meredith Roman (who is uniquely qualified to comment here considering the thesis which earned her a PhD was titled Another Kind of ‘Freedom’: The Soviet Experiment With Antiracism and Its Image as a ‘Raceless’ Society), the reasoning was as follows:

On a practical level, deportation signaled a return to the vast unemployment and hunger of the depression-ridden United States. Symbolically, expulsion sent a message to the large number of (noncommunist) American workers […]: racists belonged in a racist society. [2]

Next article: 202005151926 Part 3 - Soviet union

February 22, 2023

How were people of different ethnicity treated in the Soviet Union?

This is a really big question for several reasons but primarily because when talking about something like how peoples of various ethnic backgrounds were perceived and treated in a nation-state like the Soviet Union, one has to take into consideration something called intersectionalism. You’ll see this word floating around in places where these kinds of issues are studied and discussed but it’s started to become one that is more recognizable in the mainstream of some societies– what it means in the context of this question though is that making some kind of broad statement that encapsulates how, for example, Chechens would be perceived and treated within the Soviet Union is nigh impossible because it requires that one unpack literal centuries of history concerning Chechen and Russian relations, but likewise an equivalent amount of history for Chechen and Dagestani relations, Chechen and Armenian relations, Chechen and Georgian relations, and on and on and on. History doesn’t just disappear overnight because you’re ostensibly a communist now. To give a truly holistic and complete answer to your question is the stuff of which PhDs are made.

As you can imagine, that means a question like this which is seeking a straightforward answer concerning the treatment and perception of all minorities within the USSR (which had 69 officially recognized nationalities and more like 200 self-identified nationalities) scales up to be an absolutely enormous question the moment one sets out to answer it. Literal volumes have been written on this subject. Literal volumes have been written about a single ethnic group’s conflicts with the other ethnic groups in its own region. Literal volumes have been written about a single ethnicity as it relates to another single ethnicity within an even smaller region. I would never claim that I’ve read near enough material or done near enough research to truly, completely answer this question to the extent that it could be done. As such, in this context, intersectionalism helps us immensely by allowing the acknowledgment to be made that racism is a supremely complicated issue and provides the recognition of the collisions that occur between multiple forms of oppression or discrimination that inevitably occur when you’re talking about something like race relations in a country of nearly 200 million people and over a millennium of recorded history. We need to be mindful of it and consciously address it before trying to answer (what I’m hypothesizing is) your underlying question which (to nitpick, I’m sorry) can be more explicitly stated thus:

How did the government of the Soviet Union treat non-Russian ethnicities and/or did the average Russian Soviet citizen harbor intense racial biases or prejudices against his or her Soviet compatriots?

This question becomes even further fraught with complication given that ‘Russian’ is also obviously not synonymous with all other quote-unquote white Slavic races in and around Russia– that is, Belorussian, Ukrainian, etc. So again, while to someone who is looking in from the outside, a Ukrainian will present essentially as a Russian, or Belorussian, or otherwise, the fact is that within these groups, there is huge amounts of dissent about how distinct or indistinct they truly are from one another.

So, okay, sorry for the entire windup there but it’s important to give some space to other writers who might have something to contribute concerning, perhaps, how a specific minority ethnic group experienced specific discrimination (or lack thereof) in the Soviet Union instead of my answer which, as I implied above, is going to talk about the concept of non-Russian ethnicity in a generalized way that is absolutely not correct or even applicable and relevant 100% of the time. Next article: 202005151925 Part 2 - Soviet union

uid: 202005151924 tags: #literature

February 22, 2023

These thoughts are based on me having a fairly unproductive work week, and things that I can do to correct the issue.

• Get all the unproductivity out of the way, early on in the day. Don’t feel like this mix of being productive and unproductive, where you’ve tried to be productive throughout, but then you have difficulty focusing afterwards, and you’re still trying to be productive by focusing on other things, that are distracting you from your task at hand.
• When you’re feeling unproductive, just go downstairs and run around with the basketball, shooting hoops or anything to get your blood flowing.
• Stick to a more regular routine, rather than coming down to eat earlier and earlier. That causes you to lose steam faster, I’ve noticed. That means that you should probably drink milk in the morning, so that you can last longer in the day. I’ve been doing that though, and still having issues with this. I think I need to disable all my notifications, so I don’t see the messages about food, and I’m not tempted.
• In general, understand the fact that you will lose energy a bit throughout the day, and structure your routine to take advantage of that. Potentially do more menial tasks, that don’t require as much brainpower, later on in the day, while make sure I am only doing productive stuff during the day.
• Related to that, don’t do any inbox processing while at work. At least to the extent that I’m currently accustomed to the system, which isn’t very high, I still get distracted while I’m processing, and I tend to lose my focus a bit
• When I’m adding new stuff to my inbox, only mark stuff that I have to look at today as today, and nothing else. Then, I can look at the stuff I have to deal with, organize/categorize it first, and deal with the rest of the stuff later when I have more time to formally process everything.
• When you decide to do stuff from your task list instead of doing the task at hand, make sure you’re sure that the task will take two minutes or less. A lot of the loss of focus comes from your brain thinking that “okay, I’m doing this other task, but it’ll be fine I’ll be back to the original task in just a sec”, and that ends up not happening, so your brain starts to expect less and less that you’ll come back to the original task.

uid: 202005142042 tags: #productivity #selfgrowth

February 22, 2023

Lucas’s Presentation — Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

• The length of the hydrocarbon determines whether it is methane, kerosene, or gas
  • C6 - C10 hydrocarbons, become crude oils
  • A single barrel of oil 42 gallons turn into:
    • 19 gallons of gasoline
    • 11 gallons of diesel
    • 7 gallons of other products (ink, crayons, dishwashing liquids)
    • 4 gallons of highly refined gasoline
• Svante Arrhenius was the first to posit the greenhouse gas effect (as the quantity of carbonic acid increases, temperature will increase linearly)
• Earth re-reradiates heat as blackbody radiation, GHG particles catch that heat
• Carbon dioxide PPM is in cycles (peaks and valley in a year), peak is winter in northern hemisphere, dead trees are leaking our carbon, valley is in the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere

Positive and negative feedback loops:

• Negative feedback:
  • Ocean absorbs CO2
  • More plan growth in some areas
  • Increase in dust, evaporation, volcanic activity
    • Increase in volcanic activity is because as the earth warms, glaciers melt, causing change in geologic pressures
• Positive feedback loops:
  • Poleward shift of forests
  • Drying of peatlands and methanols bubbling in permafrost
  • Decrease in biodiversity (biodiversity fixes carbon)
  • Increase in forest temperatures

Main effects of climate change (affecting humans)

• Food instability, drought, hunger
• Increase in conflict following natural disasters
  • Syrian war is a result of drought, something to follow up on
• Climate refugees
• Rightward shift in many governments of the world
• More extreme weather events
• Greater spread of disease vectors

Enter Machine Learning

Summarizing the paper

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Useful Machine Learning Techniques

9. Generative modeling: Statistical models that create simulated “observations” of real world phenomena
   • Applications:
     • Generate structural model of buildings with less carbon intense material
     • Generate energy signatures of people to help model in data poor environments
     • Dynamic price generation of grid prices to help optimize for lowered GHG emissions
10. Personalization:
    • ML grid price signals
    • NLP has been used to extract plane ticket info and shopping receipts from email to quantify a person’s carbon impact
    • Counterfactual AI has been used to create what-if scenarios
    • Psychological research - Distance from climate change psychologically is a big determinant on someone’s climate change policies
11. Digital Twin models
    • Make a good representation of machinery in a computer base, and use that representation to do (and model) things
12. Image ML
    • Precision agriculture
      • Scan for disease, yield, identify spots for fertilizer
      • There is a digital revolution going on in agriculture going on right now. (Farmers tend to like flying drones)
    • Identify and count species
    • Scan satellite photos and identify good spots for solar panels or predict good wire siting (work in India used minimum spanning trees)
    • Agriculture is fundamental to climate change: Ensuring that we have high yields is essential for making the most of the environmental consequences that are occurring
    • Can also visualize the effects of flooding on homes, can change your perception of climate change
13. Natural language processing
    • Venugopalan (2015) applied this to analyzing solar patent applications to build a general model of solar innovation
    • Provide personalized recommendations for people who want to reduce their carbon footprints
    • Analyze social media to understand discourse around climate change
    • Automated identification and scoring of climate risks in company’s public disclosures

[went to make dinner, so don’t have much information from 4-2 unfortunately]

2. Reinforcement Learning and Optimization
   • Control the charging of EVs to help stabilize price grid
3. Combinatorial ML for material discovery
   • Basically search ML, search the space of materials experiments faster

uuid: 202005072038 date: May 7, 2020 tags: #raise #presentation

February 22, 2023

Got up pretty late! Was initially going to go to Levels Cafe with Mulan, but eventually decided to go home. Before I called Akaash, I was running kind of late, but I went to Poundsavers (which was pretty cool, they have absolutely every household/kitchen supply that you could ask for, for a seemingly reasonable price to boot). I also wanted to go to Lidl afterwards, but didn’t end up going—ran back home and called Akaash. The call went pretty well, but didn’t seem like we got some significant clarity on the work we were supposed to be doing, but I guess we’ll see in our meeting later today. Afterwards, I wanted to give myself a bit of a break, so I loaded up Hearthstone—it was a pretty big mistake, because I ended up playing for a long time. At this point, I should just know that I’m good enough at arena that if I ever decide to play, it’s very unlikely that I will lose, and so I will keep playing. Therefore, when I play arena, I have to set myself a limit of like 3 games or something, which should take 15-20 min at most. I think that’s a good enough break!

After I was done playing hearthstone, I replied to everyone, including Mulan, and didn’t spend time on my essay (which was the primary urgent task that I wanted to work on), but I read this cool article by BurntSushi (the creator of ripgrep) about how to use FSMs (and by extension tries) for implementing an OrderedSet and OrderedMap.

Also read Trisha’s audiobook, which was really interesting!

Afterwards, Mulan came and I talked with her for a while, then went downstairs to hang out with the Sciennes group. We talked for a bit, played Secret Hitler, tried to figure out what to do next, did a “feelings circle” where we started talking about siblings and family-related stuff (and I brought up that Mulan recently realized that her mom is narcissistic to Kas which I probably shouldn’t have done, I’ll be sure to ask her before I do that next time. Then I played pool with Farsan and ping pong with Lorenzo (I beat him in the first game but he beat me in the second game, with two lucky shots at the end but it was pretty epic and a lot of fun).

Went back up, and sat with @mulan for about an hour while she told me different absolutely shitty experiences and stories that she could never forget, about how her parents treated her while she was younger. Something that really stuck with me was how they expected her to be an adult at such an early time in her life, which might have affected her life in more ways than you might expect (puberty, emotions, personality, etc). The story where she, as a five-year-old, didn’t look after her newborn sister enough, and her mom literally kicked her because she was so angry, is so fucked up in so many ways. I’ll remember to always consider that whenever I’m thinking about certain characteristics that she has or why she is a certain way—that kind of thing scars you for life, and I’ll never undermine the struggle that she goes through every day to put that side of things behind her.

uid: 202003100000 tags: #journal #edinburgh

February 22, 2023