> if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives
Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true!
If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself.
For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car:
All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo.
Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option.
Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists.
Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.
DOT and SOLAS conspicuity tape (the red and white reflective stuff on semi trailers and so on) is mandatory for certain commercial vehicles, but also works great on bikes, scooters, strollers, backpacks (or rigid tags attached to backpacks, many varieties are kind of stiff), boots, helmets, and other things that you want not to be run over by vehicles with headlights.
It comes in a few grades, the better ranks are magnificently, astonishingly bright! You can also get more flexible, stretchy types made to be stitched or glued onto fabric.
I outfitted my classy black bike and bike gear with a bunch of material from reflectivepro.com, they're easy to deal with even for consumers who only need a little bit of material.
The ostensible purpose of the certificate transparency logs is to allow validation of a certificate you're looking at - I browse to https://poormathskills.com and want to figure out the details of when its cert was issued.
The (presumably) unintended, unexpected purpose of the logs is to provide public notification of a website coming online for scrapers, search engines, and script kiddies to attack it: I could register https://verylongrandomdomainnameyoucantguess7184058382940052... and unwisely expect it to be unguessable, but as it turns out OpenAI is going to scrape it seconds after the certificate is issued.
The main thing isn't validating the cert you're looking at, per se, it's to validate the activities of the issuers. Mainly that they aren't issuing certificates they aren't supposed to (i.e. you can monitor the logs for your domain to check some random CA you've never done business hasn't issued a cert for it). This is mainly enforced by any violations (i.e. any certificates found that don't show up in the logs) being grounds for being removed from browser's trusted list.
I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I could imagine a rational, fictional society that had different shared values.
Because you clearly haven't spent enough time closely looking at pond and river water!
Our local parks department has several annual events where they ask for volunteers to help perform benthic macroinvertebrate surveys. It basically amounts to meeting up at a local park with a couple people in waders dragging special nets along the bottom, dumping scoops of material into buckets and large, shallow, white trays, and others sitting at picnic tables with spoons, magnifying glasses, and muffin tins sorting out the critters that get caught in the nets.
The cool part is that at the end, you can score the creek based on the quantity and types of larvae that you find: Caddisfly, mayfly, and stonefly larvae are very sensitive to factors like runoff from agriculture and road salt, sediment, water oxygenation, and other factors, beetles, crayfish, dragonflies, and scuds are moderately tolerant, while leeches, worms, midges, and flies will grow in anything. Thousands of these surveys happen every year, so you can compare the relative frequency and quantity of various species and determine the relative health of the stream.
I don't know how many tardigrades you'll find just scooping 4-8mm nymphs and larvae by eye, but I've brought my microscope to a couple and put random droplets of water under a cover and slide: there are an astonishing number of tiny critters swimming around at any zoom level.
No, sorry if that wasn't clear, I've not identified one by eye without a scope. Maybe your fine vision is better than mine, but all the tiniest things in a drop of water are just about indistinguishable without magnification. The kinds of water that have sufficient density to contain a tardigrade just look like they're full of grit, I don't think you could identify which speck was a tardigrade and which was just dirt.
Nymphs are larger (that's why they call them "macro" invertebrates), but it's always good to have at least a magnifying glass if not a loupe or microscope on site.
It's using the size of the ruler, matching the posture as shown in the image. A few keys over and there's a picture of a grizzly bear that says it is 1m or 3'4" tall. And maybe when it's on all fours, that's a typical measurement to the shoulders - its arm length, more or less.
That's much shorter than the human at 1.7m or 5'7". From just those numbers, you might think that a human would weigh more than a grizzly or take one in a fight: But when a bear stands on its hind legs, it's 2.4m/8' tall and can be 800 lbs, I'd have put a grizzly way further to the right.
The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.
If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.
I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.
Genuine question, I don't understand the economics of the stock market and as such I participate very little (probably to my detriment) I sort of figure the original theory went like this.
"We have an idea to run a for profit endeavor but do not have money to set it up. If you buy from us a portion of our future profit we will have the immediate funds to set up the business and you will get a payout for the indefinite future."
And the stock market is for third party buying and selling of these "shares of profit"
Under these conditions are not all stocks a sort of millstone of perpetual debt for the company and it would behoove them to remove that debt, that is, buyback the stock. Naively I assume this is a good thing.
If you don't understand a concept that's part of the stock market, reading the Investopedia article will go a long way. It's a nice site for basic overviews. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/buyback.asp
The short answer is that the trend of frequent stock buybacks as discussed here is not being used to "eliminate debt" (restore private ownership), it's being used to puff up the stock price as a non-taxable alternative to dividend payouts (simply increasing the stock price by reducing supply does not realize any gains, while paying stockholders "interest" directly is subject to income tax). This games the metric of "stock price", which is used as a proxy for all sorts of things including executive performance and compensation.
My view is that you don't want more layers. Chasing ever increasing share prices favor shareholders (limited amount of generally rich people) over customers (likely to be average people). The incentives get out of whack.
I disagree. Those place the problem at the corporate level, when it's clearly extended through to being a monetary issue. The first thing I would like to see is the various Fed and banking liquidity and credit facilities go away. They don't facilitate stability, but a fiscal shell game that has allowed numerous zombie companies to live far past their solvency. This in turn encourages widespread fiscal recklessness.
We're headed for a crunch anyway. My observation is that a controlled demolition has been attempted several times over the past few years, but in every instance, someone has stepped up to cry about the disaster that would occur if incumbents weren't shored up. Of course, that just makes the next occurrence all the more dire.
Stupidity, greed, and straight-up evil intentions do a bunch of the work, but ultimately short-term thinking wins because it's an attractor state. The influence of the wealthy/powerful is always outsized, but attractors and common-knowledge also create a natural conspiracy that doesn't exactly have a center.
So with AI, the way the natural conspiracy works out is like this. Leaders at the top might suspect it's bullshit, but don't care, they always fail upwards anyway. Middle management at non-tech companies suspect their jobs are in trouble on some timeline, so they want to "lead a modernization drive" to bring AI to places they know don't need it, even if it's a doomed effort that basically defrauds the company owners. Junior engineers see a tough job market, want to devalue experience to compete.. decide that only AI matters, everything that came before is the old way. Owners and investors hate expensive senior engineers who don't have to bow and scrape, think they have to much power, would love to put them in their place. Senior engineers who are employed and maybe the most clear-eyed about the actual capabilities of technology see the writing on the wall.. you have to make this work even if it's handed to you in a broken state, because literally everyone is gunning for you. Those who are unemployed are looking around like well.. this is apparently the game one must play. Investors will invest in any horrible doomed thing regardless of what it is because they all think they are smarter than other investors and will get out in just in time. Owners are typically too disconnected from whatever they own, they just want to exit/retire and already mostly in the position of listening to lieutenants.
At every level for every stakeholder, once things have momentum they don't need be a healthy/earnest/noble/rational endeavor any more than the advertising or attention economy did before it. Regardless of the ethics there or the current/future state of any specific tech.. it's a huge problem when being locally rational pulls us into a state that's globally irrational
Yes, that "attractor state" you describe is what I meant by "if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system". The older I get and the more I learn, the less I'm willing to ascribe faults in our society to individual evils or believe in the existence of intentionally concealed conspiracies rather than just seeing systemic flaws and natural conspiracies.
There was a long standing illusion that people care about long-term thinking. But given the opportunity, people seem to take the short-term road with high risks, instead of chasing a long-term gain, as they, themselves, might not experience the gain.
The timeframe of expectations have just shifted, as everyone wants to experience everything. Just knowing the possibility of things that can happen already affects our desires. And since everyone has a limited time in life, we try to maximize our opportunities to experience as many things as possible.
It’s interesting to talk about this to older generation (like my parents in their 70s), because there wasn’t such a rush back then. I took my mom out to some cities around the world, and she mentioned how she really never even dreamed of a possibility of being in such places. On the other hand, when you grow in a world of technically unlimited possibilities, you have more dreams.
Sorry for rambling, but in my opinion, this somewhat affects economics of the new generation as well. Who cares of long term gains if there’s a chance of nobody experiencing the gain, might as well risk it for the short term one for a possibility of some reward.
Using a naive rectangular approximation (40x10^6m x 20x10^6m - infinite resolution at the poles), that's a map of the Earth with a resolution of 37mm per pixel at the equator. Lower resolution than I expected!
The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.
The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.
I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.
Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.
I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.
You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.
That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.
There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…
It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error
Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true!
If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself.
For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car:
All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo.
Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option.
Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists.
Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.
reply