Really more of a PR spectacle than a worthwhile experiment.
Including humans seems to have caused most of the problems there. If you actually wanted to experiment with closed biological systems in a useful way then I'd recommend doing a bunch of trials with a less cantankerous species of large omnivorous mammal, like the goat.
Biosphere 2 was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space[0]
>including humans seem to have caused most of the problems
I chuckled a bit at your reply hvd.
The hardest, seemingly intractable problems in the world aren't engineering problems, they are human ones. If we want to level up as a species those are the ones we will need to figure out how to solve.
The Malaysian government is very far from legitimate.
It's run by the party who got dramatically voted out at the last election. Even their supporters call it a "backdoor" government.
The former PM who stole billions and was found guilty of all charges was sentenced to 12 years in prison yet still sits in Parliament while getting friendly media interviews, he gave a speech on the budget just the other day representing all of the backbench.
I always find the South China Sea discussions interesting because I'd love to hear who people actually think deserves ownership of it?
The Philippines is run by a proud mass murdering nutjob, Vietnam is China-lite, Brunei just tried to roll out the death penalty for gay people. Malaysia is steadily gaining more extreme Islamists in power who bizarrely blame the Jews for everything that goes wrong like it's a country run by 4chan.
Who exactly deserves all that oil and fish? It's none of the above in my opinion.
Not sure why you are attacking and trolling all the claimants to the SCS by ad hominem most of the governments involved except China?
Go and critically read history books/articles/etc my friend, not only by the colonial regimes namely Spain, British, Dutch and France that have plundered the countries that you have just mentioned, and what names these areas are collectively called (yes they have their names) few centuries back before the dark colonial era started.
After that you probably know to whom the oil and fish belongs since these people have been fishing there for centuries. Truth and facts really matter but not your random opinions.
A better point would be that the current CCP regime in Beijing has no legitimate claim to be any kind of government with any legal claim over any territory whatsoever.
An unelected government is not a government, it's just a group of thugs who happen to have control over a capital city.
If China has any sort of legitimate government at all it's the one in Taiwan which was at least elected by somebody. But really, mainland China has no government, and the CCP should not be talked to or negotiated with as if they are a government.
There was a revolution in China. Many millions of Chinese people fought in it. It's not as if the Communist Party came to power by some accidental oversight.
Whether or not you like the government of the PRC, it is the government of China.
Your knowledge of history is so little that for you Washington is the guy who prints green notes.
Jokes aside if the legitimate government are only the elected one lets wipe 2/3 of the world's government lol.
Taiwan is a dispute territory because the kuomintang after they lost the civil war in China they moved to Taiwan and claimed the territory. Taiwan was not even a democracy after that but rather a military dictatorship with the martial law being applied till 1987 (from 1949, year in which they lost the civil war in China)
Only after that Taiwan started to open their system and allow general election in the 1990s (in some form in 1991, 1992 and presidential election only in 1996)
There's only a few dozen remaining completely unelected "governments" in the world, and yes, we should definitely get rid of all of them.
Certainly Taiwan never had a legitimate government either until recently but now they do, demonstrating that it can be done. I hope that the CCP can peacefully give up power too, but we should not take any military options off the table.
Does Taiwan becoming a successful democracy mean that China can? Taiwan is a small homogenous island, China, and more clearly Russia for that matter, is an empire. I fear China would fragment probably in bloody civil war if central power were loosened.
Taiwan cannot be considered a legitimate government either as the premise of their existence is illegal as they've claimed a territory that didn't belong to them and established a country (supported by whose thinks that communist should not exist - remember North/South Korea, North/South Vietnam)
The fact that someone elected the government doesn't change anything. People can be manipulated easily, look at who voted for Trump. The reality is that you've to see the history objectively.
CCP won the civil war in China (like Washington won the independence war) and is the legitimate government of China.
Luckily we don't vote for who is legitimate or not in HN, but in the UN. And there are resolutions of the UN that consider the CCP the legitimate government of China. The same can't be said for Taiwan for example.
I'm sorry but the down votes don't change the fact. Your view of what happened is pretty foggy and inaccurate, perhaps full of bias.
Taiwan was originally not a country, but it became one when it held elections. Having been elected by the people of the island of Formosa, and with no other legitimate government laying claim to that territory, they became a legitimate government.
The fact that the CCP has a group of men with guns occupying China does not make them in any sense a government, it just makes them the world's largest and most murderous criminal gang. We should stop pretending that China has a government and start working on how to bring them to the Hague for trial.
Country is not defined by the existence of an election process! Taiwan is not recognized as a county by the UN! While the CCP is recognized as the legitimate government of China
Also China has been claiming control over Taiwan ever since they won the civil war, so is not true what you're saying here that nobody has claimed Taiwan.
> The fact that the CCP has a group of men with guns occupying China
Well.. first they were not a bounce of men with guns they had the support of millions of people in China! And the reason was pretty easy, the old government (that become the Komingtan) sold China to the west and Japan (look for Nanjing puppet state [1]) and they were not happy about it by any means! So yes, they had all the rights to start the revolution to fight a corrupted government.
But even if they were a bounce of random people, the Brits went in Australia with guns and all and claim "this is mine now" and as you can see nobody is complaining about it. Before that they went to the current American continent and claim the land as well with guns and all, guess who won?
It seems to me that social media companies should only be allowed the legal protection of being "platforms" if they are truly neutral. No censorship, no algorithms.
Facebook should only be allowed to show you a feed of all your friends' posts, in chronological order. Twitter should only show you the tweets of people that you've followed, in chronological order.
Aside from solving any potential censorship or manipulation problems, it would also make a much more pleasant user experience than the unnavigable garbage that is Facebook's current product.
The more I think about this, the more I find myself coming around to a hybrid of your idea (strict neutrality) and Zuckerberg's original position (moderation of free speech is not their job).
Facebook et al.'s fundamental sin was optimizing the sorting and broadcasting algorithms.
I get it drove growth and made them the giant companies they are today. But it's not really a core competency, and now it's more trouble than it's worth. In fact, it's metastasized into an existential threat to them.
They should announce they're going back to naive ranking and sharing, and that they expect all external moderation requests to come through legal channels. (And then spend their billions digging the widest moat of integrated services and infrastructure they can)
They should announce they're going back to naive ranking and sharing, and that they expect all external moderation requests to come through legal channels. (And then spend their billions digging the widest moat of integrated services and infrastructure they can)
The trouble is that algorithmic feeds work really well. If they remove algorithmic feeds in an environment where competitors are still able to have such feeds, then they will be outcompeted in the long run.
This is one area where legislation and strict enforcement barring algorithmic feeds would work, though execution would be difficult.
Or at least give the user a preference as to the algorithm/sorting method they want (or the ability to implement their own! Will never happen, sadly.) I think it’s the lack of transparency into the curation. and lack of control over it, that is the issue, not the particular queries being run.
Most people have no idea how to change preferences, so whatever is default might as well be the only option. This is why Google pays billions to be the default search engine, not even the forced/only option.
It matters so little that it’s kind of odd that these sites don’t give the option, so at least they could use it in their arguments to show they have it. Probably only 0.01% of users would ever actually use it.
So all your twitter data and interactions like clicks and time spent will be sent to whoever gets you to install their algorithm? I can see why Cambridge Analytica seemed like a good idea to some people now...
Section 230, is explicitly no censorship. The problem is that twitter has gotten big enough that you can't seem to punish it by removing its Section 230 protections. As that would essentially be the death penalty for the platform.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act makes no designation or distinction of “platforms”. You have deeply misunderstood the law.
What it does is to make clear that people or organizations who run internet sites that allow 3rd party submissions will not for the purpose of the law be considered the “speaker” of the content in those submissions. It also states that this hold even if they moderate including editing the content to conform to internal standards.
The law specifically allows censorship, algorithms, banning, and editing or anything users submit. The whole purpose is to clarify that content hosts are allowed to do this without being held liable for the content of the speech they are moderating.
The parent seemed to imply that there should be no permissible moderation at all, which strikes me as undesirable. Also the use of “provider” is common to factually incorrect descriptions of the law.
I would also add that no one prevents the original poster, or anyone else from using other services. I mean, here we are on a narrow social media site discussing the topic.
I think moderation has become far too strict on the net and I have seen countless examples of censorship due to bipartisanship. I don't think all people want that. If people prefer it that way, there need to be separate spaces.
But I believe this is at the core of the issue when people complain about moderation. I think it is very true, even sites like Wikipedia are negatively affected on political topics while paid external editors are free to roam to push up articles about themselves or their companies. This is the worst kind of moderation I can imagine.
If we talk about moderation against spammers and scammers, a vast majority would agree on the other hand. But these are two separate issues in my opinion.
> I would also add that no one prevents the original poster, or anyone else from using other services.
I think there is concerted effort to purge alternatives in the current market situation and I think this nothing else than an excuse to justify certain content moderation. I think platforms have this freedom, but there are also consequences to that.
It's a great proposal for a product roadmap, or building a competitor but an awful proposal for legislation. Why should the government dabble in deciding how social media builds its product? You'll just crate a mat that entrenches FB and the like.
I think people VASTLY overestimate the influence of things like the FB feed on the real world. The best evidence they ever seem to have for any claimed effect is the number of people FB say saw/interacted with a post. They have a long history of inflating those numbers, yet the critics are all too happy to use them. The activity on social media that seems to actually result in real world outcomes seems to generally be the boring work of community building.
Also, how do you deal with spam or noisy posters in a "1:1 and neutrally ranked (e.g. by timestamp)" feed?
I barely use twitter, I follow like 2 people. But I have still noticed how offensively useless the timeline is. The timeline has never been anything more than an out-of-context jumble of nothing, even with how curated my following list is. It is actually shocking to me how utterly incompetent it is. It takes what I want to see and actually somehow strips it of value. There is no reason for me to use the timeline in any respect ever, but it's still the landing page.
Agreed. Tweetdeck is able to have a normal timeline, but the damage is done, all the people are like us, we've all stopped using it. It's on a downward spiral.
^ this. Even among people who claim to prefer chonological feeds, double-blind tests show a strong preference for algorithmic feeds.
If grandparent is saying “algorithmic feeds are so popular-yet-dangerous that we should regulate them like alcohol” then ok, that’s a valid starting point - but we should at least acknowledge that this is user-hostile in the short term.
I am so tired of this line of argument. Those are totally arbitrary suggestions without any consideration for what is practical or legally plausible.
On what basis should website owners lose their right to determine what goes up on their own website? What about the creative control one's own work? What about free speech for the site creator? What about the property rights owned to those paying cash to keep the site operational? The law should not attempt to dictate the specific ways in which it is legal for computer programs to sort information for display on a website... this is absurd.
I fully agree that website owners shouldn't lose the right to determine what goes up on their own website, but with the caveat that this right also comes with legal liability for anything that's on there.
“ No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”
It also provides protection for all good faith moderation even if constitutionally protected speech.
However, when Facebook “fact checks” a post, they become a publisher.
And the moderation exemption is very specific to types of content. It doesn’t, for example, allow blanket moderation for political reasons. It specifically mentions lewd/excessively violent content. It isn’t a blanket “moderation” exemption.
Also, “good faith” is explicit. Moderating one political viewpoint while allowing another isn’t good faith. Stop the Steal is censored. Many ANTIFA groups aren’t.
From the law:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
> However, when Facebook “fact checks” a post, they become a publisher.
Says who? I hear this over and over, but there's no legal basis for any of this. It's horse-dung.
> It doesn’t, for example, allow blanket moderation for political reasons
Who decides what's political?
> Moderating one political viewpoint while allowing another isn’t good faith.
Define "good faith". Also, you missed the "otherwise objectionable" part of that law. What's "objectionable" to one platform may not be to another. If I run a message board for adherents of a religion that say, opposes gay marriage, should I not have the option to censor posts that support gay marriage? If I run a message board for environmentalists, do I have to let climate change deniers write whatever they like?
Which is fair enough. If they write a fact check that turns out to be libelous or illegal in some way, they are liable for that specific piece of content. I think the law is clear about that.
GP was saying something else entirely. They were contending that if FB moderates or fact-checks even a single user post, they are now the publisher of everything that users post on their platform. Which is not at all how the law works.
Platforms are still liable for content that they author and post themselves. They just aren't liable for what their users post, even if they perform moderation or "censorship" on those users' content.
The phrase “otherwise objectionable” is so vague that courts have basically interpreted it to mean violations of community standards, or basically whatever. I’m no fan of any kind of political censorship, but they do own the servers. They’re under no obligation to host any content, and we’re all free to go elsewhere.
That said, I think most of their moderation is awful and their fact checking is ridiculous at best.
I think this is one of those cases where everyone actually is arguing in good faith. Nobody is actually in favour of people dying, and nobody is actually in favour of imposing lockdowns just for shits and giggles.
Including humans seems to have caused most of the problems there. If you actually wanted to experiment with closed biological systems in a useful way then I'd recommend doing a bunch of trials with a less cantankerous species of large omnivorous mammal, like the goat.