okintheory

11 ms·

61.
by okintheory 6y ago
As a casual observer, I get the impression that Google's corporate attitude toward research on Ethical AI is fundamentally analogous to Exxon's view of climate research in the 80s (and since). Namely, that Google, correctly, views
62.
by okintheory 6y ago
It's worth remembering that the Intercept hardly has a stellar reputation for protecting sources: they completely bungled the Reality Winner leak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
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by okintheory 6y ago
An important point about the technical meaning of "quantum supremacy": It is only the claim that a problem exists that can be solved on existing quantum computers and not on existing classical computers. The problem that Google
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by okintheory 6y ago
At various points in time, Facebook has made it possible to target political ads toward based on your known interest in pseudoscience or antisemitism [1]. Giving access to this degree of targeting (even if the categories are algorithmically
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by okintheory 6y ago
There's a big thing missing from this picture: If you have $ 1 billion, then you will eventually have $ 10 billion (40 yrs of 6 % returns), and your kid could easily end their life with $ 100 billion (add 40 more yrs). Is that ok?
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by okintheory 6y ago
Just FYI, govt. dark patterns in the US have been around for a very long time. For example, you could read about the "literacy" tests for voting in Southern states. Robert Caro has a nice description in Master of the Senate, vol.
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by okintheory 6y ago
No. That's what's happening in some American unions (not all!), but it's not true in Denmark (for any union!), by the sound of it from the above post, in Sweden.
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by okintheory 6y ago
There are much easier ways to fix this: Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children. I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option: Option 2) You could encourage women to get
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by okintheory 6y ago
No, the comment above is correct, and your own links show this. From link [2]: "SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)" The previous comment was just making the point that the (new) vi
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by okintheory 6y ago
That is a fair point! I did mainly mean to focus on social and political issues. I guess the question is what counts as transparent. In my mind, it should not be as easy as creating a new "page" to hide the connection between diff
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by okintheory 6y ago
That's funny! Did you try it? I find it impossible to get any useful information out of it. Literally the first ad that Facebook shows on my "newsfeed" is by "Jellop", but when I search for Jellop in their ad librar
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by okintheory 6y ago
It seems to me that there's an obvious alternative to checking facts, but it's one that scares FB much more than fact checking. Suppose they were transparent! Suppose it was easy to see unobfuscated statistics about who is paying
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by okintheory 6y ago
You're basically admitting that getting this right is non-trivial. Do you expect everyone to do it? Your barista? Your doctor? Similar argument: "Why do we even have doctors? Anyone can buy a medical textbook."
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by okintheory 6y ago
It's more complicated than that, as far as I understand. If you shift your money into a foundation, under some constructions, you can retain a lot of control over how it's spent, while avoiding taxes. Later you can pass control (a
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by okintheory 7y ago
But you wrote "meaning that the graph of active hospitalizations should be a bell curve with a maximum value of ~10,000 on ~4/20."? You didn't mean that?
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by okintheory 7y ago
That makes you think it should be a bell curve? Are you arguing it will be a bell curve with such a peak, even if restrictions are weakened or removed? That is unlikely.
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by okintheory 7y ago
Is that true? I'm more worried about false negatives on connections. Two concerns (as a layperson): 1) Transmission via surfaces is thought to be important (afaik). You don't have to be in the same place at the same time to tran
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by okintheory 7y ago
Immediate reaction: I'm sorry they settled on blue-tooth induced proximity. It seems likely to be a poor approximation of "epidemiologically relevant proximity". I would like to see research supporting the efficacy of this ap
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by okintheory 7y ago
If you upvote me, I'll pay you! This is also something the Koch's do -- they fund many astroturfing groups, e.g. Citizens for a Sound Economy.
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by okintheory 7y ago
The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hun
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by okintheory 7y ago
What a strange and bad way to "reflect" on the 2010s. This was not the decade that tech lost its way. It was the decade that more of mainstream media woke up to some of the issues with tech. NYTimes seems intent to prove they don&
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by okintheory 7y ago
Links?
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by okintheory 7y ago
Completely agree. It's a smoke screen, but probably one that holds up in court - for now.
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by okintheory 7y ago
From looking at Google's privacy policy for this product, it seems to me that if I have a file called all-my-deepest-secrets-fears-and-desires.txt stored in Google's cloud, then nothing stops Google from sharing what they learn f
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by okintheory 7y ago
For sure, people who say stuff that sounds like they don't like any white men get a lot of attention. But, I suspect they form a very small minority, also on the Left. Can I ask, what for you are some important examples of anti-&quot
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by okintheory 7y ago
This is the key point. People in power would like to avoid divisions that are between them and people with less power. Instead they prefer divisions between different groups of people with less power, because that way these groups will be i
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by okintheory 7y ago
Charles Koch and other billionaires and oil interests are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year funding the ultra-right wing US ecosystems of think tanks and academics, and a large part of the motivation is to prevent
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by okintheory 7y ago
As a working applied mathematician, I can tell you it's with pretty good reason. I learnt this stuff in high school and never used it since. It is one of the least useful things you could imagine. It is fun, though.
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by okintheory 7y ago
It's not the norm, but that is not the same as it being rare. When your money is dirty, you have to pay to launder it.
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by okintheory 7y ago
Indeed. But I also think that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page & Brin all value their own privacy. They just don't value your privacy that much.

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