deadpannini

8 ms·

31.
by deadpannini 4y ago
> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters. I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge
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by deadpannini 4y ago
I wish you were right, but this is not how people commonly use the term "cultural appropriation", which typically refers to people benefitting in some way (money, status, coolness) from using elements developed by other cultures o
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by deadpannini 4y ago
I didn't mean to give off a faux-naif vibe. I'm aware that people are concerned about market consolidation as such , but I'm not impressed. Anti-monopolists like Stoller lack rigor. They often zoom in and out of geographical
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by deadpannini 4y ago
My argument is that: 1) Consolidation as such is not intrinsically dangerous, especially when "consolidation" refers to "five large firms." 2) The Open Markets Institute website doesn't provide actual evidence of an
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by deadpannini 4y ago
So disappointing from a writer who I used to admire. There's always room for renegotiating the allocation of profits, especially when new technologies unsettle established norms. But Doctorow's arguments depends on an idiosyncrati
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by deadpannini 4y ago
For those that haven't read the OP, this comment is misleading. The original author, Erik Hoel, is not complaining about the _use_ of press releases, but taking exception to the general lack of attribution and the dishonest way that ne
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by deadpannini 4y ago
We badly need strong cultural norms against ostracizing people for what they say, short of speech that breaks the law. People should meet bad arguments with counter-arguments, or if they wish, disassociate from those that make bad arguments
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by deadpannini 4y ago
The fake vaccination campaign story is plausible, because of the CIA's historic practices, but it is not credible. I dug in and was surprised to see that the reporting does not substantiate the narrative. Read the links in that Vox art
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by deadpannini 4y ago
AIs absolutely do have goals, determined by their reward functions. Yes, "intelligence" is a deeply loaded term. It just doesn't matter in the context of the discussion here, so far as I've seen.its ambiguities haven&#x2
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by deadpannini 4y ago
I don't intend to forbid anything - I just think the language of motivation and desire makes it harder to see the risks, because it introduces irrelevant questions into the the conversation like "how can machines want something?&q
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by deadpannini 4y ago
"Mainly, why would it want to [end humanity]?" The anthropomorphism is misleading. No one expects that an AGI would "want to" in the commonplace sense of being motivated by animosity, fear, or desire. The problem is that
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by deadpannini 4y ago
The main change new technologies bring is that we can now see that a great many people disagree with us.
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by deadpannini 4y ago
I think this only appears to be a contradiction, because your concerns apply at different scales. You can reconcile the tension by insisting that the public utility platforms (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) remain neutral with res
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by deadpannini 4y ago
I agree with all of that. The context for my comment is discussions involving good-faith arguments intended to change hearts and minds (more or less object-level or simulacra level 1 arguments). The parent commenter wrote that "good-fa
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by deadpannini 4y ago
There's a risk that steel-manning can veer into condescension, but the real goal is to find a version of an argument that all parties agree represents it accurately and fairly. (As opposed to wasting time on superficial contradictions,
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by deadpannini 4y ago
No, I mean at any level. I agree with the what you're saying, but I'm not talking about things that make people popular , I'm talking about argumentation and what makes someone persuasive . I'm talking about the relati
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by deadpannini 4y ago
The dynamics you describe are real, especially on the big social-media utilities like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. "Boo outgroup" is the easiest thing to sell in the attention economy, the louder and more viciously, the
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by deadpannini 4y ago
> if the goal is persuasion then good-faith arguments don't scale. This is true, but only in a very narrow, specific sense. Arguments don't persuade on their own, they scale with the credibility of the speaker. Speakers gain cr
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by deadpannini 5y ago
Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's blog, I thought you had linked Topher Brennan's piece directly.
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by deadpannini 5y ago
Ironically, a brief passage by Scott Alexander (from the hit piece targeting him linked above) describes a very good reason to read content you disagree with, almost making the parent comment germane to the overall discussion. > Compare
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by deadpannini 5y ago
> Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator? To push that analogy a little farther, consider how
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by deadpannini 5y ago
It's not that we should never try to establish facts. Rather, we should never prevent people from challenging them.
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by deadpannini 5y ago
I don't get the implied scorn. Isn't reliable information valuable? Worth paying for? It sounds like you think this information should be priced in. I'm accustomed to that as well, since it has mostly been the commercial defa
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by deadpannini 5y ago
The damage caused by mis- and dis-information is real, but suppressing dissenting voices (even comically mistaken ones and bad actors) destroys institutional credibility, which is far worse in the long run.
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by deadpannini 5y ago
I agree, but that is quite separate from the posture of epistemological submission to experts that's being used to censor "misinformation".
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by deadpannini 5y ago
I wasn't clear. Most of the time, as with prostrate screenings, one of the following is true: - There is no expert consensus (on treatments, etiology, etc.). - Consensus exists, but the level of consensus is overstated. - There is broa
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by deadpannini 5y ago
The dissonance here is intense. On the one hand, "practicing MDs ... understand almost nothing when reading medical studies", but also I don't "know better than the average doc [just] because [I've] read 10 studies.
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by deadpannini 5y ago
The article isn't trying to engage problems at the lowest end of the housing market, it's concerned with the strange dynamics of the middle 60% of the market.
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by deadpannini 5y ago
When a niche becomes expensive, that indicates that there is a bigger market for it, even if it doesn't rise to the level of "mainstream."
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by deadpannini 5y ago
"Distributed hypocrisy."

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