"“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi, a professor and chair of biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the study’s principal investigator."
I really don't think I would put eggs all over my body to graze for breakfast, but that's an interesting image.
I always consider this kind of weird unnecessary metaphor a big sign that the content was generated by ChatGPT, and I would be willing to bet that this professor was interviewed via email and got some "help" in writing her reply.
This is why I think the study of logic and having fields where the culture generally agrees on "what counts" as good argumentation is really important. Does it solve these problems entirely? Certainly not. But look at, for example, the culture in the scientific community. From my outsider's perspective, it seems the scientific community has adopted a series of guardrails that generally prevent "bad" research from getting published.
Famously, it doesn't always work, and I'm not ignorant to the latest series of scandals involving illegitmate journals, p-hacking, etc. But I think these tend to be the attention grabbing headlines, rather than the "norm." Glad to be challenged on that point.
But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking. Simply being aware of "confirmation bias" and other psychological pitfalls might make us more capable of figuring out where we're going wrong. As the article notes, people are famously blind to their own errors, but quite good at pointing out others'. So it's not like it's impossible for us to become better and stronger thinkers.
It just takes effort and some "meta-thinking" and I think some personal virtue and character to become better!
> From my outsider's perspective, it seems the scientific community has adopted a series of guardrails that generally prevent "bad" research from getting published.
> But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking.
Run the proposition that science has cast its net of expertise and authority a bit too broadly by the science crowd and see how that goes over.
Or, pay attention going forward to what that crowd has to say about philosophy and other non-hard-science disciplines while reading your various socials.
I think the mechanism in the scientific community that allows progress are just multiple perspectives.
The version where there is one scientific authority that sets these guardrails is prone to fail and does that quite reliably. Different faculties have different requirements for their scientific work, but even here the established players often become a problem. The power of journals and their reputation can be detrimental, but as long as there is competition, it should work.
I think some field are less vulnerable here than others. You cannot just deliver scientific work in sociology/political science. You will have to fight a lot of people who will disagree for ideological reasons. These are by nature distinct from discussion about what color some gluon needs to have in some theoretical particle, although you have entirely "people focused conflicts" here as well.
But overall you should never put your belief in guardrails. They will be wrong and the next ostracized scientist was right in the end. The only relevant content is indeed the one in the scientific work itself. Whom you delegate them to evaluate them for you is a personal matter and no institution alone can take up this task.
> But to return to my initial idea: I do think that we can arm ourselves with certain principles that, if applied, will move us away from biased thinking. Simply being aware of "confirmation bias" and other psychological pitfalls might make us more capable of figuring out where we're going wrong. As the article notes, people are famously blind to their own errors, but quite good at pointing out others'. So it's not like it's impossible for us to become better and stronger thinkers.
This is why it's so important we teach our children things like critical thinking and reasoning, educate them on the various biases we're all prone to, and teach them how to recognize propaganda that works on those biases.
My Zune HD from 2005/2006 still works. I think it's the oldest piece of functional tech I own. No, I don't use it on a daily basis. But I love booting it up every now and again.
It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
I think that if society or societal standards are going to mean anything at all, it's that it's fair to expect, to demand even, that people make the necessary efforts to achieve information literacy.
It may be true that you hear similar refrains from different quarters, but, the best diagnosis I have heard of this is that it's a similarity in psychology without a similarly in underlying facts.
So broad brush despair against "the system" as a whole is, to me, not doing the homework of trying to differentiate. Sometimes those claims will be true, sometimes they won't, and the devil will be in the details. And we shouldn't regard any discussion to have truly begun until participants show an interest in doing the homework.
I would say the balance of emphasis at the Intercept has been pretty clearly on truth-to-power stories, and they clearly haven't prioritized customer lock-in or profitability to a similar degree. I might be right or wrong here, but meaningful conversations will, as ever, have to center on specific facts pertinent to their history rather than broad brush declarations of despair at the impossibility of knowing.
The article has a childish tone (comparing head chopping regimes to, er, wealthy people) but past all the bluster there may be some substance here - The intercept killed a story about Jeff Bezos donating 50M to a charity run by Admiral William McRaven. Sadly little detail about what this person would’ve given Bezos in return.
> What I don't understand about journalists is why they think any of us believe they especially deserve anyone's trust.
Excellent question.
I guess the answer is simply mutatis mutandis: they appreciate that they don't have, but do need our trust and that uttering said refrain might achieve installing it :-)
It seems the company had some procedures in place, particularly the documentation of "removals," but the line employees didn't follow that process in this case. One reason appears to be the tremendous pressure they were under to get planes out of the factories.
The article also mentions a possible lack of experience, since some of the workers could be very new to the company...though they could also have been quite experienced as well.
It is so, so very hard to evaluate risk and causation.
Slow down production, increase oversight and focus on training. Make sure that many employees stay for a long time and that they are encouraged to share their knowledge with new hires.
Also: (re) foster an environment where people can highlight issues without being ignored or even harassed for it. Once people start noticing that their reports about potential issues are ignored or makes colleagues act differently towards them, it's game over.
Dig a little deeper and you should come across some backstory that details how the company purged itself of most of it's senior engineering, machining, and inspection staff. Pretty much anyone with the experience to spot a problem and the balls to say something got the chop. Boeing senior management decided to take a page from the private equity playbook and tried to run one of the most complex manufacturing concerns on the planet like a fast food restaurant, with predictable results.
On the lines themselves, word on the street is that the powers-that-be greatly relaxed the "greeenlight" process post-COVID, which is a way to get a job outside your specific job code. To remove the Boeing-speak, they made it easier for the janitor to be the electrician. The really cool thing about greenlighters is that they never make quite as much money, and there is a substantial period - as long as two years - where they keep making their janitor salaries while they're doing the higher spec work. Win-win!
That last line really resonated with me: "It's the only thing I really know how to do," or something about like that.
One of the most terrifying realizations I've had over the past few years is that I've worked myself into a pretty narrow niche, one that I can't probably market outside of a few specialized companies if the need arose. Thankfully I have a law degree, though I let my bar license lapse.
But this is one thing I guess I'd say in favor of the modern job-switching economy: your resume doesn't get stale, it shows new things over and over again. There's only so much people like me, who've stayed / plan to stay with one employer over the long-term, can do about things like layoffs.
What happens if I lose my job? It is very hard to say. I guess I'd either try and pass my resume around, but at this point it's almost as if changing careers entirely (for a second time! Yikes!) would be just as easy...
Generic white collar jobs are far more vulnerable to AI than niche jobs. Niche jobs are hard to automate:
1. Very little public data to train on. So AI is bad at it.
2. Low savings from automation. So no incentive to spend tons of money to make the AI good, such as medicine.
There's always a balance between specialization and genericness. But with AI, I think the balance is heavily tiled to the former.
However, one must pay attention to the little ecosystem they specialise in. If it is trending down, there must be decisive moves to shift away early. Most people however choose to be blissfully unaware of the wider scale trends until it hits them like a truck.
In the article's case, the author's outcome is sad but fully expected.
1. He's a journalist
2. Worse, he's an hollywood journalist
That's a completely economically worthless niche, and there isn't even any 'public good sympathy'. When you go into a worthless niche, all the employers left are the exploitative vulture ones, and thus you get abused again and again. Because no good employer will touch their toe into that industry.
Its possible to make a living as a journalist, you just have to specialise in niches that people are willing to pay for. Financial journalism (There's investigative journalism there because readers care and pay for it), industry vertical journals (Banking, tech etc, the information charges like $600 a year). Or be so good you can get into the NYT, etc.
What if you don't want to? You just want to report on games, anime, hollywood etc? Then either start a youtube channel, or a substack. Directly confront the audience and their willingness to watch and pay. Its risky and probably going to fail, but there's a very comfortable upside if you make it.
Just don't expect someone will hand you a good job in dying niches.
I agree with everything you said here. I mean this guy chose to be a movie critic -- probably the dyingest corner of a dying industry. And of course they can pay people nothing for this, because there are a billion people who would love to do that job, making it hyper competitive.
Your comment about automation also made me reflect on the nature of job competition in the future. Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat. What's the value add for a human?
This has been the case already in some sectors, like manufacturing...but it seems we white collar guys are going to be facing the music soon ourselves.
Also it makes me wonder what kind of job kids these days should target. Trades? Manual labor? Areas where regulatory structures will soon work as welfare-esque gatekeeping (medicine and law come to mind)?
There are a lot of jobs available now for young people in building trades, as well as related fields like oil and gas extraction. The USA is re-industrializing at a rapid pace due to concerns over national security and foreign supply chains. And Gen Z is relatively small so there are jobs available for those who want to work and are willing to move.
The down side is that building trade jobs will never pay that well because value generation isn't scalable. And the risk of a crippling injury is much higher than for movie critics.
The trades are certainly not the panacea that some think them to be, and they have significant downsides (you very rarely see a roofer over 40, for example, that work is incredibly damaging).
But there's certainly a demand, and we need to get rid of the stigma that "a plumber" is somehow a dumber/worse person than "a lawyer".
The trades do relatively quickly get into "google salary" range, but they will rarely if ever reach "google stock grant" range. 15 years into being a plumber and you're probably managing multiple plumbers and could easily be netting $250k/yr or more.
> Now we compete against each other, but soon, we may be competing with an algorithm that pound for pound we can't beat.
Welcome to the experience of the blue collar worker over the last few centuries. It doesn't seem like it's going all that well for them.
> According to legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drill, a race that he won only to die in victory with a hammer in hand as his heart gave out from stress.
Amen. What I found so interesting about Girard's perspective on Christ is that Jesus represents the end of the "scapegoat," because he is the "holy and perfect Sacrifice." In Girard's interpretation, Jesus ultimately broke the cycle of imitation because He is the ultimate scapegoat, upon whom all the sins of humanity were placed, and yet He is also God, whom we should love above all other things.
There is a theory that since he was resurrected three days (one long weekend) after dying for our sins, it's a bit of a gaslight to keep eternally playing the guilt card over the whole affair.
(personally, although this theory is amusing, I prefer Bulgakov's interpretation of the passion)
Seems like a really, really good way to create a really, really boring website.
ETA: Rereading this, that is probably not a very helpful HNy comment, so let me elaborate.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but one of the things that the internet is most useful for is exploring places and ideas you would otherwise never encounter or consider. And just like taking a wooden ship to reach the North Pole, browsing around the internet comes with significant risk. But given the opportunity for personal growth and development, for change, and so on, those risks might well be worth it.
That model of the internet, as I said, is somewhat old-fashioned. Now, the internet is mostly about entertainment. Bluesky exists to keep eyeballs on phones, just like Tiktok or Instagram or whatever. Sure, Bluesky is slightly more cerebral -- but only slightly.
People are generally not entertained by things that frustrate them (generally -- notable exceptions exist), so I can understand an entertainment company like Bluesky focusing on eliminating frustrations via obsessive focus on content moderation to ensure only entertaining content reaches the user. In that sense, this labeling thing seems really useful, just like movie ratings give consumers a general idea of whether the movie is something appropriate for them.
So in that sense, wonderful for Bluesky! But I think I'll politely decline joining and stick with other platforms with different aims.
What I want is a filter for angry posts. Social media exposes me to a wider cross section than I get in person and there is really a limit to the amount of distress I can absorb.
Right, and I think you've zeroed in on what I feel is the most important point here. Somehow, for a lot of people, "diversity of opinions" and "angry posts subject to moderation" are more or less the same thing. For me, those are distinct things, and don't think diversity of opinions, at least not on things of interest to me (philosophy, astronomy etc) are under the crosshairs. Of course I feel that way because I feel like I'm right about something, and that something is the idea that diversity of opinion has a lot more to it than whether something is or isn't moderated.
The internet isn't one size fits all, all the time. Most people don't want to be challenged all the time and everywhere. Sometimes you want to watch a challenging documentary about socioeconomics in 17th century Poland and other times you want to watch Friends. I see a good use case here for BlueSky allowing users to vary moderation & use curated lists to separate interests & moods.
I think I can have lively, intellectually stimulating exposure without say, someone advocating for the mass killing of gay people. Or engaging in an interesting political discussion without bad-faith conspiracy theorists shitting up the place. For example, the “chiller” which as far as I know is just designed to cool down a hot button discussion actually sounds super amazing for this purpose.
One of the things that frustrated me about browsing twitter now is the constant bad faith discussions about everything, one-off potshots that waste pixels and lead nowhere. A moderation tool that sifts that and just gets me to the people that actually know wtf they’re talking about and are engaging honestly would benefit me greatly!
Definitely -- but the problem isn't really "content" moderation. What it seems like you actually want is personality / tone / user moderation -- which Bluesky isn't really doing.
To analogize to real life, I have friends with whom I agree 100% on politics, but I never talk to them about it, because they're annoying when they do it. But I also have friends who disagree with me on political and other issues, but we have wonderful conversations because of the manner in which we disagree.
I don't what Bluesky is doing will actually help with this problem. For one thing, I think it's design as a "feed" basically precludes any solid sort of discussion (compared to an Internet forum). The medium kind of encourages the "one-off potshots" you mentioned, and moderation won't do much to cure it.
Composable moderation means we’re not limited to what Bluesky does, however. If I want to set up a moderation server that does tone moderation, there’s nothing stopping me from doing that.
I tend to agree about the utility of Bluesky as a medium for discussion, but that’s not what I want to use it for, so that’s fine by me.
In modern US political discourse, there is no nuance in “us vs them”. Your moderators that are meant to just tag “advocating for the mass killing of gay people” will also put a “here’s why I think you should vote for Trump” post in the same category.
I strongly disagree with this position and I believe that such a rhetoric-focused moderation tool as the chiller examples in the article will assist in my desire for intellectual discussion without dealing with inflamed nonsense.
That being said, if this affects one political group more heavy-handedly than another because their political strategy is more inflamed, I’m willing to hear less from them or only hear from the members who can communicate in a sensible manner.
Any moderated system depends on trust that moderators will act fairly. If moderators begin categorizing content into labels that they don't belong in, presumably either the moderator would be removed or the service will slowly devolve and go away.
Not to be nitpicky but it's not quite that simple. BlueSky is a Public Benefit LLCs which is explicitly for-profit but does have some other limits - so it does count for something. I can't find exactly what BlueSky's public benefit is claimed to be though.
"Liu, who answered some of my questions, did not respond when I asked for the exact language the Bluesky PBLLC used to describe its public benefit mission when incorporating the company. She also didn’t say whether the company would publish its annual benefits reports — reports that PBLLCs are required to create each year, but PBLLCs incorporated in Delaware, where Bluesky was incorporated, are not required to make them public."
Super interesting, thank you for posting. Agreed with a lot of it, except for one thing:
"No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7."
That's one of the things I miss most about IRC. There was something very temporal about it -- you were logged in, or you weren't. You were present, or you weren't. More modern tools of communication like Slack or Discord basically don't have this; it's more like a long private "feed" than a "chat" as I think of it, anyway.
I miss that temporality. I miss logging in and asking the chat, "Hey, is so and so online?" "yeah, he was here about half an hour ago, went afk but should be back." It gives me the same warm rosy feeling the thought of having to use a pay phone does.
Obviously, you're right, in the commercial sense, this is unacceptable. But I personally kind of miss the days when chat / email / forum were separate things. Now we have these mutants in Slack and Discord that mish mash both. Maybe I'm old but I find it sort of difficult conceptually.
I thought this article was going to be somehow less intuitive, but in reality, it simply says something most people inherently understand: that you have to grease the skids a bit to make things work. Dressing it up in academic sloganeering doesn't make the insight all that much more powerful.
I think most people understand that a risk-free society is a poor society. Take driving: the safest way to drive is to not get in the car at all. Similarly, the best way to save yourself from credit card fraud is not to have a credit card. But does this justify driving like a maniac, or being careless with your personal information? Of course not.
In other words, the article simply points out that categorical thinking (1 or 0) is useless in this context (as it is in most contexts, to be honest). The meaningful question is what degree of fraud we should be willing to accept, and in what contexts.
It's a common insight, yet you see slogans like "zero tolerance" or "our overriding priority is security" everywhere. You can choose to believe people championing them are just oversimplifying or actually encouraging a bad system for their own gains, but it's important to be able to point to a well-written piece explaining why they're a bad idea.
I really don't think I would put eggs all over my body to graze for breakfast, but that's an interesting image.