escape_goat

2 years agodiscuss

There was a degree of proof of work involved. Text took human effort to create, and this roughly constrained the quantity and quality of misinforming text to the number of humans with motive to expend sufficient effort to misinform. Now superficially indistinguishable text can be created by an investment in flops, which are fungible. This means that the constraint on the amount of misinforming text instead scales with whatever money is resourced to the task of generating misinforming text. If misinforming text can generate value for someone that can be translated back into money, the generation of misinforming text can be scaled to saturation and full extraction of that value.

escape_goat

6 years agodiscuss

The culpability of Dean Oemcke in this particular incident should not be understated. Hindsight is hindsight, of course, but the fact that the new owner of the platform distribution rights of this open-source project was (and apparently remains) anonymous seems like it ought to have been a huge red flag. The fact that these rights were paid for made it obvious that monetization was pending. The lack of transparency made it obvious that the form of that monetization would not be acceptable to the contributing community.

There might be a way of contesting the rights to the project name but that would require legal activism and external funding. Basically the original project is dead insofar as the contributors are not comfortable with supporting a parasitic and probably malicious actor. I guess a fork is inevitable. Meanwhile the parasite will harvest the value of the 'brand', distribution rights, and existing codebase until it is drained by obsolescence.

A really disgusting way to treat a community by both parties. One can only hope that Mr. Oemcke desperately needed the money for some vital purpose.

escape_goat

6 years agodiscuss

I'm less qualified to opine on Google than most of the people here, but in hindsight, what Google products remind me of is the way that black walnut trees slowly poison the soil so that the seedlings from other species of tree cannot grow nearby. The good intentions that poured energy into all the 20% products are no longer the point. Somewhere along the way, someone figured out how to use them strategically. The free products are good, good enough to use, until you realize that there is no path for continued growth or investment of resources, and run into seemingly arbitrary disappointments and limitations; it as if at some point, someone stopped the projects from adding cool utility to the product, and started making sure that hindered, crippled versions of the feature were offered instead. I experience this most acutely with the languishing "Google My Maps" product. It feels as if the target is not just potential competition, but the imagination and demand of the market itself.

I don't actually know the story of Google Reader and RSS feeds, but I remember how integral RSS feeds were to the golden era of blogging, and how abruptly that era seems to have ended with Google Reader's apparent death. And to me, that has a similar feeling. The idea is that the target is not potential competition wherever it might spring up; the idea is to sap the demand that might nourish competition, to suck the air out of the room, and stifle the imagination of the market itself.

It isn't Google alone who is responsible for this feeling, to be fair. There is watching the growth of the walled garden of Facebook, watching the collapse of the old chat services which allowed independent clients, watching successful startup after successful startup turn new ideas into content for a routine process wherein we see the exact same sheen of gloss on the promises, the same dance steps towards the pirouette, the attempt to pivot gracefully and effortlessly towards monetization in a maneuver that is in fact a mating dance desirous of acquisition.

All of it really sucks. It's not like there's an easy alternative. People like free things, and with computer-based resources there is often so much opportunity to scale the value of a thing that free things can be sustainable; a project can succeed and be useful to thousands of people merely on the basis of the labour that some are willing to commit to to sustain it. Again, I'm less qualified to describe this than most of you are. But that's what open source is like.

It doesn't work with services. Code that runs of different platforms can be replicated/adopted for infinitesimal cost, and the underlying costs of running it are naturally distributed. Services are different. The replication/adoption and the creation of value both involve on a massive rush of the many to the one. That relationship pretty much sums up the whole story. If capital accrued to capital by a square law, attention would accrue to attention by a cube law. In idiosyncratic niches that cannot be satisfied by the mass service, alternatives are actually viable and flourish. But anything that would be beneficial to us all encounters this problem of needing to absorb the real costs of operation while seeming to be as free as possible, or else the users will flit away to a different flower.

There's no good solution to this, but the way in which Google has graciously assumed responsibility for directing our attention does not make it better. All the improvements to search results over time seem to focus attention more and more to what an archetype of user is likely to be satisfied with. I would not be surprised if the energy costs per search had gone down. As many have noted, esoteric results are increasingly invisible.

Anyways, this is what we have done with the new universe of human communication that has opened up in the last few decades, which we imagined we would leverage into new systems of effortless communication and collaboration. And we have, to a lesser extent. Second best or third best. But we've discovered this really intractable problem with the distribution of costs.

escape_goat

11 years agodiscuss

As I've mentioned elsewhere, my concern was with the nature of the parent comment's argument, rather than with the ideas he was seeking to defend. A utilitarian position is of course quite defensible; one could even argue for a sort of triage.

What I was interested in, however, was how facile and insufficient his counter-arguments actually were, and how scant the consideration of empathy actually was, even though he started by saying:

> All I long for is logical consistency and empathy...

I think my mini-essay would have been greatly improved if I had thought to address that directly.

escape_goat

11 years agodiscuss

I'd intended to concern myself entirely with why the responses in the parent comment were bad counter-arguments against the arguments/sentiments it quoted: the question of whether or not Yarvin's disinvitation might have a chilling effect on other types of speech did not even enter my head.

I'm sorry if what I wrote was unclear. I'll took another look at the first section and try to see how it ended up resembling the slippery slope fallacy you describe.

escape_goat

11 years agodiscuss

I think your counter-arguments are very bad. I thank you for sharing them here, because I don't think they reflect uncommon opinions at all, and I think they are too easily accepted without reflection.

With regards to the "defend to the death your right to say it" hyperbole, I agree that it is overstated. Furthermore, it is true that getting dis-invited from a tech conference does not involve losing the right to say anything; nor is the state punishing speech. However, it would be an error to overlook the fact that speech is being punished.

Yarvin would have been welcome at the conference had he not revealed his racist opinions in [what was intended to be] an unrelated forum. Those opinions revealed, he was unwelcome, without (as far as I can tell) any particular reference to his actual public behaviour. So as a practical matter, if the conference's reaction should be considered normative and appropriate, he had a right to say things... unless he wanted a career.

Now, you may well wish to argue that this reaction should indeed be normative and correct. However, I am not sure that you would be as comfortable with your actual words in another context. We could be discussing this in Russia in the 1950s, for instance, and agreeing that Yarvin shouldn't have kept his jewish-sounding last name if he wanted a career, or got forbid spoken about his anti-socialist economic views.

In such a case, our circumstances would have been very different, of course, and it is incredibly easy to draw broad distinctions between counter-factual racist fantasies and failing to disguise one's ethnic background. But the mechanism is the same, and here you are stating an indifference to --- defending, even --- the mechanism.

Another commentator writes that "kicking people out of your conference hands veto power to whomever determines what racism is and when something is racist."

It seems to me that if a popular arbiter of opinion about racism could mobilize a grassroots reaction against racism as they saw it, when they saw it, and when they felt like it; and if that grassroots reaction probably would not have occurred without their instigation: under those circumstances, this assertion would come quite close to being true.

Again, this is not something peculiar to racism, or fighting against racism, or any particular political struggle at all. It is a mechanism whereby interest groups influence the direction of public discourse and policy. Yet here --- despite the certainty that there are interest groups using such tactics, somewhere in the world, whose views are pure anathema to you --- you are not actually defending the fight for social justice and inclusion; instead, you defend the mechanism.

More realistically, I do not think that you intended to even do so much as that. Your reply at first reads as an announcement of indifference and antipathy to the author's concerns. A rejection of actual argumentation or discussion, in other words. (This itself, in case you might overlook it, is rather far from an inherently virtuous sort of response.)

However, your parenthetical comment does attempt to justify the mechanism, and the comment is notable in that it specifically rejects the protection of actual minorities, instead embracing a "market" determination of right or wrong: in other words, the nature of a protected minority is to be determined by the opinion of the general majority.

A third commentator complains about a sort of reverse-racism burden, in that the "straight white male" is doubly impacted, as both the target of discrimination, and as a target of discrimination who is not a member of "a protected class." I do not think that this is a very defensible argument. However, "accept that the world isn't perfect, and feel lucky you don't have it worse" is not any better.

At risk of beating a dead horse, one must in general ask oneself if the response defends the structure or the substance of the allegedly discriminatory circumstance. I will assume you can predict my response to this as an argument defending the discriminatory structure. Insofar as the response is a defense of the substance of the circumstance, then it seems to be implicitly appealing for deference and calling for restitution, of sorts, in that a hardship should be accepted in recognition of the hardships of others. This is a very powerful and emotionally appealing argument... when made to address apparent discrimination that arises out of minority protection. The 'Why The "Safe Area" Of The [Women's/LGBT/Native] Center Is Not Discriminatory' speech would be the typical example, in my experience.

Here, it is much less appealing, and also misses the point. Reading your response literally, one should infer that any member of an identifiable group ultimately needs to accept that "the world isn't perfect" and that they will face some degree of 'oppression'; they should protest against and fight that oppression only if it is too much oppression, or too deadly. I am almost certain that this is absolutely not something that you meant to say. I suspect that you meant to convey that you thought the commentator's experienced/feared discrimination was trivial and negligible.

This would be fine, as a response, but the attempt to convert it into a self-evident, justified response on this basis is very weak, and I feel that the problem is that you are trying to do the easy thing rather than the hard thing, and to end argument or dialog rather than invite it. "You can see this playing out in video games..." really? Straight white men are falling prey to reverse discrimination in video games? I would love to hear the commentator attempt to justify this view. It would be satisfactory enough, I think, to simply end discussion by responding that "this is ridiculous unless you feel like making a cogent argument to the contrary." Instead, however, you let it slide completely: you even accept the premise. I feel that if you were not intent on justifying [reverse] discrimination (because it is reverse[1]), and instead were concerned about discrimination period, you would not have missed the opportunity to talk about what does or does not constitute discrimination --- let alone missed the fact that this is a ridiculous, indefensible imagination of what discrimination is.

Finally, the commentator who writes that "my personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist, and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work."

Again, structure, substance, escape_goat goes on for a paragraph or two here in a now-predictable manner, let's skip to the good part... suffering.

You are responding to someone reporting a sense of alienation and mental exhaustion specifically because they had to wear a 'mask' in the workplace. Your response is that you imagine that it was a lot easier for them to wear that mask than it would be for them to change their skin color, or gender, or age.

This seems obviously true, as those are very difficult things to change. It is also true that these visible, physical qualities have created barriers in the tech industry. But it leaves begging the question of whether anyone should be required to wear a mask, and under what circumstances. Is it wrong to discriminate against co-workers on the basis of the color of their skin, but not wrong to feel uncomfortable around them if they act "too black"? Is it okay to create a "non-homophobic" environment and then fire people for revealing their sexual orientation? I am thinking that perhaps there are some circumstances where you would not find "it's easier to wear a mask" to be a satisfactory response at all. Even though, yes, it's easier to wear a mask.

Similar to the case of the third commentator, but more problematically, your response is clearly predicated against the complainant because of their (white, straight, male) identity and whatever mixture of personal emotions, political views, or what-have-you that makes someone fear that their views would be seen as racist, sexist, or homophobic by 'Marxists'.

Again, the central, crucial abstract question (should anyone feel this alienated in the workplace?) and the difficult, complicated particular questions (why does this person, as an individual, feel so alienated, and are those feelings justified; do they reflect a work environment that unknowingly makes rigid ideological demands; do they reflect mental health issues; could this person comfortably work with a black/gay/female co-worker [which of these] without 'wearing a mask'; would a black/gay/female co-worker be able to work with them; would the situation be altered by empathy training, counselling, mediation; and so on...) These go unanswered.

And this is your response to someone's actual personal suffering, so one must infer that you do not oppose discrimination because it causes human suffering. If there is a different, justifiable basis for opposing discrimination, then you should be straightforwards about that, as this would be the most crucial aspect of your response by far.

[1] An oscillatory model of discriminatory impulses resulting in the balanced distribution of prejudice floats into my mind when I say this.

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