"Finally, these volunteers are doing exactly the best possible thing"
No, the best possible thing would be to have the cats that can't be given homes euthanized. There is an excess of feral cats in the US, and even domesticated cats SIMPLY ENJOY KILLING THINGS. They're *cats*. That's what they do. And burrowing owls are an easy, very easy, prey.
The quote is that correlation doesn't PROVE causation - because it doesn't. The fact is that correlation largely directs us toward useful results. It's how we "science". If the sun is up and I have sunburn, that doesn't PROVE the sun caused the sunburn, but correlation suggests its a good first place to look rather than the rising count of ostriches in Australia.
Personally, I'd say that income is a FAR better predictor of criminality than skin color, but that's beside the point of the conversation that you keep trying to avoid: you've proved my point abundantly. If there's a statistical result that disagrees with your 'gut' you immediately attack it as suspect. This is my point: we as a society can't accept results that disagree with our perceptions. It's ridiculous to assume that we're going to develop AI and let them learn freely, but then dip into their psyche and tweak things every time we don't like the result. Why bother with the AI then, if the only acceptable results are those we've predetermined?
...people are losing faith in an overhyped, not-ready-for-prime-time technology in the development stages for a task that takes a colossal synthesis of perception, reflexes, maturity, and training (none of which we have systems capable of duplicating yet individually) for which the infrastructure (physical, legal, social) hasn't even begun to be developed, much less matured to the point of implementation?
It's almost like repeatedly INSISTING that "it's almost here" is ACTUALLY an insufficient substitute for real time in development?
But then you're reduced to empty arguments about the value of any knowledge. Where do you go from there?
Personally, I think your view is informed more by politics and social leanings than reality. If the numbers are that staggering - 70% of violent crime by 15% of the population - then to dismiss them one would have to postulate an ASTONISHING, daily level of racism (remember, this would be with the full collaboration and cooperation of black police officers and chiefs - Uncle Toms all of them, then?) that simply doesn't seem to be evident.
No, I'd concede that perhaps some of that is propelled by systemic racial bias - maybe instead of 70%, it's 65% - but that doesn't materially impact my point: what if the actual, factual statistics show something we're exceedingly uncomfortable with.
What if we had irrefutable intelligence tests that PROVED East-Asians were smarter than whites? No hand-waving about tiger moms or social bias, or extracurricular excuses...could we cope with such a fact?
...when your product has become a commodity, you have three choices:
1) try to buy your way to control of the market. If there are high capital barriers to entry in the field, and you already have a lot of the costs invested, you have a chance. As a 90% dominant player, you might be able to undercut/destroy any new entrants before they can get established (or better, make it clear that you COULD do this to intimidate any investors contemplating getting into your market enough to dissuade them from even trying).
2) upscale: use your ostensible experience and sunk investments with the product to deliver more product for the same price. If they can make a walkman that plays mp3's, you offer one that plays mp3 AND will pull content from the web/youtube. If they copy that, you offer one that's waterproof, etc.
3) sell your brand and GTFO. Parlay what is ostensibly a good reputation into short-term cash by licensing your brand to one of the better commodity producers for a fee. They get to make their shitty knock-offs but put your label on it so they can gain extra sales (and possibly a slight margin) trading on your name/history, while you just get $ for doing nothing. Then you can fire your workers, sell your factories, and make serious money with no capital employed at all as long your reputation is worth something for them to pay for it, which is probably a while.
The problem with choice 1 is that sometimes it's simply not possible, particularly when your competition is in China. The problem with choice 2 is that with electronics the capital investment is rarely a big barrier to entry (unless you're talking like chip-fabs or something). A quick reverse-engineering (or even simply knowing something is conceptually possible) is enough to allow low-cost commodity competitors to quickly catch up to you without bearing much of your research/dev costs....which is why we see #3 as the very common option. For example, I've seen that result for a certain brand of food products - a company with a deep historical reputation as pretty much become little more than an office managing the licensing of their brands.
I'm not confusing anything. You asserted that the "justification" for freely sharing this data was that it created economic activity.
I'm saying that's nonsense based on an antiquated 'broken-windows' sense of how an economy works and an assertion that activity would otherwise never have existed - which is just silly.
No, you're using the economic logic of people who like tax giveaways and the RIAA/MPAA. $2bn in economic activity was generated? Is that the inverse of how copying a song denies them a sale?
Further, I'm not a Keynesian who believes broken windows improve the economy - money moving around doesn't improve anything by itself. Increasing government opportunities to tax people by money changing hands is only increasing the ability of government to act as a boat-anchor on commerce.
And, this sets aside the reality that in most cases that economic activity would have happened anyway, through other avenues.
In the Calhoun experiments mice were put in an enclosed pen, provided ample resources including nesting space, with the expectation they the would breed to the limit of their space. Instead, they bred to a certain point, then collapsed:
At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. Theyâ(TM)d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes theyâ(TM)d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.
The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, âoethe beautiful ones.â Generally guarded by one male, the femalesâ"and few malesâ"inside the space didnâ(TM)t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.
Sounds pretty familiar to me. The original premise - free food and housing - sounds like an LBJ project.
I know the whole point of most posts on the interwebs in 2018 is to signal how much we all hate Trump, but I'm not sure I'm entirely against the US gov't trying to at least recoup costs for services offered?
We do all recognize that things cost money, right? Even government things.
Yes, our tax $ paid for this, so for citizens and private use? Should be free. But corporate, commercial, or non-American use? Sure, there should be a cost-compensatory charge.
...but as a US citizen my taxes paid for the agency, the hardware, and is paying for the maintenance. It should be free to me, for sure.*
*well, let's be honest, about 1/3 of it was paid by borrowing because as a country we have a ridiculous obsession with overspending, but that's another conversation.
"Their stated goal is to use this power to solve global poverty and disease. By any measure, that is not evil."
Nonsense. The devil is certainly in the implementation. If one 'solved' poverty by killing all the poor people, it would CERTAINLY be evil. If one 'solved' disease by eugenically breeding superhumans, it would pretty likely be evil AF.
So no, I don't buy your initial premise, nor most of the rest of your post.
People are MOST CERTAINLY entitled to be upset at losing agency; the premise of democracy is that everyone gets a say, not just a geniocracy run by the West-Coast intellectuals that work at google. You seem to like pure meritocracies? Should we have votes weighted by IQ? OK for you?
Hint: by that *same* logic one could certainly argue that wealth accumulation is about as clear a measure of real-world practical smarts as any other yardstick; so anyone for plutocracy?
"The point being, the republic was set up to aspire to higher goals than can be achieved by pure democracy alone. We have people in power who are not bound by the will of the people, they can vote their conscience based on what they think is right. We take guidance from a bunch of enlightened people 250 years ago who set up basic guidelines to do this."
Good post; I would only append that the FF who wrote the constitution were *very* aware of this, and (tried, at least) wrote a constitution which was in every sense designed to be a very strict fence on federal government behavior. States could do much what they pleased as long as they stayed within the basic bounds established by the federal constitution, but the federal gov't was meant to be basically a clearing house for national diplomacy, military, and a few other VERY LIMITED functions. (The thought being that people could 'vote with their feet' if a state's behavior was excessive or unpleasant.)
And now we have a Federal gov't telling people how high their doorknobs have to be.
We might have lost the point of the constitution long ago.
Start with "don't be evil" ends up with a terrifying Big Brother-y quasi police state* 'managing' everyone's behavior "for the public good, of course Mr Smith"
*you might say that Google is merely gathering data and at most 'nudging' behavior. I'd say that when Google can concatenate & save forever EVERYTHING YOU DO to a degree that would make FB and Cambridge Analytica (you know, the guys being publicly lynched for doing exactly this?) blush, and use that data against you in ways ranging from subtle to blatant including simply handing your data over to authorities, then yeah, I'm going to call that a quasi-police state whose 'public/private' partnership borders on Fascism.
"It's amazing to think that people are getting worked up about this relatively small data set obtained by this relatively tiny company"
Not really. We've had a 2 year multimillion dollar investigation into a president based on no actual evidence, just supposition and speculation by people who ardently were opposed to him.
Support Trump, you'll be punished beyond the full extent of the law for being on the "wrong side". It's almost like religion.
So we're going to have a code that essentially encapsulates a record of everything that happens during a shipment? Wow I'm so excited.
While blockchain may be slightly* more convenient and concise....this is ALREADY how logistics works.
There is a clear chain of documentation, signatures, and custody from the origin to the destination. For international ocean shipments that may go by truck, then train, then truck again, then ship, then truck, then train, then truck to final delivery this can be a fairly laborious set of documents but I can assure it's absolutely concise - indicating PRECISELY from whom, to whom, and when each of those transfers takes place. Likewise on these documents are tracked the seal numbers which prevent opening/tampering enroute.
Yes, when most of these documents became electronic, life became a lot easier (I started in the business when basically it was all faxes); likewise sure, I believe blockchain will have significant limitations in what it can encode* meaning we're STILL going to have to have an old-fashioned documentary trail to capture completely all the possible variable. So now we have 2 systems where there was one: blockchain tracking optimally 95% of shipments but 5% still requiring the documentary infrastructure. Is that "better"? I'm not sure.
*the real-life variability is...high: I've known of shipments that didn't deliver because the truck driver diverted enroute to commit himself into a mental institution. Or another shipment where the container couldn't be returned empty to the depot because it had become a crime scene where two stowaways from Italy had frozen to death in the nose of a container going to Minneapolis in January. TBH they probably starved to death before they froze, their little backpack of sandwiches and couple jugs of water = not enough for a 4-5 week transit time. I doubt blockchain will have a comprehensive code for those.
Just my $0.02. Been in international logistics nearly 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
"Finally, these volunteers are doing exactly the best possible thing"
No, the best possible thing would be to have the cats that can't be given homes euthanized.
There is an excess of feral cats in the US, and even domesticated cats SIMPLY ENJOY KILLING THINGS. They're *cats*. That's what they do. And burrowing owls are an easy, very easy, prey.
The quote is that correlation doesn't PROVE causation - because it doesn't. The fact is that correlation largely directs us toward useful results. It's how we "science".
If the sun is up and I have sunburn, that doesn't PROVE the sun caused the sunburn, but correlation suggests its a good first place to look rather than the rising count of ostriches in Australia.
Personally, I'd say that income is a FAR better predictor of criminality than skin color, but that's beside the point of the conversation that you keep trying to avoid: you've proved my point abundantly. If there's a statistical result that disagrees with your 'gut' you immediately attack it as suspect. This is my point: we as a society can't accept results that disagree with our perceptions. It's ridiculous to assume that we're going to develop AI and let them learn freely, but then dip into their psyche and tweak things every time we don't like the result. Why bother with the AI then, if the only acceptable results are those we've predetermined?
....what technical advances has Ariane brought to the space-launch process, again?
...people are losing faith in an overhyped, not-ready-for-prime-time technology in the development stages for a task that takes a colossal synthesis of perception, reflexes, maturity, and training (none of which we have systems capable of duplicating yet individually) for which the infrastructure (physical, legal, social) hasn't even begun to be developed, much less matured to the point of implementation?
It's almost like repeatedly INSISTING that "it's almost here" is ACTUALLY an insufficient substitute for real time in development?
Hm.
I entirely agree with you in theory, actually.
But then you're reduced to empty arguments about the value of any knowledge. Where do you go from there?
Personally, I think your view is informed more by politics and social leanings than reality.
If the numbers are that staggering - 70% of violent crime by 15% of the population - then to dismiss them one would have to postulate an ASTONISHING, daily level of racism (remember, this would be with the full collaboration and cooperation of black police officers and chiefs - Uncle Toms all of them, then?) that simply doesn't seem to be evident.
No, I'd concede that perhaps some of that is propelled by systemic racial bias - maybe instead of 70%, it's 65% - but that doesn't materially impact my point: what if the actual, factual statistics show something we're exceedingly uncomfortable with.
What if we had irrefutable intelligence tests that PROVED East-Asians were smarter than whites? No hand-waving about tiger moms or social bias, or extracurricular excuses...could we cope with such a fact?
...when your product has become a commodity, you have three choices:
1) try to buy your way to control of the market. If there are high capital barriers to entry in the field, and you already have a lot of the costs invested, you have a chance. As a 90% dominant player, you might be able to undercut/destroy any new entrants before they can get established (or better, make it clear that you COULD do this to intimidate any investors contemplating getting into your market enough to dissuade them from even trying).
2) upscale: use your ostensible experience and sunk investments with the product to deliver more product for the same price. If they can make a walkman that plays mp3's, you offer one that plays mp3 AND will pull content from the web/youtube. If they copy that, you offer one that's waterproof, etc.
3) sell your brand and GTFO. Parlay what is ostensibly a good reputation into short-term cash by licensing your brand to one of the better commodity producers for a fee. They get to make their shitty knock-offs but put your label on it so they can gain extra sales (and possibly a slight margin) trading on your name/history, while you just get $ for doing nothing. Then you can fire your workers, sell your factories, and make serious money with no capital employed at all as long your reputation is worth something for them to pay for it, which is probably a while.
The problem with choice 1 is that sometimes it's simply not possible, particularly when your competition is in China. ...which is why we see #3 as the very common option. For example, I've seen that result for a certain brand of food products - a company with a deep historical reputation as pretty much become little more than an office managing the licensing of their brands.
The problem with choice 2 is that with electronics the capital investment is rarely a big barrier to entry (unless you're talking like chip-fabs or something). A quick reverse-engineering (or even simply knowing something is conceptually possible) is enough to allow low-cost commodity competitors to quickly catch up to you without bearing much of your research/dev costs.
I'm not confusing anything. You asserted that the "justification" for freely sharing this data was that it created economic activity.
I'm saying that's nonsense based on an antiquated 'broken-windows' sense of how an economy works and an assertion that activity would otherwise never have existed - which is just silly.
"Beyond general non-discrimination practices, the declaration focuses on the individual right to remedy when algorithmic discrimination does occur. "
But how do we tease out actual discrimination from facts that we're simply uncomfortable with?
So I think we can all agree that any algorithm that says "If Skin=black then Criminal = 1" is pretty obviously racist.
But if an algorithm consumes statistics and determines that 74% of the violent crime in a city is being committed by https://www.amren.com/commenta...
Try reading something not from the Church of Keynes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://mises.org/library/pric...
Or if those are too dull for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I assumed it was sponsored by a Democrat, because they didn't blame a Republican or Trump.
Just fucking STOP already.
Bullshit.
No, you're using the economic logic of people who like tax giveaways and the RIAA/MPAA. $2bn in economic activity was generated? Is that the inverse of how copying a song denies them a sale?
Further, I'm not a Keynesian who believes broken windows improve the economy - money moving around doesn't improve anything by itself. Increasing government opportunities to tax people by money changing hands is only increasing the ability of government to act as a boat-anchor on commerce.
And, this sets aside the reality that in most cases that economic activity would have happened anyway, through other avenues.
...which would suggest that the logic for the original argument was stupid.
Which was my point.
QED.
I think it's much simpler than that.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com...
In the Calhoun experiments mice were put in an enclosed pen, provided ample resources including nesting space, with the expectation they the would breed to the limit of their space. Instead, they bred to a certain point, then collapsed:
Sounds pretty familiar to me. The original premise - free food and housing - sounds like an LBJ project.
I know the whole point of most posts on the interwebs in 2018 is to signal how much we all hate Trump, but I'm not sure I'm entirely against the US gov't trying to at least recoup costs for services offered?
We do all recognize that things cost money, right? Even government things.
Yes, our tax $ paid for this, so for citizens and private use? Should be free. But corporate, commercial, or non-American use? Sure, there should be a cost-compensatory charge.
...but as a US citizen my taxes paid for the agency, the hardware, and is paying for the maintenance. It should be free to me, for sure.*
*well, let's be honest, about 1/3 of it was paid by borrowing because as a country we have a ridiculous obsession with overspending, but that's another conversation.
I agree that sure, it might be useful?
But the title of my post was 'hyperbole' - this will not "completely change" anything.
Right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
at 1:00 - that's flying?
No, it isn't.
"Their stated goal is to use this power to solve global poverty and disease. By any measure, that is not evil."
Nonsense. The devil is certainly in the implementation.
If one 'solved' poverty by killing all the poor people, it would CERTAINLY be evil.
If one 'solved' disease by eugenically breeding superhumans, it would pretty likely be evil AF.
So no, I don't buy your initial premise, nor most of the rest of your post.
People are MOST CERTAINLY entitled to be upset at losing agency; the premise of democracy is that everyone gets a say, not just a geniocracy run by the West-Coast intellectuals that work at google. You seem to like pure meritocracies? Should we have votes weighted by IQ? OK for you?
Hint: by that *same* logic one could certainly argue that wealth accumulation is about as clear a measure of real-world practical smarts as any other yardstick; so anyone for plutocracy?
"The point being, the republic was set up to aspire to higher goals than can be achieved by pure democracy alone. We have people in power who are not bound by the will of the people, they can vote their conscience based on what they think is right. We take guidance from a bunch of enlightened people 250 years ago who set up basic guidelines to do this."
Good post; I would only append that the FF who wrote the constitution were *very* aware of this, and (tried, at least) wrote a constitution which was in every sense designed to be a very strict fence on federal government behavior. States could do much what they pleased as long as they stayed within the basic bounds established by the federal constitution, but the federal gov't was meant to be basically a clearing house for national diplomacy, military, and a few other VERY LIMITED functions. (The thought being that people could 'vote with their feet' if a state's behavior was excessive or unpleasant.)
And now we have a Federal gov't telling people how high their doorknobs have to be.
We might have lost the point of the constitution long ago.
Start with "don't be evil"
ends up with a terrifying Big Brother-y quasi police state* 'managing' everyone's behavior "for the public good, of course Mr Smith"
*you might say that Google is merely gathering data and at most 'nudging' behavior. I'd say that when Google can concatenate & save forever EVERYTHING YOU DO to a degree that would make FB and Cambridge Analytica (you know, the guys being publicly lynched for doing exactly this?) blush, and use that data against you in ways ranging from subtle to blatant including simply handing your data over to authorities, then yeah, I'm going to call that a quasi-police state whose 'public/private' partnership borders on Fascism.
"It's amazing to think that people are getting worked up about this relatively small data set obtained by this relatively tiny company"
Not really. We've had a 2 year multimillion dollar investigation into a president based on no actual evidence, just supposition and speculation by people who ardently were opposed to him.
Support Trump, you'll be punished beyond the full extent of the law for being on the "wrong side". It's almost like religion.
Er...look, I want to credit the development team for making some tremendous strides in miniaturization but - that's not flying.
Fluttering wings hard enough to momentarily leave the ground is impressive, yes. But don't spoil it by trying to call it flying.
"(Blockchain will)....completely change worldwide supply chains"
So we're going to have a code that essentially encapsulates a record of everything that happens during a shipment? Wow I'm so excited.
While blockchain may be slightly* more convenient and concise....this is ALREADY how logistics works.
There is a clear chain of documentation, signatures, and custody from the origin to the destination. For international ocean shipments that may go by truck, then train, then truck again, then ship, then truck, then train, then truck to final delivery this can be a fairly laborious set of documents but I can assure it's absolutely concise - indicating PRECISELY from whom, to whom, and when each of those transfers takes place. Likewise on these documents are tracked the seal numbers which prevent opening/tampering enroute.
Yes, when most of these documents became electronic, life became a lot easier (I started in the business when basically it was all faxes); likewise sure, I believe blockchain will have significant limitations in what it can encode* meaning we're STILL going to have to have an old-fashioned documentary trail to capture completely all the possible variable. So now we have 2 systems where there was one: blockchain tracking optimally 95% of shipments but 5% still requiring the documentary infrastructure. Is that "better"? I'm not sure.
*the real-life variability is...high: I've known of shipments that didn't deliver because the truck driver diverted enroute to commit himself into a mental institution. Or another shipment where the container couldn't be returned empty to the depot because it had become a crime scene where two stowaways from Italy had frozen to death in the nose of a container going to Minneapolis in January. TBH they probably starved to death before they froze, their little backpack of sandwiches and couple jugs of water = not enough for a 4-5 week transit time. I doubt blockchain will have a comprehensive code for those.
Just my $0.02. Been in international logistics nearly 30 years.
It was a post full of facts - tendentious facts, certainly - but all of them are objectively true.
I'm sorry that honesty makes you uncomfortable.
Then again, you're posting AC so you're chickenshit anyway.