The topic does not matter.
The assertion at hand does not matter.
Whether anyone believes the assertion does not matter.
The only thing that matters is: Are you playing offense or defense?
Cuz attacking looks like winning. And explaining looks like losing.
FWIW, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is doing better and better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Trying not to get scooped by Chromatic, I guess?
It still blows me away that he managed to take over the term “fake news”.
It was introduced as a way to explain how social media was leading gullible people into MAGA, but he turned it into a term for persecution of MAGA by conventional media.
It was actually an incredible move. I can’t think of anything he’s spun that well since 2016.
It was outside of my marriage too.
Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.[2] Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected or even higher risks.[3][n 1]
I’m sympathetic to the reflexive impulse to defend OpenAI out of a fear that this whole thing results in even worse copyright law.
I, too, think copyright law is already smothering the cultural conversation and we’re potentially only a couple of legislative acts away from having “property of Disney” emblazoned on our eyeballs.
But don’t fall into their trap of seeing everything through the lens of copyright!
We have other laws!
We can attack OpenAI on antitrust, likeness rights, libel, privacy, and labor laws.
Being critical of OpenAI doesn’t have to mean siding with the big IP bosses. Don’t accept that framing.
Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.
Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.
That’s the reason we got copyright, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we could want copyright.
Two good reasons to want copyright:
Accurate attribution:
Open source thrives on the notion that: if there’s a new problem to be solved, and it requires a new way of thinking to solve it, someone will start a project whose goal is not just to build new tools to solve the problem but also to attract other people who want to think about the problem together.
If anyone can take the codebase and pretend to be the original author, that will splinter the conversation and degrade the ability of everyone to find each other and collaborate.
In the past, this was pretty much impossible because you could check a search engine or social media to find the truth. But with enshittification and bots at every turn, that looks less and less guaranteed.
Faithful reproduction:
If I write a book and make some controversial claims, yet it still provokes a lot of interest, people might be inclined to publish slightly different versions to advance their own opinions.
Maybe a version where I seem to be making an abhorrent argument, in an effort to mitigate my influence. Maybe a version where I make an argument that the rogue publisher finds more palatable, to use my popularity to boost their own arguments.
This actually happened during the early days of publishing, by the way! It’s part of the reason we got copyright in the first place.
And again, it seems like this would be impossible to get away with now, buuut… I’m not so sure anymore.
—
Personally:
I favor piracy in the sense that I think everyone has a right to witness culture even if they can’t afford the price of admission.
And I favor remixing because the cultural conversation should be an active read-write two-way street, no just passive consumption.
But I also favor some form of licensing, because I think we have a duty to respect the integrity of the work and the voice of the creator.
I think AI training is very different from piracy. I’ve never downloaded a mega pack of songs and said to my friends “Listen to what I made!” I think anyone who compares OpenAI to pirates (favorably) is unwittingly helping the next set of feudal tech lords build a wall around the entirety of human creativity, and they won’t realize their mistake until the real toll booths open up.
You’re presupposing the superiority of science. What good is knowing the chemical composition of a mind, if such chemicals are but shadows on the cave wall?
You can’t actually witness a rock, in its full objective “rock-ness”. You can only witness yourself perceiving the rock. I call this the Principle of Objective Things in Space.
Admittedly, the study of consciousness is still in its infancy, especially compared to study of the physical world. But it would be foolish to discard the entire concept when it is unavoidably fundamental. Suppose we do invent teleporters and they do erase consciousness. Doesn’t it say something about the peril of worshipping quantification over all else, that we wouldn’t even know until we had already teleported all of our bread? The entire field is babies. I am heavy ideas guy and this is my PoOTiS.
To quote Searle: Should I pinch myself and report the results in the Journal of Philosophy?
The physical world is the hologram.
Between saccades, fnords, and confabulation, I don’t trust a single thing my senses tell me. But the one thing I know for sure is that I’m conscious.
So, knowing that only consciousness is “real”, why would I assume it can be recreated through atoms (which are a mere hallucination)?
Originally from The West Wing, but that’s a good line to pull.
- Congressman Skinner: Josh, all the Marriage Recognition Act does is ensure that a radical social agenda isn’t thrust upon an entire country that isn’t ready for it yet.
- Josh Lyman: Thirty-two states have passed laws banning same-sex marriage; the states are doing a fine job protecting themselves from a ‘radical social agenda’ without a federal shield.
- Congressman Skinner: Josh…
- Josh Lyman: I like you guys that wanna reduce the size of government: make it just small enough so it can fit in our bedrooms.
where all of the public schools are terrible
…from having no money
you’re going to want to look for other options
…if you have money
If the private schools in your area are way better
…funded
then you would want to send your kids there
…and your money
Public schools can also compare/see what private schools are doing that’s working
…like having money
and update their policy/curriculum to improve themselves
…like by enacting a policy of having money
As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.
Fully expected some ineffectual BS, but then I saw the author was Robert Reich so I decided to give it the time of day.
He’s got some good points. Musk is very vulnerable in a lot of ways, and there’s a decent amount of ammo to attack him on each of those fronts.
If regular people, businesses, and governments all decided to say “fuck you” to him in unison, he could be bankrupt, imprisoned, dethroned, and banned from several industries in just a few years’ time.
Now, his worst-case scenario is extremely unlikely… but I wonder if the fact that bits and pieces of it might come to fruition is why he’s gone so batshit insane over the past several years. It must seem like there’s no choice but to double down on the grift now.
It is a sale.
If I give you $400 per week for 5 weeks and tell you to spend it at my store, and you come in and buy $2000 worth of stuff… did I actually make a sale?
Do you condemn KHHAAMAS?