sayonaraman

what they call "divisive and extremist actions" that need to be censored is basically anything which doesn't agree with their political ideology. It's a direct attack on free speech.

How is giving access to user data for "research" is better than that whole data privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica.

these days research comes with a set of politically charged assumptions, for example the definitions of "hate speech" and "misinformation" are different based on which political camp you ask

So giving access to Cambridge Analytica is bad but to some other partisan "think tank" is fine? who would make those decisions?

so many CEOs would come back with tail tucked between their legs when there is an aggressive PR attack, it's so refreshing to see someone unapologetic for a change, standing their ground against blatant lies and angry mobs with pitchforks. This gives hope in the American future.

These are words by great CEO, fight these baseless accusations in court like you would fight any slander. These witch hunts must stop.

well as the success of the US economy shows, those greedy capitalists create millions of jobs and goods and increase overall "happiness" of millions (of perhaps less greedy) people.

Greed and free markets make for a healthy society.

As a counter-example see what happened with the Soviet Union, I can tell you first hand that didn’t work very well. Demonizing "bourjois" values of private property and prosperity, while fetishizing the “common good” and all-controlling government made the entire society very unhappy (except for a few fat bureaucrats) and led to its eventual collapse.

I don't think you can argue with Gordon Gekko " that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit..."

And btw this forum is hosted by one of the most prominent venture capitalist firms in Silicon Valley which funds thousands of (promising) capitalists.

That's what America is about, greed, the pursuit of happiness, whatever you call it, everything else is noise.

time to buy more FB shares

when a company leaves the headlines it's time to sell.

These things are easy to fake and hard to disprove, especially in the current political climate

Most likely this is a hoax like all the other fake “hate crimes” or recent years

e.g. that story with a “noose” in the garage or black students writing racist graffiti on campus

Some do it for attention, others for financial gain

https://www.espn.com/racing/nascar/story/_/id/29354447/fbi-s...

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/black-student-...

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hoax-missouri-school-distri...

The author also wrote "The Wretched Atom" and is clearly nuclear-phobic.

Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change.

FB, while being the prime medium by which fake news spread, is at the same time terrible for anyone who attempts to control public opinion.

You can never hire enough "fact-checkers" thank God, it's democracy in action.

the whole concept of "oppression" in modern context holds absolutely no merit, it's a divisive racist view of American culture and it's been used for political gain again and again.

Since it's published by supposedly reputable academics I think it's a perfect example of misinformation.

have they defined what "hate speech" and "misinformation" mean these days?

More often than not these terms are used by one party to silence & suppress opposing views of another.

Thankfully Zuckerberg doesn't give a damn, one would be hard-pressed to find a better CEO for social media company who can stand up to all this whining.

I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchronize for particular tasks, or just figuring out what exactly are those "tasks", the basic computational primitives of adaptation in "lower" animals and insects, let alone humans.

While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some of the basic mechanisms, the "LEGO blocks" of cognition, before talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when it's so ill-defined.

I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.

time to buy more FB shares

The only result of “defund the police” movement so far has been an explosion in violent crime. The murder rates skyrocketed in 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/upshot/murder-rise-2020.h...

I just reset profile in youtube settings periodically, their recommendations are way too sticky, like literally the same videos are shown for months even if I watched them already.

I wonder what all the highly paid "ML/AI engineers" are doing.

What’s wrong with 4chan? I for one think it’s awesome, one of the few outlets that haven’t gave in to censorship.

I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/

i think it comes down to difference in sources of the information, rather than difference of interpretation. These days people rarely form an opinion of their own, it's mostly a sort of digest of media they consume.

The assumptions can almost always be traced to some "fact" they believe to be true. And facts are easy to fake.

A good example is this recent Reddit thread based entirely on false "facts" promoted by the media, but believed to be true by significant chunk of the US population https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/px9vr2/bles...

So the debate can often be reduced to something as basic as difference in sources you trust, rather than semantics.

> words cause pain

more often than not it's the pain of hearing a different opinion. The "hate speech" label turned into "speech I hate" long time ago.

i think this can be extended beyond Nobel as many famous scientists use their large audience to promote e.g. political ideology, Noam Chomsky being the prime example.

it's an incomplete graph problem, no all the edges (and vertices) are available, i guess the best way to describe it is finding missing edges by identifying network "hubs" i.e. most influential nodes (as in PageRank or Katz Centrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_centrality ). The original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07181v2

It's not a database problem but more of a graph search algorithm optimized for particular network topology.

I recall about 10 years ago in college we had these required 'core' classes, and the very first course, on writing I think, included mandatory readings from Edward Said*, a well known academic whose entire career was built around pushing anti-Western ideology and "Western guilt", I think it was framed as "cultural criticism".

When I hear the woke talk about "cultural appropriation", "colonialism","white privilege", etc., it all sounds very familiar. Only now cultural criticism turned into full-blown cultural indoctrination.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)

I don’t know about squirrels but hamsters are known to hedge their “nest eggs” with crypto.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-...

May be thousands of years before Genghis Khan the hords of steppe people conquered the territory of modern Italy in the same way mongols conquered most of Europe and Asia much later.

The fact Etruscans preserved their language could be either because they fought really well or may be had some diplomatic relations and mutual trade with the “migrants”, or both.

It’s funny we have the names of say Alexander the Great or Genghis but leaders of those long gone civilizations before them are completely unknown. May be they intermarried and the steppe people’ benevolent leader allowed some of the conquered tribes to keep their language, who knows.

Whoever wrote the article must have done a cursory search at best, I'm surprised they didn't mention semantic hashing by Salakhutdinov & Hinton (2007) https://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~rsalakhu/papers/semantic_final.p...

Edit: also, talking about LSH, must check out FAISS library https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss and the current SOTA http://ann-benchmarks.com/

no, they banned almost everyone with a different opinion, Reddit these days is predominantly leftist echo chamber

how about trying to understand it first?

I keep hearing this phrase "we don't know much about the brain" from people who've never opened a neuroscience textbook. And at the same time everyone and their grandma has an idea how to build artificial intelligence.

you've gotta know the details, kind of like those 19th and 20th century epidemiologists who went to the ground zero of say cholera outbreak* and investigated how it started and what was its source, and how exactly it originated and spread, and such investigations were helpful to bring about vaccines and preventive measures (and more recently see Ebola response for example).

Now while we do have effective Covid vaccines (at least for some variants of the virus), knowing the exact origin of a major pandemic, either it came from a natural source or a lab, is of major importance for science, medicine and public health.

Arguably we're lucky COVID was not as deadly as some other viral pandemics of the past** and we have to gather as much info as possible on its origin and distribution in order to prevent something like this (or worse) happening in the future.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Haffkine

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

cancelled my SciAm subscription today, it's not longer about science but woke politics in every issue