If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
If I did that to my 13yrs old, she would not know about when her friends are organizing to meet up. Simple as that. They usually agree on going to visit one of them or local center in chat group. And since they are young, it is all spontaneous "lets go now" kind of thing.
A kid that cant use a phone will sit home alone while others meet up. And I am actually glad my 13 years old has friend group she does in person things with.
1.) What is the exact way to contact people via phone if those people do not have phone?
2.) And yes, organization among 12 years old means that someone writes "lets do X" and other write back "cool". Those available show up. Those not available sometimes talk back and negotiate different time.
3.) If 5 12-16 years old kids organize in a group chat, not being on that chat means missing out spontaneously organized actions. Even if they are unusually serious and recall to call your parents instead of just jumping into action, you are not there to have input into agreements. So, the meetup will be when you are not available and it will be too late for you.
4.) And yes, even among adults, if others have to jump through special hoops to join you specifically whereas everyone else does not have such requirement ... you will miss out.
Yes, 12-14 years old act on impulse and organized spontaneously without creating org chart around it. That means forgetting to do extra steps so that people not being in chat even know what you are about to do.
> alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features
Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.
Alcohol and cigarettes are bad for you but we've decided that when you turn 18 you have the freedom to ruin your own life. (But not with LSD, for some reason)
We fear that these drugs have developmental impacts but beyond that we also forbid them in restaurants and indoor environments quite generally even for adults. So adult usage is tolerated in their own home or in the outdoor public environment (although some further restrictions apply here).
I am sympathetic to the idea that social media may also have social development impacts separate from their negative social impacts, but my experience in life is that actually people appear to socially degenerate with overexposure. Thus we probably need some regulation analogous to forbidding smoking in restaurants but for social media or limiting gambler's access. But indeed, maybe on top of that we also need bans for minors.
> But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
The article considers exactly that.
> Similarly, in an international study that looked at 7 to 15 year old children across 16 different countries they found that most english-speaking countries were in the lowest autonomy tier (12th- Ireland, 13th- Australia, 16th- South Africa). Americans weren’t surveyed, but countries like Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Denmark scored the highest on autonomy.
These countries are considered because they would generally be considered roughly as safe as one another (generally safer than America). These countries are the counterexample to your hypothesis: you can simultaneously have safe and independent children.
Certainly you pay a price for lifetimes but you buy compile time race condition detection via the borrow checker's aliasing-xor-mutability enforcement. So all that is happening is the complexity of concurrency is being made explicit and therefore easier to reason about. Many applications can be architected in a way that wouldn't ever trigger a race, so for people working on that it isn't something they would need to reason about and they can call it unneeded complexity. This is the simpler vs. simplistic distinction also made in the article. If you can be simplistic, garbage collection is less cognitively demanding, but if you are designing race free algorithms with shared memory then rust will be. I do believe more developers and applications live in the former.
The better example actually comes from the article: returning a struct and an iterator over that struct isn't possible in rust. Heck, initializing a struct to return an iterator might lead to issues. Most people will encounter this before needing a linked list and the lesson it teaches will help out with the linked list.
Rust doesn't promise that your safe Rust doesn't have race conditions only specifically that it doesn't have the one very weird kind of race condition from computers with no analogue to the real world, a Data Race.
An ordinary race condition would be e.g. you put the cat out of the front door, then you walk to the kitchen and close that door - well, the cat might race around the outside of the house and get in first. Our world has race conditions, Rust doesn't solve them, take appropriate care.
A data race is much stranger, it's caused by a difference between how humans think about programming ("Sequential consistency" ie time's arrow X causes Y, therefore Y happens after X) and how the machine works (a modern multi-core computer does not exhibit this consistency) maybe you and your house mate both pick up the cat and she tries to put it out the kitchen door, you try to put it out the front door, this seems to work fine mostly but then on Tuesday the cat explodes, everything is covered in cat fur, messy. Rust actually has a whole layer of extra stuff beyond the aliasing-XOR-mutability to prevent this mistake because humans struggle to reason properly about software which loses sequential consistency so it almost doesn't matter what it "means" if this is lost.
> In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from [...] knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand.
Of course I mean data race, most people in such a thread will implicitly understand that is the race meant. Nobody building a webshop with limited supplies wants to prevent "first come first served", it barely makes sense to think about preventing that kind of race
Data races have obvious real world analogues, they are just so obvious people naturally synchronize. You can look over someone's shoulder while they update a paper master copy and observe data tearing as they erase a field and start writing in another value while that is inconsistent with the rest of the form. It is easy to see that data is being modified and wait until the writer is complete instead of memorizing a partial update and walking away to make decisions on the basis of the incomplete information. A good mutex/rwlock is like having a private separate room to go into to make the update so that no overeager person can even observe the partial update (some languages have non callback style mutexes so there the mutex/lock is the analogue of the visual cue that someone is performing the update). I don't find this at all strange to consider. In a concurrent system it is just all too easy to forget that there are other threads (analogue of people) reading/modifying at the same time. So rust makes that manifest through the borrow checker and it becomes obvious.
Rust prevents more than just data races. Even in single threaded code, if you have a reference to a struct (without explicitly choosing interior mutability), you are guaranteed that its value has not changed since the last time you read it, despite other parts of the code having a reference to it. You don't need to make defensive copies. Some people may find this useful, but generally it won't be enough to convince someone to drop their current language in favor of rust. This transfers into multi-threaded code as well: only a single thread can make modifications to a struct through a reference xor as many threads as you want can read from the struct with references. You can easily write go/java/python programs that have these features and so don't feature data races, but they are difficult to reason about: how do you know that there is only a single reference featuring mutation or many threads only reading? The answer requires non-local knowledge which is difficult to reason about and this is enough for some people to consider rust where the answer is local (defined by the variable).
No they don't, as you handily illustrated by offering no actual data race analogies but instead managing to confuse loss of atomicity with a data race. It's OK though, so long as you write only safe Rust you can't blow your own foot off even though you didn't understand how the explosives work.
And actually people write other race conditions all the time, particularly ToCToU races are very common, and as I explained Rust doesn't prevent those - although a Rust library you're using might go out of its way to be friendly by directing you away from them as Rust's own file system stdlib functions do.
We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.
One can probably can have a better communication with, say a dog, than a sever autist or someone in the state of deep coma.
We don’t apply our ethics based on the communication (or same-language ability) but instead on an arbitrary selection. That selection evolved recently to includes a wider set of humans (anti-racism and feminism). Antispecism is an interesting view as it state a the specie itself (humans /dogs/caw/cat/chicken…) isn’t a valid denominator to define what is ethic what isn’t.
We definitely apply our ethics and premise it based upon communication.
Given a stranger, all I can do is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and make assumptions about how they want to be treated. This will be generally more successful given my broader exposure to the world or if they are from the same culture as me but individual differences can be stark. After some interactions where they can make their preferences known to me I can then follow the better precept of, "Treat others how they want to be treated," assuming the actions required of me are not especially burdensome and I can find compromises with them otherwise.
I have an easier time imagining a severe autist in a consensual BDSM relationship than that I could believe that someone knows that their dog actually likes being slapped. I have an easier time believing this because an autist in abstract may have some communication problems but it is not impossible for them to make their preferences known. These are both so hypothetical though, real situations would require much context of which communication forms a basis (I am not saying we don't understand dogs at all, just that the gap is large).
There is no real anti-specism. What there is the proposition that a central nervous system is a prerequisite for consciousness and from that stems moral value (few people argue that we shouldn't enslave and consume members of the Brassica species). But even then, few of the staunchest vegans are against pesticides or anti-parasitic medication, how many animals (insects) must die to bring one carrot to my table? I don't know the answer but it will always be more than 0. Meanwhile, it is instead possible to believe that the guinea worm has as much inherent moral value as a human but that it is ethical for humans to try to eradicate the guinea worm completely.
Regarding antispeciesism you're conflating two different concepts (although you may have you own opinion):
1. antispeciesism = rejecting discrimination based solely on species membership.
2. all living beings having exactly the same moral value.
Most anti-speciesists defend (1), not (2). Anti-speciesism also doesn’t imply that killing animals is always wrong, most people instead reason in terms of reducing suffering/benefiting interests, and proportionality. You can believe a guinea worm has moral worth and still think eradicating it is justified because of the suffering it causes.
And the “insects die for carrots” point is not really a problem specific to veganism, since animal agriculture typically requires even more crops, land use, and indirect animal deaths. Also there's vegans that are speciesists and anti-speciesists that aren't vegan. Those concepts intersects but are not strictly equal.
I'm not sure to understand your other points but strongly agree communication helps to grow ethics and gain empathy. However it's not absolutely required as seen with the exemples of comas, mute, newborn, or as you mentioned someone of a different culture or language. I hardly understand how is it "impossible for [the dogs] to make their preferences known" especially in the situation of being slapped. Perhaps I missed you point because that contradict all my interaction with dogs and gods's owners.
Have you met someone who claimed that their dog liked being slapped? When I imagine such a situation I imagine a person who is just excusing abuse because of the priors in my life, I have an easy time imagining this since I have encountered more than one such person. Impossible is probably too strong of a word, but I mean that you must interpret their behavior and interpretation is to me more a form of estimation not knowing, these examples are intended to show that non-verbal communication is still deficient when compared to a person with problems with verbal communications. Whether it is ok (ethical) to slap another individual that hasn't done anything to you is dependent on knowing their preferences and that takes communication and hence we apply our ethics based on communications.
"Insects die for carrots," is a problem for vegans who base their preference on the idea that killing any animal is wrong for sustenance. A person willing to kill a cow because they like the way the flesh tastes or finds it more nourishing simply isn't going to see a problem with an insect dying for a carrot. One person is holding themself to a higher standard and therefore is vulnerable to this critique. Animals need to die so that we may live, people quibble about where the line should be drawn but the line exists for almost everyone (excluding the Jain vegetarians, but practically speaking it exists for everyone).
I am not so much conflating those two as arguing that a) anti-specism much like freedom of speech has all kinds of caveats built in and isn't absolute even in the few people that would preach it, b) anti-specism doesn't form a basis for ethics because there are more absolute truths that override it but also render it unnecessary.
Fair enough. I see your point on the limits of interpretation and how any philosophie ends up being somewhat arbitrary.
You still choose a frame (eg: "killing any animal is wrong"), then show that frame is irrational and deduct that the while group is wrong. Classical strawmaning, although I'm sure that's not your intent. "Animals needing to die" as a practical truth is not a problem for vegans, you're arguing alone here. However many people thinks suffering is not desirable and act accordingly to minimise it. You're free to critic though.
I understand better your second explication: there's not more absolute anti-specism than absolute freedom of speech. I find more interesting the "All models are wrong, but some are useful" perspective as it helps interacting with the world, but in a theorical land you're probably right.
Rarely do people get the right takeaway from this effect. Take a normal bottle of red wine and some top tier, swap them around so the ordinary is in the expensive bottle and vice versa. Serve them. People prefer the ordinary wine in the expensive bottle.
Bad takeaway: taste is meaningless.
Good takeaway: qualia depends on many contextual cues beyond the obvious.
Part of the appreciation of Monet is the fact that it was made by Monet. The art pieces 4′33″ or Black Square are early examples of this within the are world. Many pieces will have you saying, my 8 year old could have done this, so why is this piece famous? Critiques and appreciation are often not literal because we cannot properly express these subconscious effects.
Exactly - context is everything in art, in how it's experienced and how it is created.
I think it's important to note that a jpg of Monet is not fully experiencing the painting in any sense. Colours will not be accurately captured, the texture, the framing, the scale - it's sort of like getting a heavily watered down version of the expensive wine, saying it's cheap wine, and asking what people think.
This reminds me the day I went to see in person Starry Night Over The Rhone.
I am not exactly an art person, but I once was explained why that painting is a big deal, the whole impasto thing, etc.
I get there and there's an horde of morons taking selfies next to the painting, and another horde of morons taking photos of the painting. I just wanted to observe a bit the depth of the carved layers of ink and how light reflected on them.
Why bother taking a photo when I can find professional high definition photos of it online?
In the end I was unable to observe anything. It was sort of a let down, and the experience made me hate people a wee bit more than before. Nobody wanted to fucking look at the painting.
I love deeply observing paintings and also love taking a photo while in a museum. It helps me remember the details and review like spaced repetition the things I saw, or spend more time observing nuance later. Are many people ticking boxes? Probably, but the issue is the too many people. Even with people just looking, I feel uncomfortable spending time if there’s a line.
> The act of taking photos of paintings in museums is meaningless.
No. I found some paintings I liked in a museum and took photos of them with a serious-at-the-time camera and uploaded them to wikimedia and found the endeavour worthwhile. Not all the paintings are super-famous and been scanned at infinite resolution!
This is why John Cage's 4'33" mentioned above is genius. If you listen to the composition with sincerity and seriousness, you get the full, unadulterated (non-silent) experience as opposed to an interpretation.
I feel really sorry for people that find context is key for art.
For them often context is more important than the actual art. Lie about the context and their view of art changes completely. I would say these people have objectively bad taste in art. These are the worst kinds of people.
In respect to your point about jpeg, you could have had a jpeg marked as real and one ai, and you would have had all the same comments about how the real jpeg was much better for all kinds of reasons. There is going to be almost zero chance anyone commented how they did due to it being a JPEG, vs them thinking it was ai.
Yes and no. Whilst I agree with your broad point, the point being made here is largely that the people dumping on the "AI" Monet are claiming objectivity about their opinions. And in many cases claiming that it's obvious to anyone with an eye for such things.
My 2 cents is that qualia is definitely a fancy way to say “opinions”. As in:
“My opinion is that this brand is good because others have told me it is. My opinion is that it is expensive because it must in fact be good. The bottle looks old, therefore it is old, which means it must be good because anything good takes time. Everyone has told me how this is amazing, so I need to ensure my refined palette can identify the blah…blah..”
Opinions all the way down, rarely ever based on concrete objectivity. Even for Monet.
In abstract you take the same paintings, stick them in some old dead dudes attic in Nowhere, Montana because he just did them for fun, I’d be surprised if they even ended up at a yard sale.
And that is the point. Value is entirely subjective and built through opinions. If your opinion begins with “I don’t like this,” you don’t tend to then overlook the same characteristics you willingly ignored or even embellished when you believed you are expected to like said thing.
I think far closer is “people want to be part of the in-group”.
Closer yet is “look at me! I am sexy and cool! Have sex with me!”.
“Taste” is social signalling, end to end, so strike me down.
I say this as someone who gets writeups of their work in design magazines fairly often - and I am not a designer - it’s just like dressing a theatre set with the correct objects to signal the thing you want to signal.
Fuck, I fed people cat food at a dinner party when I was 20 and they all said it was delicious pâté.
I suspect this particular painting wouldn't do particularly well anytime you remove the framing of "this is a genuine Monet". It's not one of Monet's best. Monet would almost certainly agree.
Some of the comments reflect this, critiquing the art for what it is, not for who it is from. But at the same time a lot of them clearly go in with the mindset that they don't like it, then try to rationalize that with art critique.
I heard about an experiment on some podcast where they switched organ donation to opt-in from opt-out and before and after the change they interviewed people coming out of the DMV and asked them _why_ they chose to or chose not to be an organ donor.
No one said -- Oh that's just what the default option was.
Everyone had a thought out reasoned answer why they did what they did. But the data showed none of them did that and they in fact just did what the default was and justified their choice afterwards.
I wish I could remember/find the podcast but I haven't been able to. It feels like an old freakonomics but I don't think it is.
The point is that "part" of the appreciation appears here to be all of the appreciation.
Yes, the context of who created a piece of art will have an affect on how you interpret it. But if the question of who/what created it can literally flip your interpretation between "it's genius" and "it's garbage", then that's the only thing you care about. All the actual characteristics of the thing itself are irrelevant. And if literally the only thing that matters about art is who created it, what exactly is the point of art?
Id argue that your dichotomy in of itself requires context.
While the idea that qualia depends on contextual cues might be valuable to understand how culture evolves, it's also indicative that that these cultural phenomena evolve to preserve in group/out group dynamics.
It's not so much, "taste is meaningless" and more, "taste is an arbitrary construction." These kinds of tests are the natural tools of the cynics and satirists of the world.
Critics and purveyors of the Fine Arts and Refined Tastes tend to get a little "up their own asses" about the things that they like.
So, while I agree that the framing of "taste is meaningless" is a bad take, it's valid to point out that there's natural humor here.
This kind of playful mockery is as old as the arts themselves. See: Diogenes.
As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.
Professional communication has a completely different goal than a student essay, and it's weird you conflate the two. A student paper is useless as an artifact, the actual value is for the student to learn how to write the paper. If a coworker sends me a long email for me to read it should provide some actual value.
I'm arguing against people who essentially say that running the LLM is useless; just send the prompt.. Obviously that is true if the person does zero additional value add, but then that person probably sucked as a colleague before LLMs anyway. When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise. Especially if the agent is automatically fed your personal context.
An essay states a hypothesis and then uses first and second party sources to validate it. I'm not conflating anything, it's just a good abstract example of the type of knowledge synthesis work, which is why we make kids do them.
A business strategy proposal is nothing more than a specific type of essay where the research sources are internal research results, market trend analysis, etc.
A technical design doc is an essay about the best way to implement a feature.
An "executive summary" is just an abstract, and the MBR puts the latest research citations and raw results in bullet points.
> When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise.
So send me the prompt and the three extra paragraphs that you wrote. The improved LLM will generate the additional context for me if I need it. But heck, maybe I wrote that context myself or have read it many times and don't need it parroted back to me.
The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.
>Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.
Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.
Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment.
The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.
I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them
I am talking about the psychological effect, not the accounts being banned. Accounts pretending to be e.g. bona-fide Red State MAGA Americans are not going to successfully manipulate the American populace or move MAGA merchandise if the name "Ramesh Sharma" or "Goodluck Ngozi" or whatever is shown on every one of the account's posts.
Wouldn't "Ramesh Sharma" just file a name change form with the government and hence be known as "John Smith" when they create their account?
And even that is assuming they need the same person to be writing the posts as lending their name. They could also pay a homeless person or food service worker in Kentucky to sign up for the account and still have a troll farm in another country writing the posts.
The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users
What part of that requires anonymity? You pay some broke college students or unemployed dog washers to shill (or let someone else shill) for the big accounts under their name.
There is not only a massive supply of such people, they have high turnover as the seniors graduate but the new freshmen are broke again and the unemployment rate is fairly stable but the specific people distressed enough to sign their name for a buck are constantly in flux, so it doesn't even matter if they get banned.
How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.
Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there.
For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.
As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.
> Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out
This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.
This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening...
It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.
There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...
The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...
Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.
The belief isn't unjustified though. One of the defining elements of a government is aggression. Spending resources to force someone (specially with violence) to something is more wasteful than if they were to do it by themselves. Furthermore, most, if not all, cited inefficiencies are linked somewhere to distortions created by government action.
That being said, I do agree that there's a dangerous apathy about how the free markets work. The free market, being the product of voluntary action, is anything but automatic.
But I don't see how that is a scapegoating mechanism for "anything you don't like". Anymore than apathy is, at least. I see human rights (specially the right to live and private ownership) being used as scapegoats much more often.
"Entities with more resources" are not necessarily bad, as you seem to assume. In reality, they're not aligned with eachother. This is just as true for nation states as it is for individuals.
When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship to survive.
You're not describing a world of freedom and opportunity. You're describing a world where anyone with money can do whatever they want without consequences.
The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.
The world I'm describing is one where anyone, rich and poor, can say whatever they want without being silenced or persecuted, without fear. People with more resources will have the means to make themselves louder in public as they do now, but unlike the situation we have right now, they will not be able to monitor other people's private conversations, nor can they censor and compell other people's speech. That's a world of more freedom and opportunity.
The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols. Ideas will clash, leaving only what people think is good in common. And that is the definition of the common good.
Do you have any better ideas? Or do you think that you possess the superior definition of "good" such that public discourse to search for it is unnecessary?
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
> The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols
This does not match reality. Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion. If you think they cancel each other out you're living in a fantasy.
> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
The solution, presuming said law to be fair, is to make a world where no one has to sleep under bridges, to beg on the streets and steal their bread. Not getting rid of the rule of law. Of course, that presumes said law to be fair (aside from the last part, it isn't).
> Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion.
Most people share goals, understand the benefits of collaboration, and exploitable conflicts still arise. The problem isn't caused by a lack of shared goals, but the presence of conflicting ones. Even just one can inhibit collaboration and induce sabotage. After all, there is no long-term collaboration to be had if your goals are mutually exclusive.
Also, it think it bears reminding that the alternative, regulation, is enforced through a powerful corporation that is structurally much harder to hold accountable (despite best efforts, although it was always a non-starter), the state.
> But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion.
How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.
I rarely receive messages from kindly anti-propaganda bots, but sure receive a lot of messages from actual propaganda that bypass filters and infect everything like cockroaches.
Assuming that otherwise won’t happen is a basic failure to understand humanity. Spend a few hours with middle school boys and after observing their behavior, try to determine if your protocols will withstand that goofiness, naivety, rudeness, absurdness, sensitivity, callousness, puerileness, unpredictability, and rambunctiousness.
As a parent to several, I see how educational institutions (school) whose job it is to be experts at this exact behavior are failing catastrophically by not understanding this very basic idea. If your protocol something that is designed for well meaning people with good behavior who trust one another, it probably won’t work to well when given to middle schoolers and will work even worse when someone with the slightest bit of malice gets a hold of it.
> How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.
Those are centrally controlled systems where propangandists have home field advantage (email is debatable, it's halfway, it wasn't designed with the existence of companies like Google in mind). But even if that wasn't the case, it's not the same phenomenon as bots on social media. The important difference is that on social media, if there is no central moderation, the bots will cancel out eachother's influence. If I make an anti-propaganda email bot, it doesn't lower the ranking of the propaganda that's already in your inbox. But if I have an upvoting bot for their downvoting bot, they neutralize eachother.
Also, ensuring that nobody except the participants of group chats and DMs can figure out eachother's real identity is already a massive win. That alone makes it a lot harder to beat a population into submission.
Do you also suggest to make it illegal to pay someone to publish certain posts/texts? And plan on enforcing this somehow worldwide? Because otherwise, if I have the money to make someone post my opinions, I already have twice the influence of everyone who doesn't have that money. And there are people who have the resources of entire nation states at their disposal and have a big incentive to influence public discourse in their favour.
There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...
All available evidence points to it being an incremental improvement at best. Higher claims are attributable to the psychological effect of the AI sycophancy problem which erases the Dunning-Kruger effect and makes even experts extremely overconfident.
You still have to read the output of your LLM. Learning by reading alone and not doing is not nearly as effective.
I think that callbacks are actually easier to reason about:
When it comes time to test your concurrent processing, to ensure you handle race conditions properly, that is much easier with callbacks because you can control their scheduling. Since each callback represents a discrete unit, you see which events can be reordered. This enables you to more easily consider all the different orderings.
Instead with threads it is easy to just ignore the orderings and not think about this complexity happening in a different thread and when it can influence the current thread. It isn't simpler, it is simplistic. Moreover, you cannot really change the scheduling and test the concurrent scenarios without introducing artificial barriers to stall the threads or stubbing the I/O so you can pass in a mock that you will then instrument with a callback to control the ordering...
The problem with callbacks is that the call stack when captured isn't the logical callstack unless you are in one of the few libraries/runtimes that put in the work to make the call stacks make sense. Otherwise you need good error definitions.
You can of course mix the paradigms and have the worst of both worlds.
In another part of the thread, you lament the use of callbacks. May I ask you what you think async/await is, except syntactic sugar that wraps around the callback pattern?
The attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
Conjecture is precisely why you don’t understand the test. Bias is the point! Binary choice is how you derive it. No answer is not an answer. How do you not see this? Any conjecture on anything but the two options defeats the entire point of the test. The test is to find your bias towards blue or green. Cake or death.
I don't have the bias towards green that the "test" suggests for the very reason I pointed out. I and others understand the perspective of the test but you don't seem to understand how it fails to meet its own goal since you are caught up in browbeating people that are trying to explain it to you.
If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
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