schalab

Lets say I have a club I own, but I need to keep the riff raff out.

I cant openly ban poor or low society people from entering which would be considered "evil". But what if I mandated every service from a staff must be tipped with atleast 100$, because we value our workers more here.

This achieves the same purpose and I get to pretend to be egalitarian.

If this law is passed, ride sharing apps will still exist. They will have a smaller roster of higher quality of drivers and be more expensive to use. It will be perfectly fine for most of the people commenting here.

Who it will destroy is the "riff raff", the people at the lowest rungs of the ladder on both ends. Those who cannot contribute work of sufficient quality to be paid for full time work and benefits. And those who cant afford more expensive ride sharing.

Basically a way to ask people of a certain level to leave the state because they cant participate in the economy anymore and appear compassionate at the same time. Insidiously genius.

You have natural talent which becomes exponentially better with training. But a guy who struggles to even find words will be trounced by you 9 times out of 10. Regardless of who is right.

Interestingly those type of people will rarely venture on message boards, because this requires a lot of reading and writing and they would rather spend their time on other pursuits(maybe more visual?). Its interesting to imagine the section of viewpoints that dont even get represented at this level.

The deepest separation of labor is female and male. The female energy is associated with empathy for the child. Male energy is protecting territory.

Some combination of both these energies exist in all of us.

You can say humans have the capacity for love, and also acknowledge there are people out there who gain pleasure from power over others.

You cant say one is natural and the other is learned.

Even the people who gain pleasure in causing pain, are useful in the right situations. Hence the trope in fiction of the jailed entity being released to combat an even greater foe in a dire situation.

The allure of free speech and debate is that the best ideas win.

But what I have often found is that the best debater wins.

And some debaters are so good they can win both sides of a debate.

This wouldnt be that much of a problem if you assume verbal iq is an independent variable uniformly distributed through the population. But I have often found verbal iq is highly co-related with other biological traits and markers. This creates a biased situation where debates often lead to erroneous conclusions and bad results.

I am guessing its because the hackers are not gaming fakespot's detection systems.

If amazon adopted fakespot's algorithm, the hackers would circumvent it within a week. This would also happen if fakespot reaches a critical mass of audience.

I am reminded of a story in Three men in a boat.

A couple go out on a picnic with a young man. The moment they set out, the young man begins predicting rain. The couple begin to hate him for his gloomy disposition. They meet an old man on the road. He scrounges up his face, looks up at the sky, and says there wont be any rain. He has seen many days like this in his long life and it usually clears up. The couple cheer up at once and praise him for his wisdom.

No sooner had they set up their picnic, then it begins raining heavily. On the drive back completely drenched, they look at the young man with anger. Like somehow he was responsible for the rain. They think of the old man fondly, "well atleast he tried".

Thats human psychology.

Just make the whole service distributed. Cut out Uber. Connect me directly to a driver through open source software.

Person A exists who is willing to drive from point a to point b for x price. I am willing to pay x price. An open source software exists to connect us both in real time.

Who will the government regulate in this scenario?

Imagine if the internet was started by one corporation.

Instead, the internet is an open source set of protocols.

The answer lies in converting companies which abuse becoming the standard due to network effect, to an open source set of protocols.

Maybe give them a period of 10-20 years to profit. Then they have to expose a public set of standards and protocols which can be used by everyone else.

For instance microsoft windows after 15 years, would be forced to release a freeware version of code, which contained all functionality they had at that time.

Other companies and users could build on this code and thus microsoft are no longer the standard. Just a version of it.

I have found if you have nothing constructive to do, then twitter sucks you in and is very addictive.

But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.

I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.

I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.

The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.

Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.

The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.

Explanation 1:

Lauren Sanchez(bezos' new girfiend) along with her brother Michael(who is also her agent), leaked the story to force Bezos to divorce his wife and get along with her.

Explanation 2:

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia personally sent a trojan file, downloaded all the data, distributed it through a gossip rag he happens to be friends with, for some kind of revenge/message

I get why Bezos has to go with explanation 2 because explanation 1 would indicate the girl he wants to have sex with or her brother is manipulative. I dont see why the rest of us have to go along with this. Even this anonymous source says he has "high confidence" not anywhere near certainty.

The problem is, most methods you propose to correct for individuals getting burned, may create more systematic problems, which may result in more individuals getting burned in the long run. These are incredibly complex systems which are not suitable for intelligent design.

The best solution maybe is for individuals and the shared culture to get wiser, and this often happens only when there is enough collateral damage.

Isnt this a self correcting problem? I guess the first time advertisements were introduced, people were incredibly susceptible to misleading advertising. Overtime you learnt that almost everything they claim could be wrong and you tune them out. They become much less potent.

We are just living in a perfect storm, with the internet just taking off mainstream, and people are susceptible to believing online trends translate to reality. If you are in niche communities, hiring an artificial botting firm might provide insane rewards. But over time, as more people see the disconnect they will understand not to trust anything online.

I feel people getting burnt and changing their behavior organically is far better than a benevolent organization stepping in and making arbitrary decisions to protect us. Because these organizations do not tend to be benevolent and even if they are, their decisions often have disastrous second order consequences. While the public never learns or evolves.

Its like the body's immunization system. Just give it time. Sometimes it may take a decade. People should really stop trying to make drastic solutions for things that will likely resolve themselves.

I dont think ownership is the main problem.

The larger problem seems to be global.

The ability to be expressive comes with it certain biological traits and dispositions. These traits may determine your viewpoints on matters.

So, if I hire journalists purely based on their writing ability, I may find most of them have very similar political views. If I create an industry of the best actors/musicians, again I may find them to have similar traits and views.

So, you can have a situation where some view has 50% support in the larger population, but almost no support in the press, academia, entertainment industry etc.

In a society based on free speech and no violence, the views supported by expressive people have an overwhelming advantage. The problem is just because you are very good at communication, doesnt mean your viewpoint is always correct. That is the reason some brilliant professors dont make it in the private sector, while someone who cant string a sentence together becomes a billionaire.

But when people see, supposedly neutral organizations have an overwhelming slant to one side of a viewpoint, the organization loses credibility. They are in a bubble.

When you no longer have institutions of fairness everyone can agree upon, you create the problem of fake news.

What are you basing this on?

It should be fairly obvious if you look at any issue the left focuses on. Blacks vs Whites. Rich vs Poor. Women vs Men.

The double standards of how they talk about christianity vs islam. Israel vs palestine.

Literally every issue. Divides the world into weak vs strong, blames the strong for the situation of the weak regardless of causal chain.

For more practical evidence, the only march which gained traction was the women's march. They tried it with latinos, science etc.

The biggest issue which has resonated against Trump is the children in cages. Why do you think that is?

I love how people are worried about the far right in these comments but not on the impact of propaganda on themselves.

This recent Kurds vs Turkey is an example of this.

The left usually hates war. Why? If you break down to the lowest level, it looks like the current left is mainly dominated by the maternal instinct. In every issue they divide the world into child vs predator. And they always come down on the side protecting the weak child.

You can see this across a number of social, economic and geo poilitical issues.

In terms of war, they look at it as America's selfish predatory instincts preying upon innocent parties in the middle east leading to countless lives lost of the weak.

So how do you get people who think like this to support war?

Simple. Invent a weak, childlike ally in the middle of the war zone, who are being attacked by a notorious hateful predator, and we would be abandoning them if we dont put our troops in harms way.

So, you rebrand the american troop presence as honorable protection rather than predatory intervention. Thats all it takes to manufacture consent.

Seems to me a large part of growing up is keeping up with the herd. Like a pack of zebras in the savannah. If you stray too far behind or show weakness, you get picked off by the roving lions.

Now I can see utility in behavior divergent from the norm being encouraged. But at the same time, peer pressure to keep moving and keeping pace is a great motivator for growth.

So, I would say the issue needs to be studied with greater depth than it sucks for the guy being bullied. What is the greater effect on the entire population? If you ensure no one gets bullied there is a non zero possibility that it results in a negative effect for the entire population in the long run.

What was wrong with US's response to 9/11 attacks?

Tunnel vision, moral and patriotic grandstanding, group think, not thinking about the long term consequences of actions.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was evil, but the consequences of removing him were much more dire and opened up pandora's box.

Yes, what Saudi Arabia did was gruesome, but if you respond by cutting them off totally, they will ally with China. You lose the entire region, your leverage on oil production in the middle east. You make your rivals stronger. Is that reaction proportional with the action?

Is this one incident, which is not like Saudi Arabia didnt get massive blowback for, worth the long term consequences?

Where is the media commentary which is more pragmatic and willing to look at things two steps down, a decade from now?

Which media outlets actually present the question in that format. Nobody has learnt anything from the previous problems. People are still easy to manipulate, and the media still lacks any kind of long term thinking.

I dont think its a cultural thing. Men on average show less empathy and emotion than women. For obvious reasons, child rearing vs hunting.

But most writers and journalists tend to be on the feminine side of the spectrum because that correlates with verbal ability. So this theory has emerged that most men are actually just as emotional as women but are hiding their feelings because society expects them to do it.

Maybe a fringe of men who are all co-incidentally in persuasive fields in academia, entertainment and media exhibit this, but the average male may not.

Maybe its not an education problem. Maybe the idea that everyone can be an engineer/coder is just as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.

Yep. The idea that you have one unit while the landlord has multiple units is not true.

You have the choice of a hundred units. And its their responsibility to fight with each other to make you choose one of them. Thats what keeps them honest and gives you bargaining power.

Twitter needs to be a set of open source protocols and standards like the internet.

Imagine if all of the internet was owned by one company and they had this kind of power. This is more power than many governments around the world.

Imagine if the internet was owned by one company. Or email was owned by one company.

Instead we have a non profit set of standards which divide the internet into different layers. So you can have your ISPs, your web hosting providers, your websites etc. There is a healthy demarcation which prevents consolidating of power.

Maybe the way to breakup twitter/facebook etc is to create a set of protocols and divide them into layers.

For instance I should be able to register a username for tweeting like how you register a website name for DNS. Once registered you have a choice to store your tweets in any data hosting service.

Then a number of aggregate readers handle the front end user interface.

Each reader can have its own content filter and discovery algorithms. So even if your content is found offensive in one reader, you can just switch to another. If one is really addictive in a negative way, switch to a less intrusive useful version.

The talking heads point is deeper than that. Not only are they paid to be interesting.

The very ability of being good at talking might be co-related with other base attributes.

For instance being good at talking might be co-related with tunnel vision, not having a bigger perspective, being able to connect things which shouldnt be, naivety, empathy and so on.

So if your process of conferring the title of expertise involves going through the university system, or performing well in debates or on a podium, you will get experts who are all wrong in exactly the same way and there is no one to offer them a different perspective.

Maybe the solution for centralization is decoupling the data architecture and the interface. Like in the net neutrality debate everyone understands that the hardware providing bandwidth is separate from the websites which run on them.

Lets take youtube for instance.

Imagine if you had the choice of 10 different services which allow you to upload videos on them. Once the video is uploaded they provide a key to retrieve it.

You can use this key now in any of 10 different video display sites to actually play the video to the end user.

The video display sites provide the monetization and discovery services. The upload sites provide the bandwidth.

This way you can migrate your videos whenever you want to a site which is more friendly to your type of content.

Why dont western companies band together and threaten a boycott until some kind of IP laws are enforced?

They just keep getting picked off one by one.

Its a game of diminishing returns.

Assume there are 80% included in a game and 20% frozen out. Here it makes sense to change the rules of the game to include the other 20%.

Yes it might slightly inconvenience the 80% but the switch from not being included at all to playing the game for the 20% is huge. So, overall it might be a net positive.

Problem is when you get to a 98/2 split. Is it worth it to inconvenience such a large majority for the benefit of a very small minority. And how much are you going to change the rules?

Is it worth the reduced enjoyment/efficiency of the game?

At some point the trade off will become too much, and even moral/emotional arguments will not be enough to silence the dissent.

People are suffering from taking too many pay day loans.

I think I will donate 2 billion dollars to my local pay day lender.

There, problem solved.

Now people dont need to be worried about paying it back.

I am sure they wont use this guaranteed income to jack up the rates more.

The basic problem is astroturfing.

In politics if I create a bot network to artificially boost the more divisive tweets, over time the entire political network may become more polarized and toxic. And it would necessarily elevate fringe candidates who are most equipped to deal with chaos. Its absolutely fascinating that you can create a real world riot just through a simple algorithm over time.

And politics is probably small potatoes compared to the commercial applications. Imagine if you can make your product go viral, suppress all dissent and at the same time sabotage your opponent's user base. And all that for very little investment. That is an unbelievable competitive edge.

So, the question is how do you stop this?

The internet is designed for anonymity and is not easily traceable across national lines.

So, if a Chinese/Russian company is involved in massive botting, what can you even do, except hire them yourself to stop your opponents gaining an advantage.

I am struggling to see a solution or how government involvement doesnt make this problem worse.

There used to be a lot of natural factors which worked against monopolies.

Every new market you introduced your product in brought along with it a layer of bureaucracy and middle management, which left you more bloated and unwieldy.

This allowed smaller,local companies to have an agility and responsiveness advantage even if they offered the same service at a higher fee.

Computers and the internet have made the process of expanding a lot smoother with instant inventory management, communication etc.

Not sure what government can do to stop this. The more power you give to the government, the more lobbyists and corruption it will result in. And even if they do manage to sign some legislation, there will be workarounds and loopholes.

I am struggling to even think of rules that would efficiently limit the growth of Amazon,Google etc. Cap their market share somehow? Tax companies which have more than x% of market share at an exorbitant rate?

You are blaming unethical people for profiting from a flawed system. I would say fixing the system is a easier problem, then fixing humanity as a whole.

For instance, what are the consequences for the mid level government bureaucrat who accepted the 7$ a tube toothpaste contract? It is obviously a flagrant violation with a paper trail. Even if it is revealed he gets a fully paid vacation every year from the bidding company, how do people even hold him accountable?

The government is involved in so many projects and employs so many people, that your one vote every few years means next to nothing.

Democracy was meant as a safeguard against tyranny. It cannot hold individual people in a vast system accountable very well.

You either split up each department in separate elections or reduce the scope and size of the government such that essential services like law and order get maximum visibility and priority.