Blaming the technology for its misuses is always a dubious position to take.
The promoters of said technology (and it's misuses) will always argue that you could say the same about <actually useful technology> which allows <some bad guys> to do this <bad thing> and are you saying this means we should ban this <useful technology> ??!
They would argue this and they would have a point. Also, in an open democratic/non-surveillance state, you can't really ban a technology like this. Instead you focus on regulating the marketing of its misuses or launching information campaigns (I guess that's what you're doing).
Like cigarettes, pink-sheet stocks, multi-level marketing and gambling or any other large revenue sources that are either zero-sum or have net negative social impact, you're better off convincing the public of its dangers than pointing the finger at the underlying technology.
I moved quite a few of my domains from GoDaddy to Epik because of a) the pricing and b) the option of having "forever" domains, or at least very long term registrations as a potential choice.
...but that decision was made without knowing much about Epik. Ignoring the fact that they've potentially shielded some, uh, unsavory individuals (doxers, DDoSers, etc), the absolute stupidity in the design of their system, insecurity, and the fact that it looks now that Rob Monster tried to negotiate with the hackers to not release unhashed CC#s assuming they'd be happy with him removing the people they wanted removed...
Yeah, no. I'm moving my domains at this point. I don't want to be associated with that anymore than I already am at this point. The system "security" itself was bad enough, but having a CEO try to negotiate with the attackers? This is almost funny if it weren't so idiotic.
So let's assume the science is bad, and policy is fraught with political motives, incompetence and distortion to persuade the public to behave in a way that policymakers assume (right or wrong) is in the collective benefit.
Now let's assume this has always been the case. At what point, do you ever trust a vaccine or public health policy in general? Whether it's a vaccine for polio, rubella, hepatitis, etc. at some point does the collection of bad science become voluminous enough to somehow equal good enough science?
If you believe data integrity issues are extreme, there's no way to calculate risk of vaccine vs no action. Your decision would depend on whether you trust your own research over the official policy.
But given that most of us have no formal education on the subject, no resources to conduct more accurate studies, no access to primary data sources, nor an educated peer review group to critically examine our analysis, the chances of major flaws and biases seems quite high.
These are great questions that I'm struggling with at the moment. Certainly, my chance of taking vaccines in future has gone down a lot. However, mostly I've already taken all the ones I'd ever need including vaccines against the diseases you name, so the question is somewhat moot. In the end there's no real substitute for just weighing up the risks in each case the best you can.
"If you believe data integrity issues are extreme, there's no way to calculate risk of vaccine vs no action. Your decision would depend on whether you trust your own research over the official policy."
Correct. I do actually trust my own research over official policy at this point, but, the difficulty of mounting an alternative data based argument is definitely there. That's why I didn't try but explained my policy via social explanations. However, we can make some assumptions that let us use at least a small amount of data. We can assume that whatever official statistics do exist are manipulated or exaggerated to increase the apparent attractiveness of being vaccinated. There's enormous amounts of evidence that this sort of manipulation is happening, so it means those statistics put an upper bound on things. The truth may be that they're less attractive, but it's unlikely that they're moreso. Thus if even the official statistics, when examined closely, aren't convincing, it seems reasonable to conclude the argument must be very weak indeed.
"But given that most of us have no formal education on the subject, no resources to conduct more accurate studies, no access to primary data sources, nor an educated peer review group to critically examine our analysis, the chances of major flaws and biases seems quite high."
I think this is the source of the disagreement. As far as I can tell, public health researchers and officials are characterized by:
1. No formal education in anything biological or medical. Tedros is of course a former African communist official put in his position by China but even academics can turn out to be untrained. Prof Ferguson, whose bogus predictions created lockdowns, was originally a theoretical physicist and has no qualifications in anything biological or medical. In fact nothing in his team's work has any biology in it. That's totally normal: the people who predict disease and suggest policy frequently have no training in it, they're just data analysts ("mathematicians" to the press, to most corporates they'd be junior business analysts). I touch on this in my presentations to the British government ministers: you can read all the relevant papers without once encountering any actual biology or even any theory of disease. Even when they have training it's irrelevant, because they don't use it.
2. No resources to conduct accurate studies. Most existing studies are done by academics in their living rooms at the moment, so they don't actually have more resources than I do. Again, public health is not medicine. Public health consists primarily of academics and bureaucrats, especially in the current environment, they are mostly just working-from-home Office jockeys. Plus if existing studies are mostly useless then that's still useful to know, as it informs what to do next (i.e. nothing). A basic principle is that if there isn't clear evidence that it's useful to do something, the right response is not to look desperately for something to do (that's the so-called "politician's fallacy") but rather leave things alone.
3. The same access to data sources as everyone else. The primary data is all available and when you read in the press or government announcements about COVID studies, almost always those are simply analyses of publicly available data sets.
4. Peer groups of people who are just as poorly educated as them, with the added problem of groupthink. A big part of why the research is so corrupt is the academic need to please their in-group without looking un-educated or confrontational, so the absence of such groups is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. And at any rate, there are plenty of people out there debating these things in forums that are freer and more open than the average scientific peer group.
Overall I think the chance of flaws and biases in self-done research is lower than amongst the professionals assuming you're willing to sit down and wade through a lot of data and reports, and to stick to the scientific method. The quality of the "professional" stuff is so unbelievably low that as long as you're not actively lying to yourself all the time, and as long as you know how to use Excel, you stand a good chance of doing a better job. Not because the world is filled with high quality amateur scientists but because the world is filled with low quality professionals.
I believe these are persuasive arguments to trust policymakers less but not to trust non-professionals more.
Your work may be exceptional but the signal to noise ratio on public forums especially on subjects that have been politicized is just too high.
I would be curious to see what solutions exist for quality peer review that doesn't suffer from group think. Possibly providing anonymity for reviewers and cash incentives?
If by professional you mean specialist, then the set of all non-specialists is very large. There are certainly many professional people within that set who are out-of-field but smarter than the people within it, given the tiny size of most academic fields.
I think anonymity for reviewers and cash incentives are a great idea, but that already exists, it's a market. I don't think we need any clever or new solutions here. Simply stripping science of public funding would force it to convince large numbers of people (via markets) that the science is being done well and actually going somewhere.
It would also bring scientists within the purview of all the mechanisms that have evolved to handle fraud in the private sector, mechanisms like prosecutions, lawsuits, regulators, consumer reviews, trademarks and so on. Consider the huge difference between how Theranos was handled vs how the fraud coming from universities is handled.
The paper shows employment elasticity wrt to wages is very low (Table 4, 5 page 50, 51).
Sure, many workers would choose the less labor intensive Target job over the shitty Amazon warehouse job for the same wage but in many of the warehouse locations, there is simply not that much demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise the market would bear that out.
Also, Amazon has more opportunities for career paths/upward mobility than a local Target/Home Depot.
It can be a political stance, but that's for the commenter to decide, not you.
It is a legal truth. Uber is not legally responsible for providing FT or benefits period. You can argue they should be but as you pointed out, regulation is the responsibility of the government, not Uber.
Something tells me that a user named "BTCOG" is not here to provide rigorous objective analysis but okay lets attack the strawman.
The number of bitcoin addresses with a balance is 30 million. The number of bank accounts is in the billions.
As you said, BTC is two orders of magnitude less efficient than banks assuming mining provides the same value to people as ALL of the services banks provide including loans, savings, and money transfer which IT DOES NOT.
Something tells me you just like to go on tangents nobody was talking about here. Never once, have I ever said that "Bitcoin is two orders of magnitude less efficient than banks."
That's where it stops, because what you've said is nonsense.
As a content creator, you want the platform to protect your copyright and at YouTube's scale, copyright scanners are the only way to implement this.
Will they produce false positives? Of course. Do the benefits to content creators outweigh the costs of these false positives? Yes if you believe creative content should be protected.
The only other viable model for content creators are subscription based services like Patreon and they have/will also be pressured by the entertainment industry or even the content creators themselves to flag copyright infringement once the platform gets large enough.
> As a content creator, you want the platform to protect your copyright and at YouTube's scale, copyright scanners are the only way to implement this.
Is this really true, though?
Google certainly doesn’t want to pay for people, but automated systems can be used as a first-pass filter, before human are brought-in to make a second-pass judgement.
So what is the rate of false-positives? And how many automated flags are triggered per day?
As it stands, someone can make a remix of your song and make claims against anyone using your original song. It all happens through youtube's automated system, and you won't see a penny for your work.
Like some have suggested, the automated system should only be an input for a team of humans to then review and consider. They should then contact the potentially breaching party and get some feedback as well as doing some due diligence to check if the complaint came from a proper right holder.
Yes this costs money but it is the only way to do the job without being a scumbag and a general burden on the world.
Furthermore it should cost the person sending a complaint somethings to file it, which then is refunded if the complaint is found to have merit.
Lastly, some of these steps could and should be skipped if a particular account or multiple accounts determined by some other means to be the same person are repeatedly found to be in violation.
Similarly if a person keeps making unfounded accusations the refundable fee might increase in steps.
That's all great in theory, but current US copyright law isn't really in favor of implementing any of that. If Google tried to do it, they'd likely get flooded with massive lawsuits from the media conglomerates because they'd lose the DMCA safe harbor.
Why would they lose the DMCA safe harbor? We're talking about YouTube's own scanner here, not DMCA takedowns. There's no requirement in the DMCA to implement an internal scanner that has many false positives, and not investigate the scanner's output.
But the difference between composition and performance is well delineated in copyright law. What technical barrier is preventing Google from setting up scanners to detect similarity, get a hit, and then identify a video as a performance of 'Moonlight Sonata', look that up, and OK it on the basis that everything written by Beethoven is long out of copyright?
>Will they produce false positives? Of course. Do the benefits to content creators outweigh the costs of these false positives? Yes if you believe creative content should be protected.
False positives are absolutely unacceptable when it comes to anything dealing money. I sure wouldn't stick with a bank if they said "oh well, false positives happen. you'll get your money next week... maybe".
but there are several banks that help ensure that security. There are no checks to google allowing for such false positives.
What you described as the ideals of crypto maximalists largely applies to fiat currency. Individuals "own" their own USD, are able to share and use as they please within the bounds of legality.
Not sure what it means to "censor" currency, but if they consider governments' economic stewardship to be foolhardy, why would they consider the wisdom of miners, programmers or the crypto's regulating body to be superior?
What's left is the question of legality, anonymity lets users skirt the government's laws, which has value to basically criminals.
What value does crypto provide to those groups you mentioned, that cash cannot provide? If the answer is, it allows them to break laws then yes by definition they are criminals. You can argue that some of these laws are unjust, sure but that's tangential to the question. The value of crypto by volume is largely for speculative bets and criminal activities.
WSB is a public subreddit. Traders, pms, hedge fund guys all participate and win often bigger because they have more to play with. They pump and dump and ride the emoji rockets like everyone else.
There are only the winners, which include the $60k/yr nurse, the $600k/yr FAANG principal, and the $6M/yr Senior PM who timed their call options right.
And the losers which include the same but timed it wrong.
The engineers and finance folks who lost will have a bad week. The lower-middle income earners will have a bad year.
The promoters of said technology (and it's misuses) will always argue that you could say the same about <actually useful technology> which allows <some bad guys> to do this <bad thing> and are you saying this means we should ban this <useful technology> ??!
They would argue this and they would have a point. Also, in an open democratic/non-surveillance state, you can't really ban a technology like this. Instead you focus on regulating the marketing of its misuses or launching information campaigns (I guess that's what you're doing).
Like cigarettes, pink-sheet stocks, multi-level marketing and gambling or any other large revenue sources that are either zero-sum or have net negative social impact, you're better off convincing the public of its dangers than pointing the finger at the underlying technology.