Until now, I think Twitter's not-so-slight political lean has been viewed as detrimental to the company (and public discourse).
I hope the people who work at Twitter and think it is OK to bring your politics to work go elsewhere. We would all benefit from platform where telling jokes that offend only the wokest doesn't get you banned and silenced.
“the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'”
EDIT: Seems like a lot of disagreement with this, but would love to hear some compelling arguments to justify activist moderation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIwMIrj5Ulo
>I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
In other words, what you think of as moderate and not ideological is a result of your ideology itself.
For a more thorough, very academic examination of ideology, I can recommend the book The Sublime Object of Ideology.
Zizek is very ironically an ideologue himself (a "Hegelian" in his words) and as such his version of the story only contains half the lesson -- that culture, which he calls ideology because he seemingly refuses to truly understand what ideology is, lest admit he is an ideologue, can blind members of that culture to certain things, but without addressing that culture and ideology have positive aspects as well.
The man is a neverending font of faux insight and obscurantism posturing as wisdom and this quote is no different from any other.
(and it seems that includes you based on how you contrasted "status quo" and "ideology" in the other comment, as if the status quo were somehow unideological)
Invariably, topics involving "ideology" are a trap for pedants. They think they're going to get a good "gotcha!" in, but they find themselves hoisted on their own petards.
People who want Twitter to be non-ideological in reality just want it to represent some other ideology instead, they don't get to hide behind some veil of neutrality.
Or am I misunderstanding?
In Saudi Arabia, death penalty for homosexuals would be considered moderate. They would consider your attitude toward free speech around the prophet radical.
What you consider moderate is always a result of your ideology. There is no objective moderate, there is only moderate within your ideology.
That's exactly what ideology is: It determines what you perceive as "normal" or "moderate".
Relative to your ideology.
You'd be tall in Nigeria relative to the median height.
You'd be a moderate in the US and a radical in Saudi Arabia relative to the prevailing ideology.
Incorrect, not relative to one’s ideology, but relative to the implicit political context (such as “US politics” or “Saudi politics”. If it were relative to each person’s own ideology, then everyone would identify as a moderate: “My ideology is moderate relative to my ideology”.
> You'd be a moderate in the US and a radical in Saudi Arabia relative to the prevailing ideology.
This is correct, but it contradicts your earlier claim that the definition of “moderate” is itself ideological. It’s contextual but not ideological.
The ideology is the context.
To a devout Muslim, the amount of freedom of speech we have around the prophet is radical.
To a leftist, the exploitation of laborers by the capitalist class is radical.
To the religious right, LGBT rights are radical.
To racists, race mixing is radical.
The only thing that makes it seem moderate to you is your ideology.
> To a devout Muslim, the amount of freedom of speech we have around the prophet is radical. To a leftist, the exploitation of laborers by the capitalist class is radical. To the religious right, LGBT rights are radical. To racists, race mixing is radical.
Yep, you're observing that "moderate" is a relative term. Different groups have different Overton windows.
> The only thing that makes it seem moderate to you is your ideology.
No, it doesn't matter what my ideology is, it matters what context we're talking about. That context is often implicit, but that doesn't mean the notion of "moderate" is ideological. If someone says "Joe is of median height", do you leap out from behind the bushes and yell "gotcha! 'median' is an ideological term! In Nigeria Joe is tall!"? That doesn't mean "median" is an ideological term, it means that it's dependent on the context, in which case the context is probably something like "whatever country Joe lives in".
Correct. Which attribute of the population though? Their height? Their skin color? Their weight? No, their ideology.
> Different groups have different Overton windows.
What is an Overton window if not a measure of ideology?
> No, it doesn't matter what my ideology is, it matters what context we're talking about. That context is often implicit, but that doesn't mean the notion of "moderate" is ideological.
That's exactly what ideology is, "implicit context".
Right, “moderate” refers to ideology, but that doesn’t mean the meaning of the word is ideologically determined as you’ve variously claimed.
> What is an Overton window if not a measure of ideology?
Absolutely, but this supports my point against yours.
> That's exactly what ideology is, "implicit context".
Yes, correct. Again, this is all compatible with my points.
I'm not even sure what the point you're trying to make is at this point. You've agreed that "moderate" is a term relative to ideology already, so what even is it you're arguing now? If it's relative to ideology, of course it's ideological, because your definition of "moderate" will change based on ideology.
Right, that was my point from the start. "moderate" isn't an ideology by itself. When we are in a US context (irrespective of whether someone is a US progressive or a US conservative), "moderate" refers to the propensity to hew somewhat closely to the US status quo. On the other hand, you've argued that "moderate" depends on a person's ideology, and people with normative American ideologies can't talk about Saudi moderates because "moderate" would be relative to normative American ideology--of course this isn't true because I'm an American and I just referenced Saudi moderate ideologies. "moderate" doesn't depend on my ideology or normative American ideologies, but the context which I've explicitly designated as "Saudi" but it may also be implicit.
> You've agreed that "moderate" is a term relative to ideology already, so what even is it you're arguing now?
Hah, "moderate is a relative term" was my position from the start, you've changed tack from arguing that the definition of moderate ("occupying any mainstream position avoiding extreme views and major social change") is inherently ideological--it's not. It's an adjective which describes ideologies, and it's relative to some context (e.g., US politics, European politics, etc), but the definition doesn't vary based on anyone's ideology contra your claim.
Combine that with the culture that understands free speech issues in this way more generally: less from a regard for the value of liberal discourse and more for the privilege of indulgent speech, related to the idea “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” but extended into the realm of stewardship or even ownership of an entire platform. This indulgent and degraded view of free speech is required in order to understand twitter as a repressive forum as a consequence of limits on things like some trans jokes and deadnaming or even advocacy of identity-focused violence, which can only feel like repression to someone who fundamentally has nothing else of value to say.
If that seems tired to you, I’d be happy to inject more vigor.
> To be much more specific: the idea that Twitter has a free speech problem is itself immoderate and ideological.
It's ideological in the sense that "free speech is desirable" is ideological. Arguing that it's "immoderate" implies that arguing for stronger free speech protections is radical, which is untrue.
> There is an unquestionably huge range of ideas that can be not only freely but rather aggressively expressed on twitter. There is a very narrow range of speech that is disallowed and even a considerable amount of that actually gets through.
I'm not going to die on the hill of "Twitter needs to be less censorious", but free speech proponents can still legitimately find Twitter problematic even if the censors allow a lot of wrongthink through. For example, Twitter can sort replies by ideology such that wrongthink is much less likely to be seen. It could hide wrongthink from various users altogether. Whether or not it actually does any of these is difficult to assess because there's no transparency.
> Combine that with the culture that understands free speech issues in this way more generally: less from a regard for the value of liberal discourse and more for the privilege of indulgent speech, related to the idea “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” but extended into the realm of stewardship or even ownership of an entire platform.
Yes, we have a broken epistemology, but this is the result of the politicization of institutions (especially by the left wing). Specifically, the left wing argues that because perfect neutrality and objectivity are impossible thus we should wholesale abandon the pursuit thereof and instead be doggedly (and ideologically homogeneously) activist. This predictably damages trust in the institutions which in turn drives people toward other institutions, many of which are less savory.
I don't want to follow any politicians, but that seems pretty obviously one sided. I wish people would just recognize that, and recognize that it isn't "right-wing" to do so.
It twitter recommended new users to follow Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, and those were the only recommendations they saw without clicking "view more", would anyone question whether that was biased or not?
I don't know how the recommendation engine works, but Barack Obama is the most followed account on twitter I think, so can see how they'd suggest that...
But if the recommendation engine is anything like their recommended tweets, I think they intentionally show you the other side always. I see tons of garbage view points that I don't agree with almost exclusively when I view a tweet. Without knowing anything about your tracking cookies and however else they 'enrich' what they know about you, it's tough to say why you got the recommendations you did. If you signed up based on a tweet from a democrat so you could engage by telling them they're wrong, maybe they assumed you like other democrats.
If your complaint is that Twitter is an outrage inducing platform by design, I would absolutely agree. But that isn't an ideological bent. It just wants you to engage, and the fastest and easiest method is to make you mad.
It’s not a bad thing, the same way that Fox News being conservative isn’t a bad thing. It just is what it is.
These are major news sites. News always has a bias. It’s important to identify, for one’s own sake.
It’s not even particularly hard to bias an AI algorithm. It’s arguably the default.
I don't think we can say with any honesty that Twitter is a clone of Fox's Three talking heads, comprised of a good looking moderator with a leftwinger, and a rightwinger duking it out.
Twitter has been censoring, moderating, editorializing, and shadow-banning a large amount of conservatives, Libertarians, and also, moderates/centrists, and leftwingers that are posting contrary to the establishment narratives.
By turning into more of an ideological echo-chamber it initiated the birth of conservative and other competitors, of which gettr appears to be leading the race with competitors like parler, truthsocial, gab, and others falling behind. Am surprised there are not shareholder lawsuits yet against Twitter's Officers for violating fiduciary responsibilities.
Maybe they are prioritizing influence over eyeballs & economics?
Perhaps because you're on the fringe.
If it were 2009, and Twitter was pushing Al Gore and ignoring George Bush, I'd see it differently. But it's 2022, and the toxic & polarizing aspects of many individuals make a perceived endorsement problematic for mainstream consumers.
Do you believe that Twitter's Terms of Service have an ideological bent?
Do you believe that Twitter's Terms of Service are being applied when they shouldn't against conservative politicians in France?
Do you believe that Twitter's Terms of Service are only used against Conservative politicians - and do you have examples of Tweets that were actioned for conservatives and counterexamples that were not actioned for liberal politicians?
Either way, my intention was to say: you can disable these quality filters, Twitter isn't forcing you down an ideology with no opt-out. On that note -- many of these are based on user reports: if accounts get too spammy they get put in "other replies", if they're regularly inflammatory they (might) be put in "other replies" + sensitive content, etc. But again, you can turn this filter off and see all replies together, media normally, etc.
That's a general theme with these 'I got banned, how overly sensitive!' stories. 95% of the time you don't need to scroll long until you find some genuinely vile stuff. I honestly cannot figure out how anyone who behaves even half-civilized ends up being banned by any of these platforms, it's kind of wild how much garbage you can post.
https://www.lefigaro.fr/medias/twitter-plusieurs-comptes-lie...
"By mistake", that's twitter's version of the story, so, there goes some new information for you, sorry if it's crushing your beliefs.
As for the long story: EZ was convicted for saying that most insecurity comes from immigrants, which is actually true when you look at the Calonge file - you just have to be part of the police or work in defense to see it, and France forbids ethnical statistics so people can't be made aware publicly about that, except by syndicalist cops such as Bruno Attal. The conviction is purely political and EZ should have appealed but he was just a journalist at the time and preferred to consider this conviction a medal of honnor.
Nonetheless, he didn't have twitter at the time, he has twitter since he's a candidate, and his account is completely clean, so is the GZ party's, but those were closed "by mistake" by twitter according to twitter itself, and since then, their content is systematically marked sensitive, for absolutely no reason.
Also EZ have made it very clear that he doesn't have that much problems when immigrants are white and christian (even recently when discussing immigrants from Ukraine) so it's not like he is really hiding that everything he says about immigrants is really about non white and Muslim people.
* Not exactly sure what insecurity means exactly. I feel it's often used to mean "the feeling ignorant people have when they see foreigners" in which case you might be right :)
Targetting delinquants is often seen as straight up racist, which kind of proves the point.
EZ is the Muslims’ best opportunity to separate the good from the evils, because many Muslims in France would like the bad ones to be convicted, which the current system prevents. Macron has instaurated a system that can be summarized as “Let’s free all Muslim criminals”, which does a lot of torts to all of them.
It's not a feeling, we have the data, it's just illegal to publish them in France because ethnical statistics are forbidden:
https://youtu.be/2tCmyi62yH0?t=416
In 2021, 1659 anti-religious acts were recorded in France, including 857 anti-Christian acts (52%), 589 anti-Semitic acts (36%) and 213 anti-Muslim acts (13%)
https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/284641-les-actes-antirel...
But yeah, go ahead and say we have a "feeling of insecurity because we are racist", I won't blame you, I've been doing the same for 15 years or so. Meanwhile, let me know if you want more data because I have tons. What, you want to talk demographics now ? ;)
Criminals with double nationality must be removed from the country, that'll already be a great improvement.
Hey Americans! Did you know police and firemen are assaulted every day somewhere in France? Here's for today
https://twitter.com/mvalet_officiel/status/15114494657812111... https://twitter.com/sbovodaa/status/1511682808439312393
Well Mr statistics, since you are offering, maybe you also the percentage of Christian/Jew/Muslim in France and, probably there are less Muslim than Christians which means they are more likely to be victims of anti religious acts? Was that your point?
I'm not sure it's really worth discussing more, I'm not going to convince you you got brainwashed by populists, you are not going to make me become racist or xenophobic, so we are just losing time and energy :)
Have a great rest of your day. I wish you to become less hateful in the future and to start loving all humans <3
Maybe there's still more christians in France, but certainly not twice less muslims than jews, France have 2 200 mosques and 500 synagogues (2019), so, go ahead and find another explanation :/
> Have a great rest of your day.
The day is not over, but so far my daughter is safe, let's see how's life for my people (whom you obviously don't love) today:
- a Congolese migrant raped a minor, 1 month after his release from prison, where he was incarcerated for... similar facts https://www.ouest-france.fr/pays-de-la-loire/le-mans-72000/l...
- In Saint-Denis (93), the attempt to close down an illegal African street restaurant turned into a riot: a pot was thrown, 2 policemen were injured: https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/saint-denis_93066/videos-jet-d...
- Melun (77) : tenants deprived of mail in the mailbox for one year... because of the dealers at the foot of their building: https://www.leparisien.fr/seine-et-marne-77/prives-de-courri...
- Canteleu (76) : police officers surrounded and attacked by several "young people", while they were trying to arrest the author of an attack with a baseball bat, the police car damaged https://www.cnews.fr/france/2022-04-06/seine-maritime-des-po...
- Reims: two illegal North African migrants are convicted, in recidivism, for assaults, including a rape reclassified as "sexual assault". https://abonne.lunion.fr/id358557/article/2022-04-06/deux-ag...
- Saint-Lô: judged for an umpteenth aggression, Abdelaziz Bengana, 56 years old, defends himself as usual... by accusing his victims of being racist https://www.lamanchelibre.fr/actualite-988164-saint-lo-ivre-...
- Bricquebec-en-Cotentin (50): on the occasion of an umpteenth trial, for umpteenth offenses, a 60-year-old Turkish migrant exposes his grievances and demands to France: https://www.lamanchelibre.fr/actualite-987764-bricquebec-en-...
> I wish you to become less hateful in the future and to start loving all humans <3
I've been saying exactly the same thing for 15 years, anyway, you're saying that I'm hateful but you don't have any argument to back it up, you're just defaming me because your arguments aren't worth anything, while I haven't said a hateful word, I'm just stating facts, so, I'll take it as a medal of honnor because this is exactly what EZ has been going through.
I haven't done anything, I only have love for my people who are victims here, I wish one day you love the victims who haven't done anything neither because so far you're just closing your eyes and not giving a fuck.
> you are not going to make me become racist or xenophobic, so we are just losing time and energy :)
I'm french from north africa so you're not playing that card with me, and I know what's coming to you, and you have no idea. It's not about being racist because it's not about race, it's about culture, it's about protecting our people, our children, which you obviously hate.
Anyway, one day it'll be your turn too, or the turn of someone you love, then we'll talk again, and then maybe, like me, you'll be ashamed of having closed your eyes for so long.
America has great immigration standards, in France we have absolutely none, we even pay them even if they enter our territory illegally, it's insane.
Americans reading this, come spend some time to visit paris and we'll see if you think it's become a shithole or if it's still what it used to be like, keep in mind murder attempts have tripled in the past 10 years, this is called an explosion of criminality. But some people like this guy are too rich to see it, I guess there are still some people who haven't any victim in their circle, but that's definitely not going to last, criminality is rising everywhere in France as they are spreading immigrants including illegals which France doesn't throw out anymore, no matter if they were leading genocides in rwanda (see other comment) or whatnot
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPrH4JLXwAEGWOM?format=jpg&name=...
That's not even true.
Source, liberal media:
> Son avocat se plaît d’ailleurs à rappeler qu’il dénombre au total «seize dossiers de poursuites, dont une seule condamnation définitive» contre son client.
Deepl: His lawyer likes to point out that he has a total of "sixteen prosecutions, of which only one is a final conviction" against his client.
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/combien-de-fois-eric-zem...
And for the first prosecution, he didn't appeal, see the other comment for the reason.
The only conservative candidate is Pécresse, and she is not “sensitive”, because she’s never been convicted for hate speech or inciting violence.
He’s an inconsistent hypocrite and there’s zero evidence that’s been presented to make me believe this move is coming from a sincerely held belief that isn’t “what’s best for Elon is the right thing”
Edit: fixed autocorrect of “and” back to “an”
While I am not claiming that you personally are guilty of this, musk stans always seem like they are talking out of both sides of their mouth whenever they defend musk’s comments on free speech and jump back and forth on whether they are using the “protection from government action” definition or the “protection from condemnation of other private individuals and companies” definition
Not that I entirely agree with him on this topic. IMHO Twitter has the right to delete whatever they want and ban whoever they want.
But he's not trying to force the change through law/government. He bought a stake and got on the board and wants to change the rules of the platform itself from there - that's a way I respect.
That means nothing to me. He says lots of things and then does the opposite.
Having come from a quasi socialist dictatorship and being a foreign born Hispanic ,I would fight for the right of the racist idiots to post there idiotic comments. You fight ignorance with education and rational debate, not with censorship.
It appears that Elon wants to treat Adults as Adults and let them make up their own minds. Unless you are bad at adulting this shouldn't be a negative, but a positive. Let me make up my own mind and don't have a Corporate Oligarch and a Gov't riddled with conflict of interest spoon feed me or use group think bullying to shape society based on Tech Oligarch morality and political believes.
If anyone has become radicalized its the tech oligarch, hollywood, MSM and BOTH the democrat and republican party.
They do nothing but promote hatred , intolerance, and violence among the people in order to keep them fighting with each other.
If humans were rational, that might be true, but humans aren't rational. Studies, and just looking at people's response to social media, have shown this.
Try changing someone's opinions with facts, and it will usually fail, but systematically post a bunch of fake content on social media, and many people will literally be willing to ruin their lives or even die over it.
But for me it's now clear he's not a good person by any mean. He's filthy rich and not anywhere close to satiation, now he's throwing his money at twitter "to defend freedom of speech". That's gross, he's obviously after more control over twitter to better push his personal agenda. I don't pretend to know what it is, but it's certainly not about human rights, freedom of speech or democracy...
Again with the mind reading. You might be right by the way. It’s not like I’m an Elon Musk fan boy or Trump fan boy. But you have no idea what’s going on in other people’s heads. They might be better people than your hallucinations, or they might be substantially worse people. Those of us outside of their brains simply don’t know.
I'm really concerned with that current mood of not "taking sides"... At some point you have to say what you stand for. And acknowledge that Trump is miles away from that, assuming you stand for human rights, democracy, honesty, ...
Or maybe he actually, somehow, stand for those values. Then he does a so bad job at promoting them that he's still harmful. Why are people so quick to say "we don't know" regarding Trump, and then "but Biden sure is doing a terrible job".
Something sounds off.
More hallucinations
Mind reading.
Strange post when Russia is currently committing genocides, something I don't think Tesla has ever done!
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/business/musk-labor-board...
Edit: not all of these are about employees. He has attempted to get an anonymous stock analyst fired from their job due to a negative evaluation of Tesla stock.
So your logic here is that because he fired subversive or insubordinate employees he will do the same on Twitter?
this is the behaviour of a free speech absolutist? https://www.fastcompany.com/90208132/elon-musk-allegedly-sil...
I don't doubt that if he thinks he can get away with it, he'll censor information on twitter that is harmful to the finely-crafted PR narratives he likes to make about himself and his companies. Like those battery fires and autopilot unforced/spontaneous crashes.
Because it’s just a catchy phrase that sounds good on paper.
What’s a “free speech absolutist” position on spam, NDAs, calls to violence, libel, national security, fraud, false advertising, copyright infringement, personal privacy, etc.?
I don’t know of any country, platform or person that follows an “absolutist” philosophy on free speech within any reasonable definition of the word “absolute”.
Everyone is a “free speech exceptionist”, it’s just varying degrees of exceptions.
++
Exceptions for me, but not for thee!
"What are your thoughts on false advertising laws?"
"That's fine, because fraud is a crime and therefore not speech"
People have bucketed "things I think should be legal" as "speech" and "things I think should be illegal" as "not speech" and then this makes it trivial to say that all speech should be legal because the definition is circular.
Conservative or liberal criticism, real or imagined, doesn't matter since they just want to keep pushing the stock price up.
during a factory visit over issues with the Model X's
window. When a worker on the assembly line proposed a
solution, Musk lit into the worker's manager.
"This is totally unacceptable that you had a person working
in your factory that knows the solution and you don't even
know that," Musk reportedly said before firing the head of
the factory.
I'm of the opinion that a manager's responsible to know issues raised by his subordinates.Story I heard from a friend was of a CEO who asked a janitor if he used their store and if not why. He replied that he needed size Y of a product to efficiently store in his cupboard, size X was too small and Z too large. For months he hounded the department and forced negative performance reviews on them because there was no good way to provide Y with their current supplier. They ultimately switched to a different inferior supplier because of it (the brand the janitor normally brought) and lost several good employees in the process. They got a lot of negative feedback from customers from the switch and their revenue on the product went down.
If I'm in a meeting with some higher-ups above my boss and I have some suggestion to a process I think may help the company out and relay my thoughts, my boss should be fired because I can think for myself? Completely idiotic.
(Note this is assuming it doesn't involve anything controversial, office politics etc, just a suggestion based on my observations that I think could help the company overall).
Tho I've got very mixed assessment of Elon Musk, he's right in this case.
At the moment that you first think of the solution and mention it, your boss should not be fired.
However, this was not that situation.
But, from the above description alone, we know that there was a known problem, and that the employee had enough time to think about it and present it to Musk. One of two things happened. The manager had failed to put out a request like "we have problem X, please bring all ideas for solutions", and/or the employee had previously described the idea and been ignored up the chain of command.
Either of those are cause for a decision of "I now fail to see why we should allow you in our plant, nevermind paying you to be here.".
One of the most basic jobs as a manager is to identify problems, seek solutions and implement them. If the answer had been something like: "yes, he brought the solution to us yesterday, implementation will require P, D, and Q, and we expect to have it into production by next week", I'm sure Musk would have been fine with it.
"1. Email me back to explain why what I said was incorrect. Sometimes, I’m just plain wrong!
2. Request further clarification if what I said was ambiguous.
3. Execute the directions."
Failure to perform one of the three actions would result in termination, Musk noted.
He's proven this over the years by getting sanctioned by the SEC for posting on Twitter over the weekend while high with his girlfriend and then being forced to step down as chairman, and also consistently shitposting on Twitter the last few years that would get any line level employee fired.That said, the twitter nonsense is getting a bit much. When he wanders into anything outside his zones of expertise, he's a disaster.
I don't know if someone should be fired over that, but then again, a firing is a pretty potent warning to others not to commit the same offense.
Had the employee even brought that up to the manager before? Had they had the idea for a long time and didn't bring it up? If so, why not - does the manager foster a culture where collaboration isn't encouraged? If that's the case, does the manager not do that simply out of ineptitude, or because that's the same culture coming down from above him/her? Maybe the individual just had the idea that morning? That week? The very moment it came out of their mouth, even? Has the manager had a stellar tenure up to that point, or a rocky one? How severe was the issue pre-fix that it warranted this termination? I could go on and on.
Point being, two sentences saying, "An employee had an idea and Musk fired his boss because he didn't know about that idea," is typically not going to be enough for us to say, "Oh yeah, that was a good/bad call".
To learn you need ‘contact with the ground’: Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game-having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.
I'd suggest reading one of the books by Sidney Dekker. The last thing you want to institute is a culture of fear surrounding surfacing problems. Every other manager in that factory just got a loud and clear signal to lock down their staff and suppress awareness of any problem that might get them axe'd.
There are things that justify firing on the spot, but these are generally malicious, criminal, etc acts. Short of that no matter the fuckup treating firing as something done by whim of the CEO is very corrosive.
The goal of liberty is freedom under common rules. Rules may exist but it need to apply and enforced equally. The trouble is that no one seems to want to have such rules when they themselves get effected, and so people want to carve out exceptions to common rules in order to return to Freedom for me, not for thee.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say that freedom is never sincere and there's nothing we can do.
For instance, the Constitution has been successful at maintaining many important rights, some of which are quite rare in the world.
Every time people suggest that social websites should operate on such rules, ie laws, people throw up our hands and say that laws don't work, or that there must be exceptions because the world is unfair and wrongs need to be addressed.
Its a very difficult problem to solve since in general people really do not want to be in a system where rules are common and get enforced equally. That it happens to be the only thing that actually work is just part of the problem.
Reconciliation should be the goal of any debate (at least in the political sphere)
He wants Twitters algorithms to be open, but his cars must stay closed.
Requesting anything of him is anti-freedom then he projects at others how they could do better in the same contexts.
He’s like a crazy TV Lenny salesman who has never actually invented anything net new. He’s playing the acquisitions of other people work game to prop up his preference to not work.
Normal humans should not be given extreme leverage over other normal humans. Lie to me about “free markets” but as one of the 13% with and advanced degree, mine being in math, the average person has no ability to smell through his BS in detail, but they have a gut sense he’s just another used car salesman.
Lol, literally nobody invented anything new by this metric.
Elon musk is more analogous to Stebe Jobs, primarily a businessman with some engineering backgrund.
Then there is the whole controversy of tesla being funded by two guys, him being an investor and forcing them out of the company.
I suspect he has achieved more than you ever will.
Musk isn't an engineer, he has no engineer credentials and isn't licensed to engineer in any country. Moreover, Musk has never engineered anything.
Given the fact that both companies hire hordes of real, licensed and credentialed engineers, says that, yes, the engineers at both companies are responsible for the hard engineering work.
I prefer to stick with actual facts and not feelings or insults. I'm not sure why stating the basic fact that Musk is not an engineer would upset you so much.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-ceo-is-made-up-tit...
He doesnt have an engineering degree, that doesnt mean a whole lot anyways.
Nothing you stated can be backed up by anything real - all of it is taken directly from leftists twitter headlines that are more concerned with moral grandstanding then facts.
It is not chear to me that this person is left wing, they sinply dislike Musk.
I do not recommend you go around accusing everyone of being left wing - otherwise peiple might start asking:
Is asking that you practice what you preach leftwing these days?
Is being a two-faced lyer a concervative value?
Really I just don’t think anyone should be above the real hands on work of supporting their existence.
Term limits for these roles should be explicit, not a game of they who can possess the most minds the longest wins.
The promise of human colonization of all of space time is still a high minded fantasy which makes this “hype/gossip my way to wealth” seemed designed to intentionally manipulate the same basal biology religion accidentally latched onto.
Who knows, maybe rockets to Mars are all wrong and we should be doing something completely different; information doesn’t need to just travel in a ship, but Star Trek seems to live long and prosper in his head.
>”Is asking that you practice what you preach leftwing these days? Is being a two-faced lyer a concervative value?”
Now this is just playing dirty. This is a rhetorical cheap shot combined with moral grandstanding while also being nakedly partisan at the same time.
For years I used to be a fan of both Elon and Steve jobs, but when I learn about how Jobs treated his child or the 'diver saving kids in a cave is a pedo' incident, I have to conclude that they are shitty people.
I can imagine how a man forces another man out of a company, offers him a rotten deal or even robs him at gunpoint.
I cannot understand how a man abandons his child in poverty. The degree of irresponsibility required to live with yourself, to me is incomprehensible.
Elon's 'pedo incident' is simpler - he tried to butt in into a rescue mission with a submarine PR project, made a fool of himself, and instead of admitting his mistake has displayed infantilism and self control of a moody teenager. He could have shown at least some respect to the diver that has saved many lives. So maybe not irredeemable, but does not sound like someone you'd invite over for dinner.
Maybe it's not their fault, maybe the flaw is in our society and when you become super rich and people line up in a mile long-queue to kiss your ass, it starts messing with your head and you really start to believe that the sun shines out of your arsehole and other people are lesser to you, the ubermench. Thats just a hypothesis.
I know right wing people who hate both of them, reasons vary: disrespecting family values, pushing green agenda, whatever.
But sometimes you dislike a person because they are a shitty person, and it has to do with their action, not political leanings.
From him not unionizing his companies.
From the officially documented history of his business acquisitions where he bought up business that already existed.
This approaching 1984 level double speak. It’s the lack of effort that speaks to his motives. Where is the code for his machines that can choose to plow into us? But somehow Twitters algorithm is super important.
Edit: tacking on his desire to burn up fossil fuels on rockets while the UN is announcing we’re firmly on track to an unlivable ecosystem. We are not optimizing human economics but Elon’s.
Musk has a very high IQ. Unionizing his company would be a very dumb decision.
Strawman.
I have a very high iq; in a past life I designed power switching machines and high performance boards for Nortel. Also that’s an appeal to higher authority.
Also these companies are pretty data driven through automation; big banks are run from 2GB excel sheets. It’s just people doing math and the ones doing best also happen to have political tradition on their side.
Musk is still just one man.
It’s almost as if humans will work to enrich each other and the numbers game is artificial political semantics; millionaires appear in both constructs!
At least I can vote and discuss openly union operations.
Not so with Papa Elon. The outputs of labor are his preferred targets.
Why does humanity keep doing this?
Oh and governments serve at the will of the people which seems fine with the status quo. I’m not expecting much movement there. Any improvement on Main Street has to occur within politics as usual which means deflating Elon for change.
It’s really sus to suggest his vision for the far future is possible given he sits right at the same edge of discovery we do. “Outlook uncertain” for that far down the road is the only honest answer. Especially when “build rockets to nowhere” and even EV production are exacerbating industrial feedback loops threatening the species.
Diversity in thought leadership is good, imo.
Given that the IP in question includes whatever solution Tesla adopts for the trolley problem, there certainly is a clear difference. Twitter's algorithm is for arguing about, Tesla's algorithm is going to be directly the cause of death for someone (arguably, it already has).
The truth is the opposite - not only will cars never make a "trolley problem" decision (because the only thing they should be doing is braking), it would be immoral to give them the capability, because it might decide it's in a trolley-problem scenario at the wrong time and randomly decide to sacrifice you.
In fact self-driving cars normally change lanes as part of their path finding. So a failure to change lanes in an emergency would be unusual.
Disagreement over the correct behavior will result in lawsuits of course. "It should have attempted to miss me!" vs "It should have stayed in it's lane!"
We'll need legislation to settle this, for insurance purposes at the very least.
If the brakes turn out not to work, that is quite the problem, but hopefully it'll notice in time to not accelerate in the first place. Maybe it can still engine brake.
Action A: kill N people, including occupant
Action B: kill M people, not including occupant
Both pathways are predictable. Which one do you choose?
ps. solve for: N == M, N > M, N < M
Your problem isn't real because the car doesn't exist in a logical world with N or M discrete things, it exists in a real world where it can be mistaken about what's happening outside it. Letting it make choices like that would have a bad outcome if it hallucinates (occupant+1) grandmas in front of it and decides to heroically sacrifice itself and you.
> But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
Even the tweet you've cited says:
> there is nothing in the street which you want to collide with. the correct response in every case is to evade the thing that's in the street.
(emphasis mine)
So braking is clearly not the only option.
I truly hope that you do not work on software or hardware that is in any way close to areas like this. You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system. Cars have brakes and steering wheels. Any real world system will use a combination of the two of them to try to keep the occupants and those outside the vehicle safe. Pretending that there will never be situations where there are conflicting choices to be made is ... well, I just find it unbelievable that anyone reading HN could try to deny that there will be situations like this.
I should point out that the guy I linked is an AI lawyer, so the replies aren't actually as valuable input in this case… also, I think he uses "evade" to mean "not hitting something" so braking still counts.
I've had other discussions with literal self-driving car company engineers where they told me it's not a real problem as usually defined. Though I can't link those, here's one where someone asks the Aurora people about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q1fsvz/we_are_chris_u...
> So braking is clearly not the only option.
It's the best option because you're not the only moving thing on the street. Braking in response to a car in front of you is normal, but evasive maneuvers at speed aren't. You don't know what other people are going to do in response to that.
Oh, but I will let you turn or reverse as long as you signal first. I just don't think you should do it at speed with no warning even in a "least bad option" situation.
> You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system.
Sorry for being a theoretical murderer, but you weren't talking about real world issues, you're talking about a trolley problem! That's defined as:
- there's 2+ discrete paths you can take. (semi-true for cars)
- there really is something on each path you'll hit. (semi-true, in reality they'd react to you in good and bad ways)
- your knowledge about this is correct. (not true, SDCs' world-knowledge is not perfect)
- you are going fast enough to be dangerous. (semi-true, SDCs will drive at safe speeds more often)
- you must go forward. (not true, SDCs can brake or reverse)
#3 and #5 being the big problems making this unrealistic.
Maybe a real world problem would be driving on a mountain road and there's a boulder about to fall on you? In that case, I agree braking would not be safe.
Maybe this will remind liberals to be, well, liberal. I've seen too many "liberals" who had credibility before lose it all by using illiberal tactics.
Now, see what happens when not-so-woke people start taking over the boardroom and using the same tactics. And then there's no more "but free expression is the heart of America" defense. It'll be "they are private companies and can do what they want on their platform... just like you said".
And it's all so predictable.
No comment on how much of a free speech warrior he is when he's dealing with employees or reporters or cavers that he dislikes.
The ideology in question is "Anything that is good for Elon Musk is good."
That's pretty much all there is to it. There's no rigour to it, there's no intellectually sound foundation, there are just things that serve his bottom line, and those that hurt it.
jokes which offend the Woke liberals is not a problem on the same scale, though it is certainly annoying. there is a censor-leaning thoughtcrime segment among some liberals but again, that is NOT an imminent danger to democracy, humanity, climate etc
Can you point out what is, in your personal opinion, the best example you have of Twitter's "not-so-slight political lean" and how you interpret it as "detrimental to the company (and public discourse)"?
Nobody spends $4 billion to create a public forum or to defend free speech. You spend that kind of money for influence or to push an agenda. What his agenda is, who knows. I'm a fan of elon and maybe he is an outlier, but I'm not holding my breath. There was a time when everyone from google to facebook to reddit and even twitter all supported free speech. People forget that twitter was once a very pro-free speech platform. Everything from war footage to politics of all sides was available on twitter at one point.
> I hope the people who work at Twitter and think it is OK to bring your politics to work go elsewhere.
It's generally not the employees. Most tech employees are apolitical at work or against the woke culture. It's just that C-suite/HR gives protection to the tiny vocal minority espousing politics at work.
> We would all benefit from platform where telling jokes that offend only the wokest doesn't get you banned and silenced.
We would all benefit if every platform allowed people to have their say. Regardless of how "offensive" you find them to be.
This is going in my childrens' book: "Why high paid employees need a union!"
sed -e 's/tech//' -e 's/or against/and could not begin to define what is meant by/' -e 's/woke culture/"woke culture"/g'Well, Twitter's stock price has already gone up, so in a way he hasn't spent anything. Getting the cash to buy the shares in the first place probably involved a lot of capital gains though.
> We would all benefit from platform where telling jokes that offend only the wokest doesn't get you banned and silenced.
Bring action items. Who was banned for "telling a joke". Bring something substantial to the conversation to discuss.
There’s a quite good podcast about this exact question, Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket.
That's an ideology. Whether or not it's a good one can be a topic of debate, but phrasing it as not being an ideology puts a finger on the scale of the debate right from the start.
I personally would like companies to be less ideological in general.
EDIT: By less ideological I mean less interference on behalf of an ideology. Allowing all legally covered free speech would be the minimum interference possible by a company but not necessarily the maximally profitable position. Some interference may actually be a good thing - I think many companies have gone too far. My problem with companies being ideological is that they are signaling a willingness to interfere that invites substantial pressure from third parties to do so which can cut both ways.
Well musk seems to want Twitter to follow the principles of open and free discourses with less moderation.
So it seems like there will be less forced top down moderation.
For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it?
Imagine if we compare 2 governments, 1 which arrests people for criticizing it, and another that doesn't. In the context of this comparison, the one that censors less people, most would call less ideological.
By ideological, people usually are talking about enforced ideology. So if you censor more people, then that is enforcing your ideology more, and if you have less censorship then that is less enforcement of ideology.
The idea that freedom primarily exists as a lack of compulsion is libertarian or neoliberal ideology. Your total freedom from censorship is somebody else's freedom to harass and send death threats - obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere or twitter devolves into 8chan, and oftentimes people call for a nebulous "free speech" or "anti-censorship" instead of specifying what particular speech is being censored that they think is legitimate. Moderation is essential on the internet.
If people think something is being censored and it shouldn't be, they should point to specific examples.
That is an ideology
> For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it?
Um, yes
Yes, technically it’s an ideological choice to NOT gather up various books at the public library and burn them. But in practice, it’s not ideological at all compared to doing the opposite.
No, in practice it's very ideological, but it falls into a the blind spot most people have for broad consensus ideology. People tend to recognize something as “ideological“ only when a large group strongly opposes the ideology in question.
(The Musk case is different from the analogy you present, though, because of the ideologically loaded way rhetorical appeal to “the principles of open and free discourses with less moderation“ is used in regard to internet fora by a political faction that actually supports intensified censorship of lots of things, but also happens to want to promote lots of things that various large platforms have decided they don't want to be a megaphone for.)
How so? How is it “very ideological” to NOT be burning the third book from the left on the first shelf in the library? Or the ninth one on the right. I don’t even know what’s in either and I spend roughly zero time thinking about my local library. I’m not even sure where the first shelf from the door is situated.
How is my (ongoing) choice NOT to walk over there and start burning a non-empty set of books “very ideological”?
I suspect if you were to enter the same library and light various books on fire, nobody hearing about your arrest would agree that you were no more ideological with respect to that library than I (or the billions of others who also did not chose to engage in that behavior).
Speech rules exist on a spectrum from total free speech where you can threaten to murder someone or continually harass them, to total control where everything you say must pass inspection (say, letters out from a classified military base). Any position on that spectrum has tradeoffs. If you ban Nazis you are being censorious but at the same time, providing space for the people that Nazis hate where they won't have their existence constantly challenged. If you ban fake news and one side of the political spectrum puts out more fake news than the other, that side will accuse you of political bias. Where you draw the line is not an objective decision, it's one based on what you value. That's an ideological decision. Brian Armstrong banning "politics at work" is because he is probably a libertarian rather than a progressive and would rather shut up the political people at work so he can focus on making money without having his actions criticised. Twitter allows politics at work because it was founded by liberals and they allow staff to criticise the direction of the company. 8chan refused to censor their platform for ideological reasons, twitter does censor their platform for ideological reasons. Does that clear it up for you?
I find this bit deeply unhelpful for the discussion.
It’s clear from your numerous comments on this story, that you have an axe to grind. My comment above was to highlight how it was repetitive and annoying as a reader of the thread.
It was not a request for a longer expanded version of the same talking points with a condescending swipe at the end.
Elon is a deluded billionaire who cares only about himself
This isn't "The Good Place" where an objective arbiter of the net good or bad we put out into the universe through our entire existence can be measured
Twitter is very ban-anything-that-doesn’t-comport-with-our-woke-worldview-and-call-it-hate-speech-or-disinformation. Also they selectively apply TOS against people they don’t like while regularly ignoring blatant TOS violations from people they like.
That may be true, but if ideology in moderation is what's killing twitter, that already exists, so it will be just as bad as it is now, just a different flavor I would think. People might not like the new flavor though, but for many people, it's already ruined by having any flavor at all.
I guess what I'm trying to say is if Musk just changes the flavor, it will just continue to suck. If he removes the flavor, it will be better for public discourse.
For example, if he stopped banning users who "misgendered" people on Twitter, but instead started banning those who "took God's name in vain", I would qualify that has imposing his own brand of ideology (just for the sake of argument I have no idea if he is religious or what his stance is on "gendering").
If, on the other hand, he stopped banning of users who "misgendered" people, and didn't replace that behavior with a ban on something he frowned upon, I would qualify that as "less ideological". Obviously in this day and age many authoritarians will argue that the absence of censorship is an ideology in itself, but I think most reasonable people can agree that overall, less censorship = less ideology.
The irony here is laughable.
I think those are good ideologies for a social media platform to have.
There is similarly a non-ideological answer to "should I steal bread to feed my family?" It involves tradeoffs like:
* what will happen if I steal this bread? Could I get caught and therefore no longer be able to provide for my family? What effect will it have on myself and on society?
* what will happen if I don't steal the bread? Is there any other way to provide food for my family? Can I accept their death as a consequence for obeying a moral law?
You weigh the tradeoffs, risks, and expected outcomes, then make a decision for yourself, which may or may not be the right answer for your specific situation and may or may not generalize to other situations or other people.
As Jordan Peterson says: " Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid."
And also: "Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems."
Your definition of ideology may differ from that, but in practice, I find that when we call someone an ideologue today, or refer to an ideology, it is always a false narrative-based over-simplification of the world.
Thomas Sowell is a fiscal conservative whose ideology boils down to "individual decisions are primarily responsible for divergent outcomes". Jordan Peterson is a Christian conservative, all his advice might as well be Bible citations. He also knows nothing except ideological positions when it comes to criticising the left wing; he loves the term "postmodern neomarxist" despite those terms being completely contradictory.
1) I didn't claim to be free of ideology. How's your reading comprehension?
2) There's nothing funny about quoting two people that are probably both smarter and wiser than you in order to make a good and valid point.
> There is similarly a non-ideological answer to "should I steal bread to feed my family?"
> proceeds to describe their own thought process
you didn't even engage with the ideological elements of the question. Is it right to redistribute property if the need is greater elsewhere? Does the right to survive override the right to property? What if violence is necessary to take the bread? You just treated it like a personal cost-benefit analysis of a single instance.
2: yes there is. The fact that you consider them to be authorities on non-ideological positions is the funny part.
I engaged with the question and responded, essentially, "there may not be a universally right answer to your question." I just didn't respond the way wished I would.
And, in general, I would say it's not ok to forcefully take property because you made the judgement that the property would be better used in your hands, but I won't say there are no exceptions to that. Again, life is complex. Abandon ideology.
2. I think you are overdue for some humble self-reflection.
2. humble self-reflection isn't going to lead me to think that Sowell and Peterson are authorities on non-ideology. But the tiniest bit of research into the criticism of them might lead you to understand the flaws in their positions. I would know: I used to think Jordan Peterson was great and his tirades against the postmodern neomarxists was him defending western liberalism against university indoctrination and crybullies or whatever. Then I grew up, read some books, actually thought about my internal unchallenged opinions.
> Again, life is complex. Abandon ideology.
Seems to be in direct conflict with this comment you made earlier:
> I find that when we call someone an ideologue today, or refer to an ideology, it is always a false narrative-based over-simplification of the world.
The idea of abandoning ideology is it's own ideology, no?
And again, I never claimed to be free of ideology. At the same time, you haven't done anything to pin down my ideological constraints.
Most of what you're parroting seems to be from JP anyways.
1) has major health problems
2) changes his diet and immediately sees those health problems go away.
3) gets mocked online by complete strangers.
Human bodies are so complex and variable. What works for one person's health may not work for another. If you are blessed to find something that works for you, be grateful and humble, and don't automatically assume what you know applies equally to everyone else. Also, "science" is not even close to settled on the subject of nutrition as it applies to individuals.
I think that would quality under beacon's idea of a more "nuanced" ideology, rather than something hard/fast (eg: a Marxist narrative dividing people into capital owners and non-owners).