wfo

Businesses are society, we are forced to spent the vast majority of our waking life under the thumb of one so we should absolutely decide how we want that life to go.

Well yes, this is a good idea, democratization of the workplace and worker co-ops generally promote better quality of life for employees and the surrounding community, less exploitation, less corruption, more justice and similar or better efficiency as the normal dictatorial corporate model.

They're not governments, they're companies.

You're right, it's important to note they are more powerful and exercise more control over the lives of their employees than many governments, though employees often have the same opportunity to leave their company as they do their government (none).

It isn't, unless your definition of "personal rights" includes "things I personally want which are neither codified in, nor protected by, laws."

Yes that's literally exactly what personal rights always means. Legal rights are legal rights, personal rights are a conception of what the person who uses the term wants or believes rights to be.

Did we even see the same movie? We're talking about the social network, right? The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!) by every organization in every category? The movie regularly voted as one of the best films of the last 18 years?

I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie. The whole conceit was that a brilliant technical expert's unexpected success pushes him into a world he is not emotionally or socially prepared to handle, and ultimately his arrogance and hubris leaves him alone and unhappy as he pushes away the people in his life one by one, ending SPOILER ALERT

beautifully with him quietly desperately refreshing his ex's facebook page alone, starting to recognize how much he regrets everything that he has lost in his pursuit for wealth and power...

Most of the movie isn't about college, or sex, or booze. If you had to could you have broken a site from that era in 2 hours? I'd be shocked if you couldn't. Lots of these sites would die when they get a little too much traffic. Some sites still do today. Security was an afterthought back then. Zuck had a girlfriend, and his friends do just fine. The lawyers are dealing with so much wealth and power in the hands of people who are so young and emotionally immature and they handle it exactly how I'd expect them to.

Zuck in the movie is driven by a lust for wealth and power, which is a universal theme in basically every story in human history.

The problem in both cases is a capricious and whimsical ultrapowerful organization with the ability to destroy a person's life for any reason with no repercussions. In China, it's the state, in the US it's in the private sector, in the form of your employer.

On the one hand, I would certainly like to know, for example, if the person I trust to teach my children in a public school is explicitly posting on the Internet about how she uses her position to indoctrinate children into extremist white nationalist ideology, Nazism and hate groups, and the "Internet lynch mob" did a great service by exposing this woman [1] -- there is no universe in which she should be allowed to be a teacher.

On the other hand, I think such firings should always be "for cause" with some kind of due process. We need to take away the ultimate power employers have to fire their employees, and make them go through some negotiation, process, discussion before they do so -- like through a union, who is obligated to stand up for wronged employees for example. If someone is failing to perform, provide evidence. If someone's publicly stated values are incompatible with the values of the business, prove it and let them respond. Either that, or we need a strong enough social safety net so that employment is optional for all people.

[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/03/05/flor...

I think most opponents of stop and frisk disagree with you: it's both. Police routinely "predict" that black and brown people are criminals, and stop and frisk allows them to act on these predictions without evidence. I think the argument here is that systems like Palantir quickly and easily become a technological proxy for these "predictions" and makes permanent the biases and racism used to create the data sets that drive them.

If NYPD set up patrols on wall street to stop and frisk bankers on their way home from work searching for cocaine or evidence of fraud it would be a very different issue.

Edit: The exception, of course, is if the behavior that is at issue is actually encouraged by a foundational belief of the group.

I'm glad you added this, I agree with you in general. I'm not interested in "other-ing" right-wing people, Republicans, moderates, conservatives, but I'm very interested in "other-ing", e.g. neo-nazis or Klan members. I am not worried about neo-nazis becoming more extreme (? is this possible?) and I also am not willing to let their sensibilities or concern for their feelings dictate any part of my or society's behavior.

Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time on reddit recently. Since the massive surge in white nationalist, alt-right, and other right-hate ideologies online (and particularly the creation of the_donald, a subreddit which has shockingly avoided the ban hammer for an inexplicably long time given its obvious explicit purpose: to be an echo chamber to spread hate, scream slurs, threaten people with death and genocide, and dox enemies).

In literally any part of reddit, if there is any post on anything that could be construed as racial or about any gender, even innocuous, hordes of extremist right wing trolls descend upon it and spew horrifying screeds of hate. They abuse people into silence. They are toxic. These things leak. And toxicity is real. Hate begets hate, saying nasty horrible things to people and advocating for genocide are not innocuous "beliefs that other people might have" they are unacceptable behavior in civil society.

If you do this in real life you are ostracized, beaten, you lose your job, you are abandoned by your family and friends. And this is good. Social signals and actions to prevent "toxic" behavior have existed since forever. But the Internet is the property of a few companies who are loath to enforce those same social rules. Sometimes, they get pushed far enough they feel have to.

No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt

I agree, but I don't agree that even a majority of participants in public policy debates are acting in good faith. I think it's possible, but given the results and empirical evidence we have to the contrary you should provide some evidence or argument to back up this extremely controversial claim.

I don't think they actively wish to push generations into debt like mustache-twirling cartoon villains, but I do think they are not particularly concerned with this side effect of their other policy goals which are essentially a massive transfer of wealth and power to the private sector, like, e.g. privatization of the loan industry and education.

I think that argument assumes a whole variety of facts not really in evidence.

The original argument was made by Blyth, who is a serious academic, not me, and you haven't made any attempt to engage with him at all. The crux of the argument is that "anti-austerity is the cure to the ills of austerity" which is honestly nearly tautological because of its obvious correctness, not because of a flaw in its reasoning. It's natural to look back at similar historical situations, like a gilded age of massive inequality and the destruction of working class power preceding a depression. The only real difference between then and now is that we've chosen to call our depression a recession, and pretended there was a recovery from it instead of creating one.

Well sure, it seems dubious if you frame it chronologically like that but that's not necessarily how it happened. "The idea that the solution to the core problem of X just happens to be the prescriptions of Y" is exactly the case whenever Y is purposefully and intentionally constructed to solve the problem X.

Who's to say social democratic policies (i.e. Sanders, FDR) don't usually arise in response to the toxic populism that austerity creates because they (anti-austerity) are the natural cure? Isn't that the story behind the new deal?

Is it so hard to believe that creating an entire generation of people who will have negative net worth until they are 40 fosters resentment?

Technically it costs bandwidth and electricity I suppose to make information available...

Not suing people for repairing or tinkering with your hardware is also a "cost" I suppose if you want to phrase it that way, because of the lost revenue you would have gotten from locking down the market and only providing overpriced replacements yourself. It's a cost in the same way that a law against stealing purses imposes a "non-zero cost" on all of us, since we don't have that potential source of revenue available to us anymore...

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

His essay here is pretty blunt about how he is opposed to democracy. He outlines how to escape democracy (he calls it politics sometimes in the essay and uses the two words essentially interchangeably, because they are the same). He outlines ways to escape from democratic governments, seasteading, techno-libertarian cyberspace, etc, where capital can rule uninfringed by the desires, needs, interests, votes of its subjects.

I was incorrect about his views on women, though, thank you for the correction I retract that completely. He simply sees women voting as a problem because they don't vote the way he wants (they are not by and large wealthy and powerful so do not vote exclusively for the interests of these constituencies, like Thiel) -- and uses this as an excuse to throw out voting altogether. I'm not sure that that's better but my characterization was inaccurate.

Tech folks are incredibly smart on technical subjects. When it comes to politics, power dynamics, seeing through propaganda, empathy, we are not trained in or likely to be interested in any of these "softer" but very important issues at all and it shows. Why do you suspect there are so many Libertarians in tech? It is the quintessential political philosophy of a smart successful person who does not understand these issues.

Interesting the authors cite unionization as an effective protection against this in the past but do not recommend it as a remedy for the future. The problem with simply passing laws as they suggest is that those laws once in place will be opposed by everyone with power simultaneously and forever, with no powerful organized collective force to defend them it is just a matter of time until corporate power grinds them into dust.

Unions give actual power to workers (and are great at motivating them to vote according to their interests!) instead of just passing laws out of the goodness of our heart to protect them and hoping they last through billions of dollars in corporate bribes.

Perhaps there should, but these laws are generally toothless and unenforceable because of the power structure in a place of business: in the US employment is "at will" so even if on paper it says you can't be fired for this, it is easy for bosses to invent some justification for the firing, and to make it known subtly or not so subtly that missing work for any reason legal or not will result in consequences. Employers can and do do this right now, all the time: "wow look at John, he worked through lunch and worked unpaid overtime until 6. He is really dedicated. He's employee of the month. You should all be more like John. He definitely won't be laid off next week."

Without a competing power structure to hold employers accountable and keep an eye on their behavior (i.e. a union) the law is a nice sentiment but not much more.

Why not give deference to the accused to set the date and time within a 120 day window?

I definitely agree with this.

Lack of teaching empathy is an education issue.

I disagree here: we live in a hypercapitalist system. Empathy is a competitive disadvantage. Any company that exercises it is weak, and will be culled eventually by companies that don't. Lack of empathy, brutal selfishness and a willingness to exploit the weak are not a cultural problem, but a natural consequence of an economic structure: we cannot teach our children to be nice and hope that it will go away.

It's certainly possible to require that if debt collectors demand the courts help them collect their debt, that they have to provide certain pieces of evidence to the court.

This is already the case: in order to convince a court to garnish wages, debt collectors have to prove to the court that the person accused actually owes the debt. They could also be required to provide evidence that the person is wealthy enough to pay.

A person not paying and not being able to reasonably afford to is no crime and should not involve the court at all: the person who made the loan made a mistake. The reason lendors are allowed to charge interest is so that they can asses the risk they will not be able to recover their investment in some cases -- these are those cases.

If someone can pay and chooses not to, that is a matter for the courts, so if a debt collector wishes to have the courts take money from these people they should have to prove they fall into this category.

Why do you assume this is informing police? Imagine police see your license plate and the Palantir app shows up and says "crime risk score: 83" and then the police manufacture a reason to pull you over. Are the police more informed, or are they just working for Palantir now?

Limiting police power is a tough political goal. Right now police can literally shoot you dozens of times with their personal assault rifle that has "fuck you" engraved on it while you are lying on the ground with your hands on your head begging for your life, then get caught planting a gun on your body and face zero repercussions. And in discussions about this a huge number of people support the cops - "you never know, he could have been armed, we can't ever suggest a cop behaved badly because that would make other cops less willing to kill at a moment's notice" are real arguments people put forward. If you want to stop them from being able to pull people over for no reason so easily that sounds great but that is a HUGE undertaking.

Well first of all, any time a private corporation does secret private proprietary unreviewable analysis on members of the public which is then used by law enforcement -- this is a terrifying, horrible dystopian miscarriage of justice on its own. People (i.e. the politicians who signed off on this) should go to jail for doing this. Police should be accountable to the public, allowing them to dodge this by using private entities who are not accountable to do their dirty work is quite simply criminal corruption.

Add on top of that it's being done by a company named after a mass surveillance device used for evil in a fantasy story.

And on top of that it's being done by a Thiel company. Thiel, who is nearly a perfect personification of evil: he has made very explicit candid public statements on how he opposes the idea of democracy itself, he does not think women should have the right to vote.

And on top of that it was being done without the knowledge or consent of nearly anyone in the city.

And finally, the justice system presumes innocence. The Palantir system does the opposite -- it makes wild, arbitrary untrackable inferences that suggest guilt for people without any real evidence. It is quite literally nothing more than a very thin shield police can use to justify harassing and intimidating the "kind of people who tend to be criminals", which in this case is not that at all -- it is "the kind of people who tend to get caught and prosecuted for crimes" i.e. only violent or drug crimes (except drugs white people use), only poor criminals, only minority criminals.

Where's the massive computer analysis system that looks for wage theft committed by employers? This is after all how the vast majority of wealth is stolen in the US, citizens could recover billions of their own money if it were stopped. Where's the computer system working with law enforcement to automatically detect any insider trading? Why don't we monitor the behavior of people in finance to detect cocaine use and then send in the SWAT teams? What about a computer system that detects bad prosecutors?

It is most of the time not an education issue. Showing up can be hard: skip work and be fired or show up in court? Abandon your kids to make your court date? Nearly all eviction hearings do not have a defendant present, and it's not because nobody understands. It's because the people who prey on the weak and destitute know they can't afford to take a day off to show up, and because the poor (often rightly) believe the legal system will never help them in any way so showing up is a waste of time.

is a better choice

Well sure, the philanthropic model, which is in essence allowing the wealthy to control every part of society by determining what exists (i.e. is funded), who gets to live and die (by who they choose to give jobs to), what can be said (since every communications medium is privately owned), is a better choice for the wealthy, never for society or anyone else. It moves as much as possible of society from a public sphere where democracy exists into the corporate world, which is always a dictatorship.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is great in that it funds research and development in educational pedagogy and techniques and funds education in general. But its existence is also explicitly anti-democratic. It funds schools that accept its doctrine, and leaves the others to wither and die. The existence of charity will be used to cut public support (why do we need public support when these schools are funded without it?) and then we have the setting where one billionaire effectively sets educational policy without democratic input at all. The Kochs are trying to do this by replacing standard American History textbooks with the history rewritten and changed to better serve as Libertarian propaganda.

Make no mistake, when you accept that philanthropy is a fundamental tenet of society you are literally ceding all decision making power to the ultrawealthy who can afford to take part in it, and cutting out nearly everyone else, ensuring they will be begging for scraps from their masters forever. You ensure that anything people have is framed as a kind gift from a wealthy benefactor (and you wouldn't want to make that benefactor mad and risk losing those gifts you need to survive, would you?), not a right or expectation. Even well-intentioned philanthropy is extremely dangerous.

Some episodes are much stronger than others. I think the eye camera episode was good, because it humanizes the dystopia: it moves past abstract moralizing and unrealistic "how things could be" like in e.g. Brave New World and gives you a real human story. It feels more real than reading stories about orgy-porgies, etc. And the technology for it is basically already here.

I think Altered Carbon is a better dystopian tech story though. The actual plot is not even really the point. The setting, backdrop and society that it envisions feels more plausible than any episode of Black Mirror.

The best sci fi dystopian stories imprint our current economic and social structures onto a new future with technology: the world of Altered Carbon asks what if we had our current economic system, which creates a class of impossibly powerful oligarchs who hoard all of the world's wealth and act with impunity while the poor suffer and die, but now these technologies allow their power to extend and expand indefinitely, past death?

The crux of every tech sci fi dystopian story is the question: What if we progress technologically but refuse to progress economically or socially? What if we encourage people to study STEM and sneer at the humanities forever? What if economics is always taught as an exercise in cheerleading for our current system?

Media like this makes us think about the changes that need to be made as technology more and more amplifies the (potentially bad) choices we make about the world we want to live in.

It's easy to get caught in the echo chamber of "technology good, disruption good, gadgets fun" especially living in the tech world so I think it's great stories like these make us take a step back.

That's odd, when I learned about it a long time ago I was told it was intended to measure "inherent" intelligence, not the level of exposure/memorization of a massive set of (likely trivial) data points.

Vocabulary very clearly belongs on an achievement test, not an aptitude test (as I imagined IQ to be).

Agreed, there's a great formula editor which is very nice if you want to create math presentations in powerpoint instead of in beamer (and I wouldn't blame you, especially if you're in a hurry).

But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? No Git, no vim/emacs, no plain text? Abandoning the digital lingua franca of mathematical communication? Abandoning the packages written by the sum total of anyone who has worked on anything close to mathematics in recent years? For what?

Or, alternately, the company could do what every other company in existence does and what B&N has always done and have people work during what they know will be the busiest time of the year instead of sending everyone home, destroying the company and letting the CEO pocket the savings.

A large portion of the SAT is knowledge of English vocabulary which obviously has nothing to do with IQ.

The mathematics questions nearly all use the same basic rules and are presented in the same format, and can easily be learned and trained.

SAT prep courses are ubiquitous and expensive because they work. Do people without training do well? Sure. Do people with training still do poorly? Sure. But a good SAT question would be "does this mean that training doesn't help or that there isn't a correlation between training and success?" because the obvious answer is no.

Sure this is true if we just let the market do as it wills.

But we have many tools to deal with this problem in our historical toolbox that we have mostly left behind as we hard embrace neoliberal ideology: regulation with fines, regulatory bodies (that can make judgements on unethical behavior not explicitly written into law and mete out serious punishment), a criminal justice system that could be applied to executives, a troubling but powerful system of asset forfeiture designed to seize "ill-gotten gains" (and what is money gained from unethical business practices but ill-gotten?), nationalizing or breaking up companies to prevent concentration of power that can be abused, organized labor and collective bargaining. If e.g. CEOs who ran unethical enterprises were afraid of their assets being seized and being jailed the fairly accurate picture you paint of our current reality -- the unethical businessman who crushes anyone with an ounce of human dignity, worker and competitor alike -- looks a little different.

I think it's pretty clear that voting with your dollar will never and has never worked, but some of the above tools might. Though they all of course come with their downsides.

I understand it, lots of people have dreamed big dreams of how great the world would be if everyone else was just like them too.

Actually nearly everyone already is like me in this way: nearly every human being has a sense of ethics and sees a pretty clear difference between right and wrong that transcends a profit motive. It's just that it's not so easy to turn that ethical and moral sense we all share into actual power to change things, especially when power is concentrated in the hands of the unethical (for exactly the reasons you describe above). But that's the task before us, and that's why universities are making computer scientists take ethics.

Yes, BLM is pretty obviously a left organization and not a liberal one. Though hard-left of course has no meaning and is nothing but a smear phrase designed to suggest "extremist" when the positions we are discussing are not particularly extreme at all. They endorse a variety of pretty boilerplate left positions: universal healthcare, state funded college, union rights, anti-imperialism, divesting from fossil fuels and taking other concrete climate action, complete overhaul of the police system. This is why BLM hijacked a Hillary Clinton campaign rally to humiliate her on national television. It was not because they are on her side.

Walmart's profit primarily comes from abuse of monopoly (which is not efficiency) and from government subsidies (they are the biggest welfare recipients in the world, since their workers require government welfare to survive while working so much for so little).

Their profits come from economic coercion and exploiting public subsidies, not efficiency. Walmart's primary competitive innovation historically was union busting.

"It's okay if my vote counts for 100 and everyone else counts for 1, since 300 people are voting".