This is a fair point. Primarily the reason that children can dominate a website is that they have so much more time to participate (and probably are more likely to contribute in a low-effort way), so putting the mark at 16 or 17 would still significantly reduce the issue. I think having places that are certified <12 would be great for kids and could be over-moderated without great consequence. A spectrum of age gates would make a very cool internet, and I'd extend that as far up as ages go (35-55? Centenarians only? Why not?).
Have there been instances of governments providing cryptographic identification services yet? That seems like a hugely beneficial thing they could do in this space (with the side benefit of social websites that aren't overrun with children). The only part that would be challenging is preventing the government authentication servers from knowing which websites you're visiting.
Setting aside the question of whether the truth should be suppressed because of consequences, this kind of research could very easily be beneficial.
Suppose you find out that the green people from East Arbitria are less productive. The immediate effect is that an innocent objective employer who being tried for discrimination or hated by a community no longer has to suffer- the cruelty of the universe is no longer being made anyone's fault. The secondary effect is that we now have grounds to investigate why Arbitrarians have that disadvantage. Maybe green people have a harder time metabolizing a nutrient; a non-issue with the diet/climate/lifestyle of Arbitria. An update to health recommendations later and millions of people's lives are improved.
I think you're making the same point. While biology would require your 8-year-old to work to survive, the social structure of your family (followed by your broader social network and eventually the state) is such that that's not the case. Blaming society for hunger is similar to blaming charity for poverty. X is probably not the problem if the solution is more X.
I would think the moral calculus is different when the non-consensual activity is sex vs. eg. cutting timber or cooking fast food. A single rape is a lot more traumatizing then a decade of physical labor. I don't know anything about how common involuntary sex work is, so I won't argue a broader point; I just think the equivalency doesn't hold up.
If nobody cares where a Cessna is, why is it mandatory that everyone can find out? You could count on a fingerless glove the number of people who care where my car is, but I'd prefer not to stick that information in a public database. Some percentage of Cessna pilots prefer to keep that information private, and the rest can continue sharing that information regardless, so it would be a strictly positive-utility change. For what reason, other than the fact that Cessna pilots are a tiny minority, has this not been changed yet?
They're using US numbers both for iPhone count (which they overestimate by ~40 million) and total electricity. That should bias their estimate against their point, as the US is particularly consumerist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that measuring as a fraction of total usage would also bias their result upwards- x/avg(y) > x/max(y).
While we have Spotify's ear: why is the default behavior to clear my queue if I play another song? It's especially an issue on mobile, where viewing a playlist or album means that an errant tap almost anywhere on the screen undoes all of my queueing so far. Just a toast with an 'Undo' button whenever the queue is erased would be plenty.
I agree that the graph is misleading, but your response is misleading as well. It looks like we spent more than twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars at the peak in 1966 (49 billion) as at the peak in 2021 (23 billion), and generally we spent 1.5x-2.5x as much during the Apollo era vs. the last decade.
Maybe I was unclear, but I completely agree both that your example does not prove that computation is a superset of thought. I'm looking for an example that would at least suggest the opposite- something humans can think that a computer couldn't compute.
That's the opposite, an example of a computation that is outside of the set of all thoughts.
Notably, such examples wouldn't exist if computation was strictly a subset of thought, but that can be waved away by acknowledging that the brain has finite resources that it does its best to use sparingly. Also, brains definitely run algorithms with staggering numbers of variables, e.g. object recognition from noisy sense data.
Worth noting, I think, that California has the highest income tax rate in the country by a good margin and the 4th highest tax revenue per capita among states in 2021.
This is tangential, but your opening statement threw me for a loop. As a Libertarian, I've spent a lot of time arguing with people on the left and right who are on the pro-censorship side when it comes to corporations. While it wouldn't surprise me to see a Libertarian take a position against individual liberty on this issue, I have not seen that happen. Your ire may be better directed at the ones in the driver's seat who have the power to address this and refuse to do so rather than the powerless minority who consistently get this right.
I don't know if that's true for everyone. If someone doesn't believe that an idea should be the property of the first person who thought of it for an innate moral reason, they might still believe that it's unethical to take that property away after it is guaranteed by the state. A utilitarian who is pro-copyright because it encourages creation and innovation might not be concerned with works that were published without that encouragement.
Sure, it's a toy example to tease out the underlying shortcomings of the measurement. Societies where the median does not reflect the typical experience do exist.
If half of a country were impoverished and half were billionaires, I'd say they have a pretty serious income inequality issue. A median would randomly conclude that either the typical person is a billionaire or in poverty. Best case scenario, the median would equal the mean and give a result that reflects reality, but it still doesn't convey the issue at all.
Median and mean both compress n data points into one, which is only useful given some assumptions about the distribution. Quintiles (or similar) would work for that scenario, but I'm sure there are more complicated situations where they fall short.
Favoring a Western lens or English language sources is racist, whether the word was used or not, insofar as it favors white people and the people white people care about. You might disagree with that definition, but it's not like the commenter above is the first person to use it that way.
I imagine for most people it's a total non-issue. Unless you're a scientist or you breed plants/animals, believing in creationism instead of evolution makes pretty much no difference.
Yeah, this place is so conservative that you can't even say that Republicans are extremists who are intentionally undermining the country and that everyone who supports them is suffering from a rare mental disorder without people calmly disagreeing. /s
100M in net worth would motivate me, but one of the differences between me and a talented CEO is that I don't already have 100M in net worth. Gates had well over 100M when Microsoft went public in 1986, Bezos had more than a billion when Amazon went public in 1998, Musk made 150M on Ebay's Paypal acquisition in 2002. We may disagree on whether we're better off that they continued working, but I don't think they would have done so as a public service after they capped out lifetime income.
Out of curiosity I looked into the numbers for this. As of 2017, there were 700,000 Americans in India. As of 2018, there were 4.2 million Indians in the US. Dividing by population, that means ~0.2% of Americans are in India and ~0.3% of Indians are in America.
As someone who somewhat supports public land ownership (of the Georgism variety), I think you'd have to be plain nuts to use that belief to justify discouraging others to use the word 'landlord'. Especially considering I hear the word more from people who oppose land ownership than from anyone else. I'm more inclined to believe that this is about gender.
While I don't doubt that an intent of this is to promote empathy, I would need to see some evidence before I could be open to the possibility that that is its effect. Anecdotally, these things seem to incense anger and hatred- I've never heard anyone say that being language-policed made them a better person, but I have seen people behave in a way that suggests the opposite. Personally, I become less empathic when someone assumes authority over what I say or write.
Your point is that people who want Twitter to be neutral are ideological, because being pro-neutrality is itself an ideology? Even taking that as a given, they could still absolutely hide behind a veil of neutrality- they support neutrality, they're the people they invented the veil for.
Is China not a uniquely threatening force? They have the second largest GDP, the second-most expensive military with the most personnel, considerable influence over other important Asian countries, and a major role in manufacturing the world's products, and they continue to rapidly expand across all of those facets. They are very much in opposition to Liberal values (free speech, democracy, privacy), and they are somewhat aligned with other US adversaries (Russia, North Korea).
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?