I Am Deleting the Blog • Hacker News Board

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#871

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

coffeemaniac wrote: post #826

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s multi-faceted. In some cases NYT (or any news org of any prevailing political inclination) might want to expose real names to exercise control or rally people to cancel someone. Other times it might be more mundane, just wanting a better angle for the story or more solid corroborative details. In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written o…

The modern left is constantly diving into the statistics of these topics, and if you think they're not it probably signals more that you're just not a part of that discussion. If you've let your conclusions be influenced by SSC and other reactionary blogs I'd urge you to check out some leftist spaces and ask around. There's a lot of nuance, and more importantly, a lot of disagreement even in those spaces on these ver…

This is really not accurate. There are many topics where appealing to evidence or statistics is Not Allowed in leftist discourse. There are certain realities that are defined as not possible, politically, and permitted discourse flows from that.

The far right is even worse about this, appealing to braindead conspiracy theories, bald religion, fascism.

But the left is _really bad_ as well. Not “conspiracy theory gun nut” bad, but nowhere near “well balanced intellectual curiosity.”

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#872

Post by Palptine » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #578

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him an…

I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#873

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #858

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s multi-faceted. In some cases NYT (or any news org of any prevailing political inclination) might want to expose real names to exercise control or rally people to cancel someone. Other times it might be more mundane, just wanting a better angle for the story or more solid corroborative details. In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written o…

Wait, did you just claim that the NYT is part of "the modern left"? If so, that's the funniest thing I've read in the last few years. The NYT is the home of bothsidesism. It's certainly not "the modern left". And as far as the NYT writing a hit piece to shut up a semi-popular blog, I'd suggest a quick reality check how much influence either has on public discourse. The idea the NYT would need to shut up SSC is just..…

If NYT has any angle to do a story on the blog, it’s very likely to be along the lines of “while this guy got some interesting things correct, look at these other horrible examples of sexism (eg consider actual data when forming opinions about gender pay gaps) and racism (eg consider actual data when forming opinions about racial motives in police violence).”

Your comment seems especially silly given that the NYT did, in fact, shut down this blog by threatening doxxing. So, by definition, the idea is not “far out there” or even remotely questionable.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#874

Post by DagAgren » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #870

DagAgren wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted here that "culture war topics" that are banned means literal white supremacists, nazis and their ilk. You are acting as if it is a great injustice done to the man that he was forced to do the absolute bare minimum to stop giving nazis a forum.

It does not. Anything that's obviously politicized in a way that relates to the culture wars (including "Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe" topics) is inappropriate outside CW-specific spaces. And obvious calls to harassment, violence, blatant bigotry etc. have always been off-limits altogether.

But talk about how white people are superior was not off-limits, was it?

And the fact that he would clumsily ban everything political instead of specifically the nazi shit isn't exactly a great look, either.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#875

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

Palptine wrote: post #872

tinyhouse wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him an…

I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?

Just curious, but what "error" did the original tweeter make? Did anyone really expect the model to accurately reconstruct the original photo starting from a pixelated mess? That makes no sense to anyone with even a passing knowledge of ML. You're always going to get craploads of bias and variance (i.e. blatant inaccuracy, over and above the bias) in such a setting, even starting from "ideal, unbiased" data. The problem domain is at issue here.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#876

Post by DoubleGlazing » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

csharptwdec19 wrote: post #664

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media. That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family ph…

Doesn't the UK have strong laws about libel and slander? Or do they not apply to Ireland?

Two different countries. There was a big hoo-ha in 1916 about all that.

But this isn't slander. The Indo didn't lie they grossly exaggerated the truth in a gory manner.

Yes, the daughter was distraught - why wouldn't she be in the circumstances? But the Indos headline was along the lines of "AGONY AND PAIN FOR name AS FATHER PERISHES IN NORTH-SIDE INFERNO". This was accompanies by lots of quotes from anonymous "friends and family" about how she and her family were suffering. This article featured lots of personal photos. The really sore things about this is that these photos were only on display in her house, someone she trusted took copies with a smartphone and sent them to the paper.

As she is the copyright owner of some of the pictures I am going to suggest she invoice the paper for reproduction fees when she feels up to it.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#877

Post by notatoad » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #616

alecbenzer wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly. To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that. I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.

>NYT doxxes sources

not to defend the NYTimes here, they're definitely in the wrong. but doxxing a source for an article and doxxing the subject of an article are very different things. The subject of this article is not a "source".

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#878

Post by lhnz » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #846

lhnz wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism. I finally understand the answer to the childhood question of "But, how could this every happen here?" that used to be an automatic response to being taught about awful events in history. When there is extreme moral certainty about societal problems, people can feel that for the problems to be dealt with they will…

> The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism. Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?

Does it mattter which one?

Once we're there, power will be wielded fully by whatever popular sociopath has the rungs on any given day.

That can change day-to-day, year-to-year or election-to-election, and different organisations will have their own all-powerful sociopaths, with their own particular preferences for abuses of power.

Once people have power, they don't merely act ideologically, they act selfishly.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#879

Post by WalterSear » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #877

kerkeslager wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly. To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that. I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.

>NYT doxxes sources not to defend the NYTimes here, they're definitely in the wrong. but doxxing a source for an article and doxxing the subject of an article are very different things. The subject of this article is not a "source".

I understood article subject to be social groups during Covid.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#880

Post by frobozz » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #821

frobozz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licensing only works if you have to be in a certain jurisdiction to operate in it. Given that more "journalism" is online, if Murdoch or the Barclay Brothers or whoever don't like the restrictions of your licence, they can just employ journalists somewhere else. If they need boots on the ground, they can employ independent contractors. How do you prevent independent journalists selling pieces to certain outlets witho…

Doctors were once upon a time not very highly trained, medicine was a crapshoot, now things have changed. I'm sure it was a tremendous upheaval at the time. That it's a lot of work doesn't mean it can't be done. A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented: * e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up, * peop…

Whenever people mention licensing practitioners of some trade, the interesting question is always "licence to do what?". All too often, the answer tends to be a boring and poorly thought out "licence to call yourself an X". It fails to answer "what can an X legally do that a non-X cannot?"

In the case of doctors, pharmacists and lawyers,things like surgery, controlled drugs, rights of audience are easy to restrict. If you are not one and try to do the job anyway, you won't get very far.

As a client, I cannot use a partitioner who is not licensed in my jurisdiction. If I have a video consultation with a real foreign doctor, they still can't write me a prescription I can take to my local pharmacist. No matter how good the doctor is, they are made deficient by not being registered with the GMC.

A journalist writes and publishes articles about current affairs. You can't legally prevent people doing that without a catastrophic infringement of free speech.

Every day, I read articles from publications from many countries. Those articles are not made deficient by the fact that they are not written by NUJ members.

Plenty of people read and believe bunkum written by people who don't even pretend to be journalists. Sticking little "licenced by..." Logo on the real stuff won't make a difference there.