101–110 of 212 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because the library is funded by taxpayers – it doesn't need the money. How would you feel about a government-sponsored search engine? I think China has one of those.
Quite frankly, it might not be the worst solution. Britain has a government-sponsored TV station which is generally pretty well-regarded, for example...
This is a really interesting study but it's hard for me to believe in the conspiracy theory that the hundreds of engineers that work on Google Search would be OK implementing a complicated vote manipulation algorithm and keeping it secret. But it's possible, criminal conspiracies involving many people seem to happen regularly in the financial industry.
I was actually surprised the article didn't mention the Ghost in the Shell series. A big part of that universe was the idea that even without concerted manipulation, the simple fact that the information consumed by the public is too homogeneous could cause problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_She...
I think in any system, there will be emergent behavior exhibited by agents. We see this in toy examples like Conway's game of life, but it could easily be applied to societies and pop culture too.
Hence we have this concept of "memes".
I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth! We will be able to discuss, collaborate, create.…
The inventor of television thought it would end war once people could see directly into other countries. I guess he thought it would make people more like himself. And you're right that the population of the internet has changed drastically. In the past 6 years, more Indian people have come online than the number of people in the United States. The mass migration into Europe has not been triggered because the Middle East is suddenly violent, but because now anyone, even without family abroad, can see how they can be paid far more in Europe for doing nothing than they can for doing anything accesible to them in their current location. They can read and share intricate details on how to make the trip, how unlikely it is to be deported, what benefits they can get where and by taking what steps, how to and why to destroy their passports and acquire Syrian passports, etc. Sure television let them see 90210 and all sorts of Western things, and that was influential, but the Western channels that could be retrieved by satelites never ran infomercials on one weird trick to raise your income by twenty times. And all of the extra information accessed through the internet has made living in the "worst" countries ever more embarassing and painful because the relative and absolute differences are harder to ignore. And this obviously effects the experience of lifestyle differences in the richest countries, too.
"Homer was wrong when he said 'Would that Conflict might vanish from among Gods and men!'... One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict." - Kahn translating Heraclitus
If we want something to be different, we'll have to fight to change it, and we can be sure someone will want to change something further still.
Re: "What do we call the state of the world that leaves us with only 2 pre-selected choices who happen to agree on 90%+ of all policies?"
Well, and supposedly over 90% of my DNA is shared with chimpanzees. If anything, there is plenty of competition in both primaries this year even if superdelegates mean that Bernie's chances are fake. Bernie was down over 30% in the polls and won Michigan so I'm not sure how pre-selected these choices are. I know there is rampant voter fraud in the United States, but new ID requirements instituted to give a possibility of detecting it seem to be deterring fraud quite well this cycle. Democratic party turnout is a whopping 285 percent (!!!) worse in states with new voter ID laws. Even as turnout overall is much higher! Voter fraud investigations ending in convictions have shown that it has been trivial for less than ten people to successfully conspire to get hundreds of thousands of ballots counted as valid, so I'd say choices are becoming less pre-selected. The only person who pre-selected Trump was Trump.
Re: "None of this is any kind of pre-planned conspiracy, just brain chemisty"
But it is a pre-planned conspiracy. These are exactly the Alinsky-ite tactics Hillary studied for her senior thesis. Yes, the average foot soldier doesn't know the origins of why they treat people with different politics the way that they do, but they are modeling behavior that was originally meticulously designed. The Twitter Trust and Safety council's biased banning is driven by Habermas's arguments for a need for censorship in favor of the good. Philosophers / theorists / prophets / thinkers drive behavior. Even if Google is diverting people to pages, someone has to come up with the ideas on those pages, even the idea that people should buy a graphic t-shirt. The ideas are then presented using techniques of rhetoric / advertising / proganda / presuasion / captology / seuduction to propel themselves through brains and their chemistry but reduction to chemisty here is unfair to the lucidity of the most far-seeing, far-planning, and far-influencing of our species.
Re: "replace voting with polling!"
And have laws fly back and forth with vacillating of polls? You haven't even acknowledged any of the historical problems of direct democracy or any of these reasons such polling was opposed by both Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Even if this polling was legitimate (its scientifically debatable whether it could be and, I feel, psychologically / sociologically impossible) its contravention to the Constitution and the sense of illegitimacy it will be saturated with to those who lose on important issues would guarantee that 10%+ of U.S. citizens would begin an armed revolution. 45% of Americans believe in ghosts and enough Americans disbelieve polls (I don't know how to Google for a poll about polls!) even when they more indirectly influence policy that I believe your policy would be a grave danger to the general peace. Hillary was favored in EVERY Michigan poll, most by 20-30 points! And she lost! Polling is less accurate than ever and it would be far more difficult to actually vet a poll where you had to make sure that the pollee was legitimate. I've been polled twice in my life and never selected for jury duty. I've heard lots of older people complain that they've never been polled. Do you understand that if people went years without being polled by your system that the mind trick by which democracy gives people the illusion of control would suddenly fail? You underestimate the ritual function of elections.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe I've said anything about why I dislike for-profit enterprise controlling the world's most valuable institution, so I'm unsure how you could correctly infer my reasons for feeling that way. As far as capitalism, my statement was factually correct and I made no attempt to fully describe the institution. In fact I disagree that capitalism equates to the monetary exchange economy, as the latter has existe…
The Bakunin critique of Marx is then relevant, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is trivially hijacked by vanguardist interests. Moreover, Marx's diagnosis of capitalist breakdown in Vol. III of Capital has failed the test. The scenario of rising organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to variable capital) triggering a falling rate of profit and a growing reserve army of labor has not played…
Mind control is not new, what is new is having so many people try to control each individual mind in so many ways. In the Egypt of ~1500 B.C. or in the society that produced the Epic of Gilgamesh, there were so few voices heard per brain that many thoughts were "heard" in the brain with the voices of those who first uttered them to that brain. Now we hear words from so many voices (and read them silently) such that they don't have a particular voice in our brain. Each individual command or religious proclamation was much harder to critique or resist. Power, including monetary power, has always influenced salience of information and always will.
We need a positive conception of what we want—a purely negative conception that just wants no outside influence on another's thoughts... makes no sense. It means no schools, no media, no habitat / creature interaction whatsoever!
Your local library does have a biased card catalog based on what officials decide to buy and keep. Even donated books are subjected to processes and must be approved by staff.
If adwords is unethical, how should we expect Google to operate? If people paid for search, they could get more helpful results, but how are they going to get the resources to pay for it? Most people no longer pay sustainable prices for news, software, music, or videos. Is that ethical?
Page and Brin: "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."
One could read this in a unwonted way: sometimes internet companies have to provide an intentionally poorer service in order to get the revenue needed to provide any service at all.
Money !== relevance, but money is a strict subset of relevance; it is certainly not noise. I'm more worried about its influence being against my interests than being a more chaotic / passive obstacle to my interests.
We shouldn't talk about money buying speech without an eye to what buys money. Should everyone get equal time on the networks and equal space in the newspapers until they look like comments sections / public access / twitter / facebook, too? Until Donald Trump looks like a moderate? If there's no centralized propoganda forming a "Common Core", then there's no basis for a society and Babel is the result. So things need to be balanced somehow. I feel afraid, too, about Google. Obviously Eric Schmidt and I are not equals, because he is the chairman of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board that will revamp the DOD's technology, he is the head of The Groundwork that is the tech heart of the Hillary campaign, and he is the head of the company that controls what we get to look at through the internet.
"So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence."
Well, and the government is heavily influenced by money through campaign donations and the Clinton foundation (and similar groups) and the government heavily influences money through grants and stimulus and prosecutions and fines and regulations and so on. What's important is to try to diversify the influence and try to spread it out and get enough "blood" flowing to the parts that will benefit from that. These elements will always be in flux and we need to figure out what we want the system as a whole to look like.
"Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior."
I don't know what you consider ethical or if you know what you consider ethical. How is money not just a tool? It's a counting mechanism, but it is also a religious talisman. What bothers you is that money is given to some things that you like and some things that you don't like. It's good that you feel a difference between utility and the ethical, but that presumably would always be there unless you equate the two. That's why it makes sense to say "more money should be spent on this" or "people should stop spending money on this" but not criticize the "influence of money" since money is an exchange medium not a power in-and-of-itself... it's lack of power in-and-of-itself is it's most defining characteristic. For example, candy doesn't make good money because if you get a craving you might eat it. The system is always firstly in people's minds / thoughts / ideas / whatever drives their behavior. That and software. Oh sure, the system is in everything but software is what's most efficiently changed.
Re: the "Omelas" bargain:
I don't get how the reference is relevant. Who's the kid in this scenario? I do think that pleasure is often bought at the expense of pain and that pleasure often sows the seeds of pain... Certainly a lot of the video games I've enjoyed have been hell to create. Overall, Omelas makes no sense; it doesn't attempt to explain in any realistic way how the kid's suffering can provide for so much joy, how people can sustain their economy / consumption / partying without painful labor, how people can avoid hedonic adaptation, or many other obstacles to trying to map this story onto the universe as some sort of useful metaphor.
Re: fund Google like a Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount
I think Kickstarter's rely on big fish almost as much as "casual" games. I do not think that's a workable solution.
Re: "workers should own the means of production"
What could that possibly even mean today? Especially for this particular topic? Should "the people" own Google? If so, everyone would have their own search engine to the point there would be unsustainable redundancy, or it would be too small to be useful, or it would still be huge and centralized but "the people" would no more control its operations than the People's Republic of China. Or if Google employees should own it, that's not really too many people. With Apple spending $2 billion dollars to build a massive data center in Arizona that will employ a whoppping 150 people, it's clear that workers owning the means of production will soon mean that the few people who know how to run the world should own it, or its time for the computers to own themselves. Given that fewer and fewer people will be able to meaningfully "work", it seems that the former slaves are getting too useless for the elites and a retreat to the pity religions or the post-Marxisms that don't rely on now completely untenable labor theories of value or a radical luddism if one wants to hold onto these labor theories, believing that labor and "[f]reedom... is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion" (Freire).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard
I would argue that the influence of media has always been this powerful. And media has always been biased.
Another angle to look at would be to apply the work of Stanley Milgram re: obedience to authority figures. Our ability to think for ourselves has some evolving to do...
I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth! We will be able to discuss, collaborate, create.…
I think the old internet still exists. Despite how terrible things have gotten in some aspects, you can still freely share ideas, data, and opinions. Yes, it makes me sad that we are forcing archaic meat-space ideas onto the internet, but, in many ways, the "core idea" of the internet moves around them. I agree that in many ways the internet looks sad compared to what it was, but I don't think hope is lost.
Of course the old internet still exists, at least as far as the old sites go - as long as someone is still paying to keep the servers up. What doesn't exist anymore is the exclusivity of online culture. But if the web is a platform for expression, and I don't think anyone can argue it isn't, then is it really the case that the old "culture" of the web, biased as it was towards hackers and university students merely by happenstance, was really more "true" than the culture of the web today?
Use DuckDuckGo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, the "Omelas" bargain. Fair enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om... It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.
"It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence" That wouldn't fix the problem. Ultimately, somebody has to decide & implement what goes into the ranking algorithm that determines the search results that people see. That person has significant power, and will be both decried by intellectuals who feel like they're on the losing edge of the power dynam…
So yes, you cannot avoid power, but you can distribute it or shine a light on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.
The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it. My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the…
Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule. They're leaders in their industries.