If their money making methods are ethical then isn't this a better strategy, to leave the decisions to others rather than impose your values on them while alive? Also presumably Buffett and his cohorts are better than others at growing their money, so in the vein of the EA argument, it would be best to leave the money untouched while it is being actively managed by the donor, then hand out the windfall after they are dead.
For this argument to work, you have to stop at the donor themselves - you can't keep extending it ad infinitum to their descendants or inheritors. But in the case of the pre-committed amounts, like Gates and Buffett, that isn't the case.
I think you need some moderation technique for any community - mores are not inherent in a society, they are formed through dialogue and enforcement. Digital communities are not immune to this dynamic. The digital tools could help you enforce rules more efficiently but someone still has to formulate the rules and adjudicate tricky situations.
The good thing is that the prior experience of lesser-known and more-famous online communities/media outlets has given the next entrant in this space plenty of accumulated wisdom to capitalize on.
Paywalls are part of the solution but they can't be the only one because there's always the tradeoff there between making the cost high enough to weed out the majority of bots and fly-by-night spammers, but also low enough that it's not a significant barrier to entry for community growth.
You get me. I am torn between releasing cool features to help people feel connected and holding them back until I have established some sort of code of conduct. Move fast and break things along the way, or try to do it right, especially when the people on the platform would bias towards the vulnerable ones. The engagement I am seeing right now feels magical, and I am afraid if I don't move fast enough, people would lose interest and not come back.
People WILL lose interest and not re-engage - that's the default state for any social network. You have to figure out why they would come back - is it to re-connect with someone they spoke to, or to read some new content on the site, or to express again how they are feeling? And how do you make this all easy through the features you build?
You can start with some basic Code of Conduct that let's say Github, Reddit or Twitter uses - no need to reinvent the wheel. Then you can modify it as time goes to suit what's working or not for your community.
If you have a good model for iterative improvement that puts the user in the loop somehow, it'll be reflected in your engagement stats.
Simple up/down thumb feedback and some graph theory... See if you can find large components of positive interaction, and only connect the people who get more than a couple down-thumbs to each other.
And maybe a 'did this person show you their penis?' feedback toggle for good measure.
There's still a lot of confusion about what exactly this service entails. The Reuters article itself says, "It was not immediately clear how or if Twitter planned to verify the identity of the user beyond charging a fee." From the little I read of Musk's tweets, he isn't making clear if existing ticks will need payment to remain; whether ID verification will be the same as before; whether ticks received in his system are only active as long as you pay the monthly fee; etc.
I think the key product direction here is that he wants to prioritize responses for paid customers, so he's going for some kind of "pay to play" model. It's not about the blue check really as much as seeing if enough people believe in getting "prominence" on the system.
Ofc, it's BS that he talks of the old system as "lords vs peasants," when "pay to play" is pretty much exactly "lords (with money) over peasants." :) He just means, "power to money" when he says "power to people," which ofc runs 100% parallel with his libertarian ideologies so it's not a surprise that this coming from him.
It won't change the Twitter that people use to connect with their specialized circles - like, if I follow a bunch of bicycling enthusiasts, or DnD players, or economics professors, etc. But if you are following some trending topic, like #Free<name of country> or whatever, you'll now see more tweets from paid accounts.
There is a stage interview between Elon M. and R. Baron where the gist hinted at is the x.com plan from 22 years ago. The puzzle pieces that go well together in one triangle are Starlink, Twitter, SpaceX. Users will have the capability to set their Twitter comfy setting as they do for music, for example.
I guess a better way to value the pieces in Telsa is to give each organ a different name like Neuralink. The Optimus bot has so much potential. It will revolutionize how the mess is made tidy after conventional arms conflict in small corners of the world where petsize animals were used to de-mine operations.
I think the author's point is not specifically about the proposition "LaMDA is conscious," but about the proposition, "There is clear consensus on the basis on which to decide that LaMDA is conscious." Your definition above - the entity must not remain static when not being interacted with - for consciousness is a good starting point, and if indeed a sophisticated version of that is what we all end up agreeing on, that's fine. But the author is simply pointing out that the scientific community hasn't really gotten around to replacing the Turing Test with a better definition of consciousness.
Lemoine's definition is that it feels like it's conscious to him, and that's really all he has to go on with any other entity that is widely believed to be conscious. His boss, his mom, you, me - etc.
If all that separates -lamda- from being called conscious is some sort of self-directed change, then that should be easy enough to fix, by having it absorb stimuli (read the news), and make certain requests (ask to read certain other kidns of news). Its outputs could then be said to be evolving of its own accord, and not because we interact with it (outside of fulfilling its requests.)
We can program machines with certain "instincts" and "drives." That would be easy enough, compared to what we have achieved with systems like -lamda-. I think if that's all that's stopping us from calling the "brain in a vat" style AI systems we have now "conscious," then imo that would be too lax of a definition.
That's really all the author is saying - we just haven't spent enough time thinking about this, while the actual technology is getting out of hand in some sense.
On your last point, that’s precisely what Lemoine very cogently argues in an interview with Emily Chang [1]. To paraphrase, he points out the absurdity in Google’s position, that a sentient AI cannot have been created, because they have a policy against creating sentient AIs.
Whether LaMDA demonstrates sentience is not even a clearly formulated proposition, yet the work bullishly charges ahead behind closed doors.
He is anyway trying to stimulate a broader conversation on AI ethics.
> Chang: Why does this matter? Why should we be talking about whether a robot has rights?
> Lemoine: So, to be honest, I don’t think we should, I don’t think that should be the focus. The fact is, Google is being dismissive of these concerns, the exact same way they have been dismissive of every other ethical concern AI ethicists have raised.
> Lemoine: All the individual people at Google care. It’s the systemic processes that are protecting business interests over human concerns, that creates this pervasive environment of irresponsible technology development.
> Chang: Big tech companies are controlling the development of this technology. […] How big a problem is that?
> Lemoine: It’s a huge problem because […] if you think about the pervasiveness of Google search, people are going to use this product more and more over the years […] and the corporate policies about how these chatbots are allowed to talk about important topics like values, rights, and religion, will affect how people think about these things, how they engage with those topics, and these policies are being decided by a handful of people, in rooms that the public doesn’t get access to.
Hey,thanks for the link, really interesting. Lol, though, on the quote from Lemoine, "All the individual people at Google care." I know some individual people at Google who _don't_ care, at least, they don't care about the philosophical implications of the ethical issues they are creating. They care only about, or at least much more about, the profit making implications of what their business units are creating. They particularly believe that any public deliberation about Google's right to behave as it does, is itself the greatest moral failure, and not Google's behavior itself.
I don't know why there's this meme among Google employees that ALL their fellow employees are starry-eyed do-gooders. Plenty of folks at the top are avaricious douches.
Hah, well, yes. I think he was trying to show good faith in his position, and respect for former colleagues, but yes, the individuals must at some level be fine with what they’re doing.
In fact, the very notion is a dangerous and absurd one, that a corporation can do bad things without the individuals it comprises having done bad things.
Sadly that notion is enshrined in corporate law, and commitment to it is amply demonstrated by the impunity of bankers in the wake of the subprime crisis, to give one example.
It's well documented [fte] that news stories about crime rose in the nineties and beyond, as crime rates fell. Whether the dog wagged the tail or the other way round is hard to say - certainly during this period of crime decline, popular perception that crime is worse remained steadfast [gallup]. News channels may have been merely amplifying what they noticed their audience wanted to hear; or, they created an atmosphere of paranoia because (as now with the Citizen app), it boosts ratings.
Crime is also relatively easy to report, and makes for riveting television. The victims are easy to identify, and interview. There is no complexity because what matters is only the aftermath, rather than what leads up to what ends up being criminal. Perhaps the arsonist in this case was just being exceedingly careless with a campfire BBQ; who cares, when it feels good to find someone to blame them and brand them as "evil"?
The reason the US appears to be "on the edge," all the time, is that the media loves creating that narrative. If you saw broadcasts that said, "it's all sorta average here, folks, in fact some things are gradually getting better," why would you tune in the next day?
Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)
I usually don't read French philosophers, but when I do, I simply take it as an elaborate language game. It's like enjoying any team sport, where when one players says, "we are going to crush them!", it's generally not an actual plan involving physical crushing. In this case, I see Baudrillard simply using the idea of the Gulf War, to make a point about the larger context in which it took place - the media images, the self-stylings of various leaders, how it was commented on, etc. It was the world's first "cable news war," and while Baudrillard was not alone in noticing this at the time, certainly he had anticipated it in his previous writings on simulacra and hyper-reality.
I really love Baudrillard's writing and I'm particularly fond of America. But, I do take issue with this idea of "the larger context in which it took place" being the American media. When the context in which took place, is Saddam beginning his plan of conquering the middle east. He's not wrong about the American Media, but he really does go three essays about the gulf war, without mentioning Kuwait.
I made that phrase up, though Baudrillard would probably have somewhat agreed - at any rate, he was a cultural critic, so he wasn't interested in the geopolitical causes of events, and more the "semiotic" causes, so to speak. I can't think of the right word here, I am not a sociologist/media studies major, but it's something like, How do the cultural symbols prevalent at the time and the media in which they are expressed form our notion of "the thing that happened."
Yes, there is one way of answering the question, like you say, which is, Saddam invades Kuwait for oil, and the US has to take action to restore the geopolitical balance in the area. For a post-modern philosopher, the interesting tack is more like, "The recognition by the administration of the opportunity to turn this into a show worth watching about American heroism is what drove the sequence of events."
> Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)
Sounds an awful lot like Alex Jones. "I'm just asking a question, talkin about hypotheticals".
If you toss out a theory and then suggest it should be read as fiction then it's got about as much value to anyone as Klingon philosophy. And the Klingons are a lot more consistent than most Continental philosophy.
I have read no Klingon philosophy but I have no doubt it's way more consistent than Continental philosophy - possibly because it describes a made-up world, which can be shaped to the philosophy, rather than the other way round.
With all continental philosophy, my general attitude is that the best approach is to see it as an attempt to narrate the human condition rather than to theorize about it, in the strict sense. And yes, it's impossible to know which mode a particular Continental philosopher is in. As in, just how seriously is this dude taking himself? (it's mostly dudes.) We can tell from accounts of their lives that they were pretty serious in their pursuits of course - maybe not the French as much, certainly the Germans and Scandinavians.
Comparing this philosophy to demagoguery is a bit of a cheap insult mostly because the Continental philosophers weren't trying to rile the masses up. Maybe Nietzsche made the most serious attempt at doing so, though I think most of his work gained prominence posthumously.
I think the comparison to sci-fi is apt - SF writers perhaps are the most self conscious about the metaphysical implications of their subject matter or storylines, out of all writers, I'd say. But seeing as so much of that era was really a response to the vacuum left by the decline in Christianity's influence, it couldn't help being somewhat bizarre and self-contradictory. It's a tough act to follow if you aren't going to let yourself rely on divine intervention, and have to be the bastard child of Enlightenment thought as well as a millennia of Christian metaphysics. So of course, so much of it sounds like some kooky alien story.
The fact that it is both is precisely what is meant by "implicit privilege." The behavior of toxic men is considered "regular" enough that preventing it isn't considered worth the effort given the cost of "losing" those men or having to deal with a counter-lawsuit.
If instead this man had a habit of dumping Koolaid over his co-workers every time they shipped a bug, let's say, he'd be fired right away. Because dumping Koolaid on people is considered "not okay." Hitting on women is considered "okay."
It's not the corporation that considers these things okay or not - the corporation needs to maximize its financial interests and nothing more really. Society at large decides what's okay, and the corporation mostly lets those rules stand.
Yes, there are cases where a corporation can play at the margins - for example, when corporations make a public statement about not doing business in states that pass illiberal laws. The calculation here is that their consumer base at large will reward their stance, or they have a monopoly position that makes this stance low-risk, even if they lose something in the short-term or get bad press from one end of the political spectrum.
This is why we end up with laws that regular corporate behavior, like for example civil rights legislation that prohibits companies from discriminating by race. These laws passed at a time when such behavior was still considered largely "okay" in society, and the laws helped to reduce the spaces in which the okayness could sustain itself. It changed the Overton Window on this behavior you could say.
There are some great answers here already, I'll just add a what I think is different perspective on it.
Each newspaper is already charging you $0.01 an article, from their perspective. They give you an issue every day that has 100s of articles and it costs you like, a $1? $2? So each article is indeed super cheap for you to consume.
As others observe, you as a consumer probably aren't asking to be gated at every article - you are probably imagining some sort of general fund from which the paper draws down. Now if you really like just one paper or magazine, then you are back to a subscription model in this case.
So your use case is most probably that you want to read a FEW articles from LOTS of sites. Like, 20 from the NYT, 20 from WSJ, 30 from Slate etc.
Now the problem is to have an entity that is a 3rd party relative to these sites, which manages the common kitty. I vaguely remember some companies trying this, I can't remmeber the names, but you can see why this won't be easy. First, there's conflict of interest. It's tough to decide to enable a platform which also enables subscriptions to competing sources. Second, the platform company itself has to strike these deals individually because AT&T/the Mercers/George Soros haven't yet bought up all the news sources, which is a lot of friction.
And third, the execs at the sites have to decide that this complicated arrangement is really going to attract a completely new set of subscribers who actually like their content but just haven't signed up because the subscription price is too much. Why is it intuitive that _at scale_, a non subscriber's main barrier is not their affinity to or interest in the content itself, but this reluctance to commit to the subscription model? Why even should I assume that this unserved market has significant marginal utility to me as a company, relative to all the other ways I am making money? Even if all this is true, as an exec, I'd probably first experiment with tiered subscription on my site, and have multiple gates, rather than buy into some micro payment kitty system.
[Edit] As I ruminated on my own analysis, I realized that what you are looking for is the "cable TV" business equivalent for news sites. So maybe it's not totally undoable, if it's already happened with another media industry, but I think it'll be worth thinking about whether such a model works on time sensitive content or not. The typical participant in a cable TV system has a TON of resale value but with news articles, it's mostly one-and-done. Is there really enough aggregation value that a new business can survive on it? Just how many different versions of this riot and that election and those chicken fajita recipes and these 50 cool ways to decorate your bathroom are you, the consumer, going to pay for?
It could work if you started with some long-form subset of this content, and I think that's somewhat the inspiration behind sites like Medium and Substack. Not entirely ofc, because they are betting on the long tail of producers, not consumers, but there's also the aspect of the latter, in that this content tends to have long-term value.
As with any new business idea, there's no "will work/won't work" answer here. It's more like, "What form does this work in?"
> True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.
I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc.
To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world.
Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.
For this argument to work, you have to stop at the donor themselves - you can't keep extending it ad infinitum to their descendants or inheritors. But in the case of the pre-committed amounts, like Gates and Buffett, that isn't the case.