ace_of_spades

Who is unbiased in this case? You have to acknowledge that all parties have agendas.

Ok, let’s hope you are right on the anti-imperialism front and that the US citizens will not tolerate all that saber rattling against Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal…

or maybe you are just misunderstanding and rationalizing what’s going on to tell yourself that everything is going fine on the US politics side of things while the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that you voted a narcissistic authoritarian into office.

Let’s hope you are right!

/s so horrible people are distinguished by the fact that they are never nice to their in-group?

There are also bikes with wind shields and roofs. Also battery powered acceleration support. Probably also heating if you are so inclined. Just saying bikes can be pretty comfortable if that’s what you need.

But that’s a rather simplistic perspective because a moral imperative in the Kantian sense can already apply much earlier.

For instance, don‘t inflict unnecessary harm on living animals if it can be reasonably avoided.

At least to me this sounds like a pretty reasonable rule that I would be willing to follow and could prevent a lot of suffering in the world.

ok, I will bite for this one.

As someone enjoying a vegan lifestyle, I am living proof that humans do not need to eat other animals. Also if we would stop the cruel practice of factory farming, it’s common knowledge that we would have more calories available for us humans. In terms of sustenance, we are going out of our way to hurt humans and other animals to uphold the entrenched consumption patterns of a select few.

I think for AI overlords the question will be quite similar… how should we use the resources which we have available? Who is worthy of consideration and who is not? At the moment, we are truly not making a great case for keeping us around because anything we can do, they can do better. So why keep us around if not for some ethical insight?

I find the tone and collective mindset expressed in this article deeply unsettling. We are talking about developing technology that is going to be the foundation and a huge challange for the longterm development of the human race and people are overtly stating that they are working on this because they perceive this to be a shot at making trillions of dollars. I mean, what the fuck, how can money be the right motivator here? This technology would change everything about what it means to be human and we do it because „we can make money“? This is so shortsighted it’s almost tragically laughable. And we as a society worship people talking this way as somekind of heropreneuers. Like anyone alive today would be able to do anything without all the people supporting our continent crossing supply chains that are crazy environmentally destructive and allround unsustainable.

Sorry for this rant but come we can do better than this!

Quite long but inspiring lecture on how we can align markets, recommender systems, products, and organizations with our values.

Would be interesting if they did the same thing for their own operation. „We collect all data that we can about you, so that we can become a mega corp that can control most of your life.“ Wonder why they don’t do it?

You are making very big assumptions here. Think about it, what if the universe is a dynamical system? There would never be any truth only systems which work or are broken according to some set of criteria. Moreover, which systems work would also be a function of their context/environment. Nothing would ever be revealed because dynamical systems can always change (also see problem of induction). Things just work or don‘t work according to your interpretation. I would recommend to look up Pragmatism as a philosophy that elaborates on this line of thinking. It‘s quite enlightening and puts a lot of things we are talking about today into perspective.

Clearly investment doesn’t depend on actual work being done… /s

What makes people’s lives better is services being rendered for mutual benefit.

Investment does play a role in facilitating this but mostly because our monetary system is set up in a way that investment is necessary to service outstanding debt. It could be different.

In general all types of dilemma situations are solved to a substantial degree by allowing people to communicate with each other and then individuals arriving at appropriate actions.

I am not advocating against regulations or the like but saying that individuals are of the hook because „I don’t matter anyway“ is a recipe for ongoing disaster.

We need all types of push back against injustice, unfairness, and plain stupidity. Making excuses doesn’t help anyone.

Btw. did you really talk to your kids about this and really explained them the situation in a way they can appreciate it? For instance, take a large number of treats divide them on the table and show them who gets what for a game they built… I think this would be a exceptionally great case to discuss business ethics and the perils of unregulated markets in a way that resonates with kids. Don’t leave this opportunity on the table!

I am really surprised by this attitude. I think most of the negative comments here are fueld by a perception of unfairness in general and not any drive to become famous or anything.

You basically seem to advocate for a world where it is ok for platform developers to double maybe tripple dip on transactions that only exist because of the hard work of others. I for myself don’t want to live in a world where this is par for the course. It should be called out and people should be made aware of injustice. It’s not about becoming rich or famous yourself but just realizing unfairness if you see it and ideally taking action on it so that the world may become a better place for all.

Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and having the heart in the right place.

I don’t really want to take any specific position on this issue as I don’t have enough context to make a fair assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out one thing:

By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some other way.

Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem of child abuse?

I don’t have the answer but I think it‘s important to look at the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most effective way of getting that or just something that is „convenient“ or „familiar“ given a set of predefined talking points you didn’t really question?

All the best to you :)

Thank you! This is a really important observation about anything controversial „child“ related. Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern.

All of these types of problems are likely better solved in some other ways. Why not have general mental health coaching in schools freely available to increase the chance of early detection of abusive behaviors? Why not improve the financial situation of parents so that the child is not perceived to be another burden in a brutal life? Why not offer low-friction free mental health coaching to all individuals?

The way the world is organized now is ABSURD to the highest degrees! We pretend to care about a thing but only look at issues narrowly without considering the big picture.

In the end, politics and the way power is distributed is broken. There are too many entrenched interests looking out for their narrow self-interest. There seems to be not enough vision to unite enough power for substantial change. Even the SDGs don‘t seem to inspire the developed nations as something to mobilize for. We need the fervor of war efforts for positive change.

Doing the right thing and doing things right needs to become the very essence of what we as individuals stand for. Not consuming goods or furthering the idealogical agenda of a select few. Each and every one of us should look into themselves and look into the world and work to build a monument of this collective existence. We were here. Let us explain to all following us how we tried our best to do the right things in the right way and where we fell short of our ambitions and hope that others might improve upon our work.

Sorry, I think this turned into a rant but it comes from the heart.

wow, so much missing nuance and little actual understanding… I am not religious but bless your soul… is all I want to say to this

While I find decentralized digital ledgers interesting and potentially useful, I am always surprised how people think that they need to jump on bitcoin as it somehow must be the best choice for the future of money. At least to me it seems unlikely that the first feasible solution to a difficult problem is already the best. Several problems with bitcoin provide evidence for this idea.

Thus, it seems like the mechanism which keeps bitcoin running is something similar to the sunk cost fallacy or framed differently attachment to a state of the ledger that is perceived as favorable by the invested community. I hope that people will realize soon enough that bitcoin should probably more be treated like a nice art project - not more, not less.

I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle.

In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.

All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.

So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition.

And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.

The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).

I mean, you do have a point.

Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.

But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.

And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?

I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?

As a European I can‘t resist but to say that I wish that we would start banning all of the American internet cooperations that are required by law to share their data with the US government which has time and time again shown that they are willing to abuse access. Remember the time they wanted to wiretap Angela Merkel? Good times!

It‘s really astonishing to what extent people are willing to be hypocrites not only but especially in the US... American exceptionalism, what a f*cking joke... Might explain how the Republican party and American establishment could create such a mess of the country. It would be funny if it wasn‘t so damn sad and dangerous for all the other countries and people. /rant

Even though academia is not perfect, it seems like going through peer review is on many dimensions better than not doing so. For instance, you get feedback and you document your reasoning and approaches for others to learn from. The only argument against it that I could see is added cost in terms of resources and time invested but for something like a blockchain it seems worthwhile to take the plunge.

Who said that any empirical study could prove anything? Except in mathematics you simply cannot prove anything. There is no way to guarantee that with UBI the things you mention won‘t happen. In the same vein, there is no way to guarantee that those things won‘t happen WITHOUT UBI.

The mindset of holding things constant is pretty short sighted in a world where things are radically changing. We have to reinvent and adjust our societies as we go along and learn from our collective experiences. Trials like this help us collect data about the consequences of complex interventions and seem to be a useful way to test the waters.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but I would encourage anyone interested in doing good to mostly abstain from animal products altogether. This must not necessarily be carried to extreme veganism but if you have the choice to not use animal products it’s in almost all circumstances better to take it. Plant based products are generally better for our health, our future, and the animals.

And how would you guarantee that the combination of parts that you are combining are safe? This would mean that there would need to be standards throughout the car.

If all of the construction would be modularized with open interfaces, I could imagine something like this working... So, I must admit that it seems theoretically possible to set something like this up but we are currently nowhere near this. Every car is a black box that only the manufacturer really knows. Same for software. What you demand would require all software modules to be “standardized” (think API with safety requirements and guarantees) so that automatic verification could take place.

But what are appropriate “module” sizes? Do we regulate every function call? Just applications? What if Apple sells the iphone plus software as one application? What are generic rules you could use to decide what is the “right” application to regulate? By what mechanisms can we come to good decisions around this?

It’s an interesting vision... but also totally different from the world we live in today. It’s not as simple as you make it sound.

The question is if all computing platform should be forced to offer this possibility or not. I don‘t think it‘s clear cut and some kind of „vetted“ side loading seems like one possible solution. You would still need to expect to pay Apple for the vetting, though.

I guess the point is that if we are talking about laws it seems that there is a desire to abstract to broader classes of things that are easily identifiable. I was pretty broad and generalized to technology running programmable software.

If you want to stay with personal computing equipment (whatever that may mean exactly) the point still holds if you look a little bit down the line. You want someone responsible for harm that is created by harmful software and as a user you want an easy way to get save software. Both is much easier with an entity curating and signing vetted software.

What is interesting in this case is the question who would be responsible for this and what are the rules that would need to be followed?

I think it is difficult to untangle the vetting position from manufacturing because the manufacturer is likely the best expert on the computing platform. But other arrangements could be tried out. In terms of rules to follow I am sympathetic to some general rules that vetting should follow but much thought would need to be put into what those rules should be. My prime concern would be safety and minimization of great harm. But how does one go about this? Even external payment providers could be argued to be a potential source of harm if they are not vetted and certified. It‘s tricky!

I think a possible solution would be to make costs and revenue for app stores transparent and stipulate that margins should remain reasonable. Maybe set up a developer board that has a voice in the app store policy making similar to how employee representatives have a seat on the board in many German companies.

It seems like you are not thinking things through then. You would at least need to get some kind of certification that your car remains „street legal“. You cannot seriously expect to run any autonomous driving software that you want in your car?