You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.
If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.
Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.
It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."
As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.
I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.
I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)
I see some lifted pickup truck, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive a potential outsize source of accidents.
If I know where a hidden driveway is, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive any cars emerging. My knowledge of the driveway biases me towards looking towards it, where another driver without that knowledge would not.
Biased perceptions of things as dangerous will absolutely make us observe them more closely in order to better perceive danger.
You're still (perhaps inadvertently) equating 'bias' with 'prejudice', but experience biases our perceptions in positive ways, like clocking a hot stovetop.
What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized, or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific. The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.
Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.
From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.
> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized
What?
> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific
I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.
> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.
If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:
When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.
You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.
The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.
You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.
tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
As you say, stats very often obfuscate.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
I'm not really talking about incompetence, and incomptenece isn't the largest issue in the category of "things that make people say ACAB."
https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/teacher-charged-with-sex-cr...
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/daniel-holtz...
https://www.propublica.org/article/garrison-school-illinois-...
https://www.propublica.org/article/shrub-oak-school-autism-n...
https://autisticadvocacy.org/actioncenter/issues/school/clim...
https://www.the74million.org/article/trump-officials-autism-...
"Selected Cases of Death and Abuse at Public and Private Schools and Treatment Centers"
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-09-719t.pdf
> Death ruled a homicide but grand jury did not indict teacher. Teacher currently teaches in Virginia
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/area-special-ed-tea...
It's not the root however. The root is nepotism. What you're describing is one of ten thousand problems nepotism causes.
Seems like a pretty big difference.
(I'm totally not ATAB here, just agree that parent post analogy)
Your rebuttal doesn't.
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/04/nypd-lawsuit...
> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...
> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.
His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
[0]https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent/...
Also, watch Serpico. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070666/
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
Are they bad actors?
People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.
Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.
Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
I was trying to defend my previous comment, and didn’t adequately consider your point.
Police reform would be simple to implement if we could all agree on what that looked like.
While it would be nice to think we can live in a world where everyone can be healed from mental problems (including drug addiction), I don’t think it’s possible to come back from the hardest of drugs (on a population level). The only thing you are inviting is chaos into your neighborhood.
I lost my brother to heroin decades ago and the laws on the books did nothing to prevent it, and a better system could have helped prevent it.
It would have to be done "holistically" (coordinated with the legal system, policing, health care, etc) but it's technically viable. The only thing stopping us from doing it is, um, us.
Even if it wasn't truly legal, it could be vastly overhauled if it actually was about doing what it pretends to be about: protecting us from the dangers of drugs.
Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?
Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.
I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
Only 10 officers were charged with a crime from these cases. What do the 'rubber-room' stats look like?
The Wikipedia article includes a claim that sexual abuse in public schools is 100x the abuse by priests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education...
This NIH study finds 1% of students reporting grievous sexual misconduct by educators: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35499558/
This Ontario study finds a much higher prevalence of abuse (internationally): https://www.learningtoendabuse.ca/resources-events/pdfs/Teac...
In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.
But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.
Is this a lazy figure of speech?
US police have recently been killing ~ 1,100 people in the US per year.
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.
IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).
( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.
Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.
Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Impossible standard. You cannot prove a negative.
But, I think it's fair to assume that any chemical that is toxic to plant or insect life is probably something you want to be careful with.
It's also a deep incumbency advantage. Of course the guys selling the existing stuff are going to dispute the safety of a competitor.
How about Fermat's last theorem?
Does it not?
"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1/...
234 m3 per tonne, of clean water.
25M tonnes per year.
=> 16M m3 of clean water per day
Edit: convert to comparable units
1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.
2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
That's not really not comparable to data centers using potable water.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
That AI consumes somewhat less water than cities of millions is not a defense.
A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.
Try again.
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
Does the water that cool datacebters become AI? Do we ship water bearing AI around the world?
If these data centers are so water efficient, please explain the Dalles data center use > 25% of their water supply?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230130142801/https://centralor...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251014013855/https://www.orego...
The second part of the system is an open loop that uses water to cool the closed loop at the heat exchanger.
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.
Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.
Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.
Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".
Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.
Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
They don't have your best interest at heart. They're going to willingly nuke the economy before admitting their chatbots aren't the god machine they've been preaching about.
This is broadly how the EU operates. If companies want to start putting new stuff in/on our food, they first have to demonstrate it's no dangerous.
Not the best approach to everything perhaps, but I'd rather not have capitalists freely innovating on my food.
At least you have to continually monitor them as such.
1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations
2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness
There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
We're being tricked!
The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.
And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.
This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms.
The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it.
You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that.
So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in.
I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.
I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.
"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).
But if you look at long timescales, it's pretty obvious that cooperation is the more powerful strategy.
We used to live in tribes of hunter gatherers, in constant danger from a hostile environment. Now, we're part of a global technological superorganism that provides for us.
If free-loading was a dominant strategy, this would never have developed.
(1) From the evolutionary biology point of view this can be explained by rate dependent selection- meaning the strategy is strong as long as only a small fraction of a population employ it. Durkheim would probably say you need these people to establish what the norms of a society are.