canoebuilder

But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.

It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.

One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.

If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.

The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.

Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?

Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?

How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?

Curiously, crickets around that one...

> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.

So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?

> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.

Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.

Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?

> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history

Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"

Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.

But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.

These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either: not much thought has gone into what your saying, or what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.

Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population? Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?

If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence," then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled, so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence. Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?

The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.

There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?

Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."

We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.

Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad. Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.

Is that a conversation you'd like to have?

It's quite bizarre the situation we find ourselves in, the way these sort of primary historical documents exist at the whims of certain organizations, not to mention the strict ideological alignment of these organizations.

Future historians I'm sure would greatly appreciate if someone started version controlling the web.

And people presently alive would probably appreciate it if we could socially work out a way to have communication channels, our ability to exchange information and understand the recent past not under this sort of autocratic control.

This goes well past DJT. It would be nice if people, no matter their feelings about Trump, could understand the gravity of this.

My shock and disturbance at seeing this is equal to what we saw at the capitol.

We have laws and courts to prosecute illegality.

It is urgent we translate the principle of Free Speech, from the country in which these platforms were founded, into an online context.

>Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.

What about the people who can never make it to elected office because their communication channels are nuked for WrongThink before their political lives can even get off the ground.

Do we want the realm of acceptable discourse set by an insular group with radical ideas?

I hope there's broad agreement the answer to that is no, even from those who see themselves at present mostly in line with the small group with radical ideas.

"It's a private business they can do what they want" is outdated thinking to address these issues.

I don't currently have the all the answers here.

But I do know we need answers to this problem.

Whatever fuel that contributed, it probably pales in comparison to the fuel contributed by Mark Karpeles' market manipulation at MtGox.

That's what really caught people's attention, and after that was when large scale VC money started to flow in, because the market manipulation and subsequent price spikes gave the impression that this was a growth market worthy of deploying capital into.

After the collapse of MtGox, and what was going on behind the scenes became apparent, you had lots of people with money invested under the false pretence of great interest and demand for this new thing.

So they had to decide were they going to take the loss, or pickup the torch from MtGox, and thus we got blockchain fever.

Whatever utility there is in blockchain crypto-currencies, the game to this point has been "Hey I'm gonna buy some of this stuff, then convince other people to do the same, because it is magic internet money! (please don't be too specific in your questions, or ask me to think if what I propose is actually workable)"

I think you misunderstood my post, I wasn't bemoaning that everyone's grammar isn't perfect.

I was pointing out that the things learned very early in language education, capitalization and punctuation are learned for a reason. And intentionally omitting them is distracting and detracts from what is trying to be said.

(check out that username) vouched

I think it's perfectly reasonable to have people socially pressure others to keep to the agreed upon conventions of communication. (It's kind of what this place is known for.)

If someone wants to do it in a funny way, all the better. Humor wins hearts and minds.

I don't understand the ignoring of basic writing conventions thing. If you think that's going to make your writing stand out, or be more expressive or whatever, you're wrong.

It is less expressive, and it only stands out for being disorienting and unpleasant to look at and read.

Seeing people write like this brings to mind this quote.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Write with the standard conventions, so that what stands out are your ideas, not the reader's effort to piece together your loose ends.

Most games are also closed systems, and conveniently grokkable systems, with enumerable search spaces. Which gives us easily produceable measures of the contraptions' abilities.

Whether this is the most effective path to understanding deeper questions about intelligence is an open question.

But I don't think it's fair to say that deeper questions and problems are being foregone simply to play games.

I think most 'games researchers' are pursuing these paths because they themselves and no one else has put forth any other suggestion that makes them think, "hmm, that's a really good idea, that seems like it might be viable and there is probably something interesting we could learn from it."

Do you have any suggestions?

That's been the 'investment thesis' for the past 5-8 years.

And people have been bidding these things up ever higher, because any day now someone's going to figure out something actually useful to do with them...

(And in the mean time if some coiners get to skim a little cream from the irrational exuberance, I'm sure they don't mind to do so.)

But where is any coherent trend line supporting claims of huge growth in the area of blockchain technology and tokenised digital assets in the years to come.?

Seems to be wishful thinking that is completely at odds with the reality of these systems.

Am I missing something?

And...

Genuine economic activity in crypto-currencies represents roughly %0.00000000000000000000001 of the economic activity transacted in dollars. How much energy would be required for crypto-currencies in a one to one comparison?

Let's not forget the US military may in fact serve some other functions as well.

Cell phones also provided something genuinely novel and useful for those who adopted them, in a package that was familiar and easy to use.

Bitcoin, by comparison, okay I can pay for some things, well I could already do that. I have to adopt hard to understand security measures and my every action with my 'money' is fraught with peril if I'm not exceedingly careful. Well, that's new, but it's not something that appeals to most people.

That's kind of venturing into a recursive loop of pointlessness.

The "problems like that" you mention, are actually the ostensible "solutions" that cryptocurrency was designed to provide.

So the solution to those "problem solutions," is to acknowledge that 10 years of cryptocurrencies with little more to show than Willybots and hot potato hype-machines, says something about their essential value to most of society.

This just goes to show where the hype and misunderstanding around this has led.

It is not too far off to say bitcoin's only reason for being, is to "hold them yourself," i.e. conduct all your financial dealings with zero third parties.

A bank holding your bitcoins is just nonsensical if you understand the relative merits of each system.

The merits of the banking system are a centralized efficiency in conducting "transactions at a distance," and economies of scale in preventing fraud, theft, and other losses,

Trying to inject bitcoin into the banking system is like trying to re-insert a vestigial organ into a species long after the organ has been pruned from the evolutionary tree.

Nobody seems to have much interest in bitcoin's purported raison d'etre, but are more interested in a perceived potential for appreciation. That much of past appreciation has been shown to be the result of various systemic manipulations, rather than genuine organic demand, seems not to register with most people, or is unknown.

That perceived potential for appreciation would seem to eventually rest on people having an interest in using bitcoin for the uses around which it was designed. Should that day come, a shift from the game of "musical chairs-hot potato-hype machine," to a system of digital cash, the system would require a major re-working to support the number of users one would think would be proportional to the current valuation.

But like you said most people aren't comfortable or willing to shoulder this sort of risk in their financial lives.

Another curiosity, or countervailing force to bitcoin's design goals is the ever growing 'blockchain' record that needs to be stored locally to partake in the bitcoin system in the spirit it was conceived.

The blockchain is growing at a fairly constant rate, has anyone ever plotted blockchain growth relative to projected future storage costs and bandwidth capabilities necessary to onboard new users?

So what is the point of bitcoin other than the original goal of "be your own bank"?

But not just your own bank, your own datacenter as well!

We are decades into this horrible experiment gone awry in much of western Europe. The second and third generations are integrating to a lesser extent than their parents in part due to rising numbers of their compatriots and their inherently anti-integration ideology. Much of the Islamic violence is carried out by second and third generations.

There are about 3 million Turks in Germany stemming from a Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program starting in the 50s and 60s, being "guest workers," the idea was they would return to Turkey, most never did and today still live in their own neighborhoods and enclaves largely separate from the rest of Germany.

Regarding this history and other problems, Angela Merkel herself said what everyone can see, https://www.google.com/search?q=merkel+multiculturalism+fail...

But there is immense social pressure not to verbalise it, and instead proclaim to live in the kind of fantasy world of the sort promoted by the destructive multikulti propaganda that has inundated the west in the past few decades.

It is frightening and sad to see people act in this way.

You can find some documentaries on youtube about it.

Edit: But yes, much of the media is silent about these things or completely misrepresents them.

also see here, https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+cover+up

and here for accounts of Swedish absurdities from an American living in Sweden,

https://swedenreport.wordpress.com/

I want the world to be more like the propaganda i was force fed throughout all my 'education,' it's draggin' me down man.

Also, no more capitalization or punctuation. Damn the consequences!

i mean

damn the consequences

Welcome to clown world.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+cover+up

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+white+pixelation

This isn't an either/or.

There's a world of possibility you're missing.

Like, people should be able to freely communicate online, but maybe not on platforms that psychologically exploit them for ad revenue (and other, potentially nefarious, aims should the wrong person get hands on the levers.)

I've not seen anyone address this, but reading between the lines, many people seem to hold a view that the existence of these finely-grained personal data profiles at this massive scale is fine so long as they exist only on the servers of fb and goog, but why? What makes that acceptable or reasonable, besides the persuasiveness of large amounts of money?

I think the clearest path forward is that no one should be creating these kinds of data profiles.

I don't think a bot learning my route to work, or a doctor's appt(along with a swath of more "monetizable" personal info) so it can alert me to potential traffic delays is a reasonable trade-off for the massive societal problems the behaviour of creating these data profiles poses.

If this data is such a monumental danger when it escapes the permeable confines of the fbs and the googs, then it shouldn't exist within these companies either, not just because as we've seen the confines are quite permeable, but also because the potential for negative use of the data doesn't change depending on who has access to it.

It can be persuasively argued that simply creating and collecting these data profiles is itself a negative use of the data.

But facebook has something on the order of a billion of these (even more) highly robust personal data profiles, and that's, not a scandal but a multi-hundred billion dollar corporation?

Can it be said the collection of these profiles is a net positive for the world?

Or is this mass societal exploitation for private profit?

Note this isn't asking about the existence itself of facebook, just the collecting of these profiles, fb could function in some way without collecting these profiles.

So in this formulation you're making Facebook out to be some kind of super-governmental authority on the proper or improper use of this potentially civilization shifting cache of data.

This issue here isn't, oh noes! Trump broke Facebook's rules, bad Trump!

This issue here is that this cache of data exists and we've seen it put to use in a variety of ways that elicit dismay from a variety of people.

This issue here is that Facebook exists, has constructed this system, exploitative of human behaviour and psychology, and collected this data.

Think back to the Chamath and Parker stories a few months ago. This is a much bigger issue than the doings of a single political campaign.

Are we just going to leave it up to Zuck and Sheryl to work out how they can best profit from this system and data while hoping they don't destroy society in the process?

What if Zuckerberg were to die in a plane crash tomorrow and an enfant terrible, a young Maxima Rex were to subsequently rise to the throne while holding political views polar opposite to both you and her father, would you be just as enthusiastic about her deciding what are and aren't "authorizable" uses of this data?

#deletefacebook

Do you have any links for formal or informal organizations or individuals working on this? thanks

What is your source for claims of trade?

There is no evidence for trade between Europe and Africa going back thousands of years.

Sub-Saharan Africans never developed a written language, this would seem to be a not quite vital, but certainly helpful thing when engaging in trade.

Thousands of years ago there was very little, if any, industry to speak of in sub-Saharan Africa. What was being traded?

Edit:

The poster above referenced black Africans, a distinct population from north Africans, and "cross-continental" trade implying a great distance and regular contact between the African and European races.

While some could argue that it is technically cross-continental as we understand geography today, I don't believe a good faith interpretation(in this discussion) of 'cross-continental trade' includes trade conducted in ancient Mediterranean world.

One of these in no way implies the other. Do you have a shag with the baker every time you stop by the corner shop?

You've been indoctrinated with the multikulti propaganda, try to extract the poison, there are people who can help.

Asians and Europeans have admixtures with non-Sapiens human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Africans also have non-Sapiens admixtures, but different species.

No Africans have Neanderthal admixture, and no Asians or Europeans have the African admixtures?

Why? How does this jive with your thinly sourced theories?

Whatever theoretical breeding patterns of this sort you want to propose, it is in practice entirely negligible.

And like I said, I know it's not really you who is thinking and proposing it. You're just parroting your indoctrination. You can do better. We're here to help.

But in this case, not actually as far away as you are thinking, because of something called pedigree collapse. For example, the second row in your family tree, your grandparents, has 4 people, 2^2. The 20th row, only about 500 years ago, has mathematically 2^20 = 1,048,576. In reality far fewer, because the same people fill multiple spots. Only 1,000 years ago, 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776.

A trillion ancestors 1,000 years ago? Doubtful.

So you can see, this exponential explosion is not an accurate way of thinking about ancestry.

Pedigree collapse within a certain area is what leads to the various human races. The distinction of race is simply the description that someone is descended from some localized subset of the global population.

You're far more closely related to your g^40-parents, than the g^40-parents of someone half-way round the world because your g^20-parents are more closely related to your g^40 parents. And so it goes up and down the tree.

So yeah, maybe only ~3% at a certain level, but that is as closely related in terms of match-able DNA sequences that it is possible to be at that distance in time. You're still very closely related in terms of the overall DNA "color palette."

And it is likely somewhat more than 3%.

Many Ashkenazi Jews have a 'genetic relation' that is in fact higher than their 'genealogical relation' would suggest because there has been such a high degree of intermarriage among a small population over the years. This is the case for all races, just maybe more pronounced in Jews because of the smaller population.

There's something sad about such a statement, and it epitomizes a certain cause of present day problems in society.

Are your genes the only things that "has to do with you"?

What about the built environment and society in which you exist with all of it's inventions and innovations from a strictly primal state of affairs?

Who built that society and environment around you? If you're like most people, your ancestors.

What aspects of your ancestors guided their building and structuring of society? Their genes. Your ancestors have very much to do with you, and you have much to be grateful to them for.

Edit:

p.s. As a corollary addendum, if your ancestors have nothing to do with you, what of your descendants? Why bother leaving an orderly and healthily functioning world to people "who have nothing to do with you"?

Safe to say, that we should pray for the well-being of future generations that most people today don't think this way, and be thankful that most people in the past didn't think this way.

What makes it more scalable than a database when a characteristic is a redundancy of copies beyond what would reasonably be needed for sufficient backup? What makes it anymore trustworthy than a database with only trusted actors authorized with write access?

The trustful, or verifiable aspects of a blockchain come as a side-effect of independent actors competing for a financial reward. How does one replicate that dynamic in a single organization? Why would one bother trying?

a number of benefits over a traditional database

A blockchain doesn't provide a number of benefits over a traditional database.

A database isn't even a particularly fine-grained description of a blockchain.

A blockchain is a key component of an experimental currency inspired by a particular political ideology that is at odds with many aspects of western civilization, such as the benefit of trust in a society.

It's not really useful insofar as most people can tell in any other contexts. Even it's usefulness in it's native context is not highly established.

In your example of multiple companies coordinating on a single blockchain, who would be paid to manage it?

What even is a "blockchain," not in the context of something like bitcoin? How does a blockchain even work within a single organization? However it may or may not work, the dynamics involved would seem to make it qualitatively different from something like a bitcoin blockchain.

So you're asking for a comparison between something that does exist and something that doesn't. And in fact something that can never exist, if we are going to stick to the convention of treating names as more or less unique identifiers of a certain set of characteristics.