Apologies, updated to include a link that should hopefully work without sign in.
1,002 karma · joined October 9, 2012
Link that should work without signin: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...
If things escalate all the way to widespread violence, we've all collectively failed.
I do agree with your broader point though that it's worth asking if society is getting more illiberal and intolerant of opposing views. It's not just a "young people these days" kind of thing.
- Automation already exists - e.g., the collision detection warning mentioned in the article. I don't know much about air traffic control but I imagine there's some element of defense in depth. ATCs dozing off or running on fumes won't cause collisions right away (these incidents are mostly close calls) but it sounds like it's only a matter of time before all the other defenses fail and a major accident happens.
- There's always going to be work that's hard to automate. Plenty of software teams have on-call rotations to cover production services. You'd think that if any field would have their operations be fully automated, it's software, but nope. We need to stop thinking that the physical world is easier to deal with - it's often much harder.
- Automation costs money to develop and deploy. Apparently one of the early outcomes of union action back in the 70s was faster automation rollout. [1] For an executive, why spend money on automation if you could just squeeze more out of your workers and compromise on safety instead?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Con...
[1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pu.08....
"The RDRE achieved its primary test objective by demonstrating that its hardware – made from novel additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, designs and processes – could operate for long durations while withstanding the extreme heat and pressure environments generated by detonations."
It's much easier to imagine that steady advances in manufacturing, computational modeling, and "mundane" technologies like that are contributing to progress like what's described in this article... Rather than some super secret AI assistant.
Please, folks, don't give up on reading just because computers can do it too now. :)
The first failure was the bug itself - without knowing more about the details it's hard to say more. But one should ask what kind of practices exist at DynamicSource - e.g., compile time thread safety checks, code review practices, testing requirements, rollout procedures - that would prevent bugs like this from getting out into production.
The second failure was that the software failed to validate its own output and fail noisily or generate a warning of some kind. It's safety-critical software - bugs may be excusable, but not giving at least a warning for an unusual output is poor engineering.
The third failure was that the flight staff failed to notice the error until tail strikes happened. Human errors do occur, but we need better systems to assist human operators. E.g., perhaps the flight software itself could act as another line of defense to prompt the pilot when values appear out of normal range.
Yes, in this case the planes weren't anywhere close to crashing. But if the assumption is that bugs are unavoidable, then there needs to be better systems in place to catch those bugs before they cause a major accident. Because the next time we might not get so lucky with detecting the issue and having someone with integrity calling the shots.
Also, no need to start off your comment with an ad hominem - a simple "software errors are unavoidable" would've said just as much.
To be fair, Google's results also mess this up. Pope Francis is referring to a heretical abbess from the 17th century.
I really appreciate this attitude - definitely something I can learn from. It's easy to look back on something and say, "I knew X was the right idea, if only everyone listened to me". It takes maturity to say, "It was a failure on my part for not advocating more for X". It's not applicable to every team or situation, but in general I think it's a much better attitude to have.
I'm only halfway through the book but it's been an informative and entertaining read so far. It delves into the bureaucracy that this kind of examination system produces and describes how individuals struggled in vain to turn things around during the last years of the Ming dynasty. Even the Emperor can be powerless against a vast bureaucracy, at least in pre-modern times.
Still, I do think it's a bit different each time - these technologies are incrementally more effortless and addictive, feedback loops are incrementally shorter, personalities we "meet" through these technologies incrementally more real and seemingly intimate.
It's a bit analogous to our diets. What our bodies fundamentally need hasn't changed much over the years. And it can be argued that we have constantly experienced changes to our diet throughout human history, and those changes are generally either benign or positive. Yet, it's easy to draw a line between certain "innovations" (trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, etc.) to obesity and other health issues. In the same way, we might be able to connect the gradual progress of technology with unprecedented anxiety, depression [1], and loneliness [2].
[1] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt3... (page 35) [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014019712...
This statement scares me a little. That type of attention/validation/connection seems a mile wide and an inch deep. I hope it's not really where the creator gets his needs met, and that he has actual friends and family who provide that for him.
From what I've seen of celebrities, the life that feeds off the attention and adoration of fans is usually not a healthy one. If TikTok (like other Internet media platforms, only more effectively) democratizes that lifestyle as well as its mirror image - parasocial relationships between fans and creators - I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. It's actually the fraying of our social fabric - making us feel loosely connected with a larger set of people, but at the same time, deeply alone.
I guess I'm old now.
It's difficult to imagine how you would blind the acupuncturists performing the treatment. I suppose you could have one acupuncturist mark the needle location and another blinded one stick the needle in. But a skilled acupuncturist would probably be unblinded by their own knowledge of where it makes sense for the needle to go. So there is definitely risk of performance bias, but they're sticking needles into patients at predefined points - I don't think it's a very large risk.
That's in comparison to a sham acupuncture placebo. And the placebo effect is already pretty powerful. Even in the "no benefit" studies, that's usually in comparison to a sham acupuncture placebo that has a real effect compared to waiting. In terms of pain treatment, I'd say even a safe non-addictive placebo treatment is pretty good, better than getting hooked on opioids at least.
I wouldn't get acupuncture hoping for a cure to cancer. But it's not exactly a stretch to think that manipulating nerves with needles will help with pain.
According to this, hedonic adjustments and cost based adjustments are two ways that the US BLS performs quality adjustments for the CPI: [pdf] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/quality-adjustm...
For a higher level view of how these adjustments may have impacted the CPI, along with changes within individual categories, this article presents a fairly balanced view: https://www.lynalden.com/inflation/#cpi
The picture gets worse if you look at men only: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q (The COVID spike should be ignored - low wage earners going unemployed skews the median.)
Say what you will about gender equality, but societal expectations around men providing for the family still exist.
This is also using a CPI adjustment that offsets steep increases in the price of necessities like housing, education, and healthcare with hedonic adjustments for higher quality cars, TVs, and phones. So the real picture is even worse than the data might suggest.
I believe the name for what you describe is "positive predictive value" or PPV - defined in the paper as the "proportion of true positives among those with a positive test result". According to the paper, their PPV for cancer detection is 44.4% (28.6%-79.9%, presumably the 95% CI).
As a point of comparison, one source I found reports a much lower PPV for the mammogram - single digits on initial screening, rising to 28% post biopsy: https://www.bcsc-research.org/statistics/screening-performan...
The paper notes that PPV can be a more useful metric than sensitivity. Their multi-cancer approach includes some hard to detect cancers that decrease the overall sensitivity, but increase PPV.
Edit: the paper also states: "The extrapolated PPV reported here based on SEER cancer incidence and clinical stage distribution was 44.4% in the screening-eligible 50-79-year age group, which is higher than that of currently recommended screening tests, as PPV is driven by specificity and population incidence."
They also add the caveat that "studies in intended-use populations that will provide more accurate PPV estimates are ongoing".
1. Is content moderation necessary in online platforms?
I think the answer to this question is self-evident, but others may disagree and so I think it's worth posing. FWIW, HN has moderation, both official (e.g., dang) and unofficial (anyone with enough karma to flag/downvote). There's also built-in protections against flamewars (i.e., algorithmic moderation). I don't think HN would be the same place without these elements. Feel free to disagree.
2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how should content moderation happen?
This is a tough problem, and it's a lot to easier to find fault than to propose workable solutions. I definitely would prefer a more democratic moderation scheme for these mega-platforms that dominate online media today. But in some sense, every form of online moderation (HN included) has been top-down. And as we've seen in the US and elsewhere, democracy itself is prone to fracturing.
It's almost like we need a constitution for online governance. But could we ever agree on such a constitution in the first place? Does it need to be legislated (and if so, how do we get global consensus)? Can it be bootstrapped from the bottom up?
3. Setting aside the question of who gets to decide, should moderation be based on tone, factuality, importance of the topic, ...? How does one determine factuality? Is there something special about political matters that makes it off-limits for moderation? What if politics intersects with other matters (which probably is the case more often than not) - as in the case of COVID?
And of course, it's probably impossible to separate these questions from the question of "who gets to decide". That lies at the heart of all of these "what about X" complaints elsewhere in the thread. Truth often matters less than trust, and trust is in short supply these days.
Again, it's easy to criticize, but these are difficult questions. There are few easy choices. And unfortunately for the people who work on these platforms, inaction is also a choice, as I'm sure they're well aware.
Article: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
Emails: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...
To me, the article seemed rather light on evidence and heavy on speculation. The first email from the editorial staff seemed reasonable, if perhaps a little heavy-handed. It certainly did not seem to warrant Glenn's immediate escalation - his reply reads like an ultimatum:
> But if the Intercept's position is that it won't publish any article by me that suggests that there are valid questions about whether Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing, then I think we should agree that the Intercept's position is that it is unwilling to publish the article I want to publish about the Democratic front-runner. Under my contract, if TI decides it does not want to publish something I want to publish, then I have the right to publish it elsewhere, which is a right I would exercise with this article.
Another excerpt that stood out, this one from Glenn's follow-up email (the 3rd in the chain):
> ...this is the first time in fifteen years of my writing about politics that I've been censored... and it's happening less than a week before a presidential election.
So, he first equates the editorial request to censorship, then emphasizes the closeness of the election in order to justify why that editorial concern should be bypassed.
His entire attitude seems to be that since he doesn't write anything factually incorrect, any attempt to influence or challenge the things his writing tries to imply is equivalent to censorship. A misguided attitude, if not downright disingenuous, IMO. But you can read and decide for yourself.
Not only is historical performance no guarantee of future performance, 10 years is a pretty short time span to look back - it doesn't even take you back to the '08 recession. The US did well in the 1990s and 2010s, but both ex-US developed markets and emerging markets did better in the 2000s: https://www.ishares.com/us/strategies/international-etfs
It's good to diversify internationally, and that probably does mean holding some US equities ETF even if you're in Europe. As for what else to buy, this may be a good starting point: https://www.lynalden.com/best-etfs/
That aside, the insidious thing about this movie is that many of the issues in brings up are real. There are real problems with social media addiction, ad tech, and filter bubbles. Changes do need to be made. Some might even need to be forced onto the big tech companies. However, these problems are not the root of all evil, as The Social Dilemma would have us believe.
They are certainly not the primary cause of societal upheaval we've been seeing. Political polarization in the US has been rising since the 90s, well before social media became dominant. Racism and police violence have never really gone away. Blaming tech for everything both makes it harder to fix the real problems with tech and easier to ignore the problems that exist elsewhere in society.
Off the top of my head, some things that deserve just as much blame for the problems this movie pins on technology:
1. The death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)
People can see distorted views of the world without the help of social media. One can argue that even now, Fox News and other mainstream media have a greater role in shaping public opinion than social media does. Not to mention the conglomerization of local news (driven by capital rather than tech) and the nationalization of media (enabled by tech, but driven by the MSM).
2. The slow death of the middle class, in the US and elsewhere.
An underlying assumption of The Social Dilemma and its line of argument is that people are dumb and easily manipulated. I suspect the educated elite, well-represented in the movie and over-represented here on HN, are particularly succeptible to this kind of thinking, myself included. But I think the reality is that most people care about their livelihoods more than anything else, and the polarization and upheaval we've been seeing (from Brexit to Trump) can largely be attributed to different reactions to this erosion of the middle class. The left might attribute it to unregulated capitalism and a failing social safety net. The right might attribute it to globalization, immigration, etc. The underlying phenomenon is the same, and has very little to do with tech, unless you're talking about factories and shipping costs.
3. Some problems have always been around - social media just makes everything more visible.
The last century saw two world wars, plenty of revolutions and armed conflict outside of that (which seems like a gross understatement, but there are too many to list), the death of the British Empire and the rise of many new nations, lots of social upheaval in the US... the list goes on. There's plenty to say about the 21st century as well, but looking back on history, I don't know if things have really gotten that much worse.
To put it differently, many on HN (myself included) love to tinker with tooling - editors, note-taking apps, what have you. But at the end of the day, we have to get back to the real work, and use those tools to accomplish meaningful things. If you look at social media and Internet technologies as tools for society, then yes, it's valuable to scrutinize them and see how they can be improved. But at the end of the day, we also need to get out into society and get to work, with whatever tools we have at hand.