Yeah, the phrase "cause harm" carries a lot of affect (e.g. urgency, impatience, panic, outrage, etc.). If we were to have a graph of common word usage and association, the words "cause harm" would be strongly linked with other phrases like
- morally repulsive
- life or death
- fix immediately
All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,
As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"
But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.
This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?
> Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.
That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).
When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.
In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing
BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?
I'm all for openness and transparency, but wouldn't an increase in US refusal to play with China just lead to more censorship and oppression by the communist Chinese government?
Consider the following:
1. The Chinese communist government derives its legitimacy to rule almost exclusively from its massive economic growth (i.e. Chinese citizens and corporations are effectively saying to themselves "I'm ok to trade some of my human rights for lots of money")
2. The Chinese communist government wishes to remain in power
So if the US decides to target Chinese economic growth - i.e. lower the amount of money that an unit of human rights could buy - this should cause the Chinese citizens and corporations to respond by exercising the human right that the Chinese government is no longer able to buy with growth. In turn, this would cause the Chinese government to use alternative methods (i.e. straight-up oppression by force) to prevent the Chinese people from becoming unruly.
This sort of pressure on the Chinese government may lead to reform (which is indeed a good thing), but it may also lead to civil / politic unrest and a massive economic slow-down that will have aftershocks around the world (which is certainly less than ideal) - and all of this pretty much will depend on how Xi decides to handle this pressure.
Here in the US, We should at least recognize that this is a risky move and take measures to protect ourselves against this (somehow)
What if the problem with open-source not making money isn't the open-source part, but the money part?
Our current economic system focuses on money as a medium of "equivalent exchange", as in there's no free lunch and a dollar you spend on buying a piece of butter necessarily means you can't spend that same dollar on a gun (same thing for the butter merchant). This exchange is based on a contractual agreement that binds for a finite time, and stuff that happens outside that window is necessarily considered an "externality". In other words, money facilitates a social interaction that prioritizes focus on the costs/benefits of individual(s) involved while de-prioritizing the costs/benefits of the collective at large.
But contributing to open-source is not that sort of social interaction, instead, it's one that prioritizes contributing to the collective over individual gain - i.e. a social interaction that focuses on externalities instead of on contractual time-based exchange. Money, with its focus on being loosely "conserved" (e.g. you can't double-spend the same dollar), is simply not a good medium for encouraging cooperation and discouraging free-riding to open-source (and other public-goods)
In traditional villages, public-goods contributions were facilitated with some combination of reputation and gossip. Later, cities and states managed to come up with taxation, courts, and prison when reputation and gossip failed to scale. But the super-connected capitalist "globopolis" of today demands a new form of organizing cooperation and eliminating free-riding when it comes to public goods.
To properly solve the problem of the economics of open-source, we need to solve this more general organization problem.
Free speech v. public safety is a touchy subject that pits the moral pillars of liberty/oppression against care/harm. However, before we lose ourselves to moral outrage for one side or the other, consider that, with Judea Pearl's (somewhat) recently work on causality, there might actually be a "correct" solution to when the government (or government-like entity) should intervene to "protect the public interest" or do nothing and "encourage free speech"
Namely, we can use the idea of calculating the "probably of necessity" v. "probably of sufficiency" from Pearl's section on counterfactuals to calculate causation.
Taking your arsenic merchant example, for instance, if you publicly release information that "arsenic in large doses is good for you" to the public, we would consider the counterfactual statements
- "would large portions of public have taken arsenic had you NOT released such a statement"
- "would large portions of the public refrained from taking arsenic had you released such a statement"
Notice that, in both statements, we require a model of public behavior that is contextually dependent on things like "how educated the general public is", "how common is it to take arsenic", "how much harm does arsenic actually do" etc., most of which can be determined and agreed to beforehand. Given that we, as a society, can come to agree on a model of ourselves (lol probably not easy), we can directly calculate the necessity and sufficiency values, which would allow authority to make "just" feeling decisions
The Book of Why DOES have a section on climate change toward the end - he actually uses climate change to illustrate the idea of counterfactuals and even provides an example about how to calculate how much man-made carbon emissions X can be a "sufficient" / "necessary" cause of storm Y... GIVEN we can agree on a model.
Among other (likely more polarizing) reasons for why folks remain so obstinate regarding climate change, it certainly is possible that not every involved party may agree to the same model of how climate affects weather
The real problem here is that there the asymmetry in machine learning capabilities between big companies and everyday consumers. I think what we all will need in the nearby future is personalized AIs (that we all individually can "build" and "own" in the same way we currently do our personalized computers) which will negotiate the currently web against big companies on our behalf.
It's an user-experience problem: for an audiobook, Book of Why is quite dense in formula that are hard to visualize when spoke as words.
For example, consider what happens if we try to describe a causal diagram in words
"A points to B, A points to X, B points to Y, and X points to Y. Now, if we apply do(X) to the diagram, we see that we can Y is now no longer a child of..."
or even simple formulas in words:
"P of A given B times P of B is equal to P of B given A times P of A"
For most of us, this sort of deal is hard to "get" and would be much better served if we just looked at a visual diagram or saw the equation.
I personally had to repeat many sections over and over again with a notebook and pencil in hand to truly understand what was being read to me... but if I'm taking notes and creating visuals for myself, then I might as well have just gotten the paper variant of this book lol.
Yes, the article even has a section where they straight up say "Einstein was right".
The title of the article "Colliding neutron stars falsify some theories of gravity" is accurate, but the theories of gravity that it falsifies isn't the popular mainstream one (Einstein's) that, let's face it, we've all been secretly hoping to take down. Instead, it falsifies some of the new challenger (MOND) theories.
I, for one, welcome our continuing Einsteinian Relativistic overlord theories of gravity (at least when it comes to dark matter)
Honestly, the best route IMO is to actually maintain an open-source portfolio of work. This obviously isn't feasible or possible for everybody, but if you can contribute to OSS, doing so is easily the best way continuously test your mettle and prove to your future employers, partners, and the general community that you're someone they want to (or don't want to) work with.
The true value of the face-to-face interview really should be getting a feel for the person - is this person someone I want to work with? Or will this person make me want to kill myself whenever I step into the office? - not to gauge technical prowess or whiteboard prove-you-are-smart-and-took-an-algo-class-in-college challenges
- morally repulsive
- life or death
- fix immediately
All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,
As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"
But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.
This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?