ramblenode

> I worry less about the data and more about how a lot of kids, teens, and young adults get their news from TikTok (and social media in general).

Fox News* is America's most watched television news source. Is this the kind of alternative you are envisioning?

*Also owned by a foreign national

> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.

I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?

The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.

The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.

"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.

I would like to see this turned into a blog post. Could even be a series.

Rota is complaining that differentials are introduced as an ad hoc technique, seemingly breaking the rules. If differentials are taught from the beginning, i.e. y + dy = f(x + dx) where f'(x) is a convenience function, this is not an issue. Of course, there are other issues with teaching differentials, namely why products of differentials vanish. On the other hand, limits aren't rigorously justified in an introductory course either.

Solving an ODE by separation of variables. With the limit definition this is just a notational trick, requires additional proof to justify, and confuses students. With infinitesimals, the separation dy = v * dx is a rigorous statement, making the logic of the method immediately obvious.

> You may believe that, but you can't verify unless you travel into the past.

Do you believe in the method of radiocarbon dating? What about dinosaurs?

> If there are no positive feedback loops, it would only warm up 1C maximum, no matter how much more CO2 we will emit.

GHG emissions are still increasing. If we assume that temperature increase is only linear in the amount of atmospheric GHGs, that means temperature will continue to increase, not remain flat.

The only items in the list that look reasonably easily answerable are how much social security costs and whether the earth is warming. Even the last one wouldn't be considered a good question to an actual scientist because of how vaguely it is phrased.

Most experts will not give simple answers to simple questions because they see the question itself as ill-posed. Theses could be written about "Is crime up or down?" GP's claim is that this has a simple answer that can be checked. The bigger issue isn't whether a dataset is statistically valid but which data would even be relevant to a particular underspecified and vague question.

> Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.

The world we exeprience and the language we use to describe it doesn't have axioms like math, so it's no surprise people routinely disagree about these topics. Most of the subjects in your list contain a great deal of nuance. For example:

> whether crime is up or down

What counts as "crime"? Is it based on a legal definition or a moral defintion? What jursidictions does this include? What time period are we using as a baseline? Do we account for the fact that different jurisdictions measure crime differently and do we use the raw reported numbers or adjust for underreporting in the statistics? Do we weight our consideration by the severity of the crime or is it just the number of recorded offenses? The laws themselves may have changed over the period of consideration, so how do we account for that?

These questions don't have objective answers, so it's unsurprising people disagree.

Preservatives achieve their intended function by broadly destroying and preventing the growth of microbes, which are an integral part of our digestive system. So I would flip the question: what evidence is there that preservatives don't damage a healthy human microbiome?

Here is a review of some of the research. It seems to still be an open question because of the many variables involved: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9864936/

> They have to make results constantly to keep officials happy. So there is a lot of research fraud.

What's surprising is that if there was fraud one would expect the results to go in the other direction since fluoridation is the official policy.

Today the university is a business and the students are the customers.

> You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.

That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".

Kind of a "reverse plagiarism".

It seems to have been purely stylistic, but that's still unacceptable, especially since it broke conventions of the field.

Just as a point of comparison, the Abraham Lincoln Bridge from the list of megaprojects measures 640 total meters [1]

According to this [2] China's largest 8,816 bridges span a total of 16.21 million linear meters, or an average of 1,838 meters per bridge. So this megaproject bridge in the US might possibly crack the list of the longest 10,000 bridges in China.

The Wikipedia list contains only 2 bridges from China. The smaller one is 32 km...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_Bridge

[2] http://en.people.cn/n3/2023/0801/c90000-20052420.html *People's Daily, but I think the point still stands.

These sprung up well after the Islamic Golden Age [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

"Megaproject" seems to be used pretty loosely in this list.

In my mind, renovating some airport terminals or adding extra lanes to a highway over a 10 mile stretch is not an ambitious "megaproject", just a typical infrastructure project. Certainly most of this stuff would not be considered megaprojects in China.

> i’m extremely skeptical of people’s ability to view the economy from on high and pick out the “good, productive gdp” and the “bad, makework gdp”.

Maybe in general, but rent-seeking is a pretty large part of the economy by estimates I've seen.

You are saying that liberal immigration policy is driven by people who believe it will create enough civil unrest to start a civil war in which they can make money selling weapons?

I suppose then we will get to learn about the consequences of global dimming.

> There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.

It is actually recent earth's biosphere with its many negative feedback loops which is the exception here. Earth could have turned into a Venus or Mars if conditions were just slightly different, and it almost did several times.

This is an interesting analogy. Of course oil extraction and refining are very complex, but most of the value in that industry is simply the oil.

If you take the analogy further, while oil was necessary to jumpstart the petrochemical industry, biofuels and synthetic oil could potentially replace the natural stuff while keeping the rest of the value chain in tact (maybe not economical, but you get the idea). Is there a post-web source of data for LLMs once the well has been poisoned by bots? Maybe interactive chats?

> Chinese models have to censor a long list of words that threatens the government, which makes them super dumb.

The heavy-handed curation and self-censorship of ChatGPT and Gemini responses is literally a meme, though. Or are you referring to the training data?

Agree with the sibling: committing fraud by intentionally not honoring a contract is not morally or logically the same as duplicating a piece of media under copyright. That is not to say that copyright violations are harmless (the scale and intent matter), but details can't be ignored.

A material difference between fraud and copyright violations as categories is the presence of lost profit. With fraud one has lost the time value of their work, but with media piracy there is some research (funded by the EU of all things) that it doesn't trade off with sales and may even help some sales.

> Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

The motivation could also be practical. Studies are canceled for a variety of reasons unrelated to the conclusion: flawed design, poor data collection process, data doesn't generalize, data isn't specific enough, study has run out of budget, something significant changed in the middle of the study, etc.

You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an entire country?

> It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.

> Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X.

The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.

These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.