Regardless of one’s opinion about AI, from a product perspective this seems somewhat similar to the dev using his 48gb ram machine and latest iphone to test an app that will be used by consumers with entry-level devices
People like to blame social media for this kind of bullshit, but social media is just the vector.
Just this week I read a "study" because someone claimed on social media that it was made by (Public, famous) Unis A, B and C and reported as an effect an increase in 30% of revenue for the companies that participated in the experiment.
The "study" was commissioned by an interest group (bad sign). It was conducted by people associated with said unis (I didn't check their credentials), and it did report in its headline the 30% revenue increase.
Said study was about an experiment that ran for a few months. Within these months, the revenue was flat (which could be considered good enough for the cause). The 30% was the revenue of this period against the same period the previous year. So somehow the experiment affected the companies retroactively! Not to mention that the researchers were able to find a group of companies that were, on average, growing 30% YoY. Surprising indeed.
So even if you check your sources, it may still be bullshit science or bullshit reporting from well-credentialed sources.
I don't think the following is a great idea for many reasons, but it's an idea that has been on my mind for a while and I'd like to share it to hear some thoughts:
Germany has (used to have? I don't follow this closely) the "church tax": citizens are obligated to pay the tax no matter how much faith they have, but are free to channel it to a denomination/organization they believe in.
Maybe a liberal, democratic state could successfully build something similar for news organizations: all citizens have to pay a "journalism tax", which they then channel to a subscription for a vehicle they trust.
Yes, a million ways this can be abused, the government may censor opposition, etc. I know, I said the idea wasn't great. But worth pondering. Also, this is based on a very stylized understanding of how said German tax works (I'm not German and never looked at it that deeply)
btw I understand this is the opposite of "free", but more about journalism financing in general.
Germany already has something like that, it's the Rundfunkbeitrag: a mandatory monthly fee of €18.36 per household, intended to fund public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, Deutschlandradio).
The BBC is funded in a similar fashion, and is very competitive alongside commercial news media. Other countries fund it from regular tax revenues.
A good public news service that is actually widely watched and legitimately valuable is possible. It's never perfectly independent, but many countries have done it successfully to a reasonable degree.
But yes, you were saying that it could instead be funnelled onto an organisation of each tax-payer's choosing instead of being centralised. It's an interesting idea.
You essentially just force everyone to have a news subscription, whichever they want. I suppose you would need an approved list, which always carries some bias.
I think health-insurance works similarly in the Netherlands. Healthcare is private, but everyone is pretty much forced to have insurance and they are tightly regulated. In practice it's very similar to other countries that have public healthcare, but you can choose your provider.
The BBC is state funded media, largely supplying state propaganda, paid for with a tax.
The only quirk is that you can avoid the tax by not owning a TV and that it sometimes used to hold the government to account in the days before David Kelly was murdered.
While I do disgree with the "state funded media scope" - I'd go as far as saying the BBC has become so fearful to rock the boat in any way that it is at risk of becoming a redundant source - I do think the lack of "competition" for BBC funding leads to a worse journalistic rigour. It's not the centre of excellence for journlism it once was, and is often looked down on when compared to other paid news outlets like the Economist, Atlantic, the FT, et ceterea. Adding an element of competition into the equation could make for better journalism, but equally, that would likely require more funding in the end.
Several European countries have something like it. I can only find a very brief article in English on Wikipedia and a longer one in Swedish. But it seems to be reasonably successful in my experience. The Swedish article mentions: Sweden, other Nordic countries, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.
The issue is that this is on a balance sheet of a budget somewhere and an autocrat will selectively choose to cut with a knife such they speak ill of them. See the current debate with the FCC in the USA.
I am sure there is some kind of financial instrument that could be structured in a way to pay down a news org with public money that cannot just be slashed at whim and will.
Hm, that’s a multinomial classification with a very high cardinality. It’s really weird it works. I’m sure it does as the author states, but for how many authors (out of the whole web) does this work?
There are ~8 billion people. Sounds big, but it's only 2^33. Ie if you can find 33 things about the text which halve the number of possible writers, you have narrowed it down to 1 person.
Just a couple more things and you can accommodate some of your things being mistaken/wrong/uncertain too.
Sure the cardinality is high, but the model isn't using a uniform prior. What do you suppose all the the values in each of the terms are,
P(Text sample | Kelsey Piper) * P(Text sample) / P(Kelsey Piper)?
I don’t think Americans would enjoy the alternative of defaulting on that debt, or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
> or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.
Every item I mentioned either increased government spending or reduced its income, both of which contribute to increased deficits and debt.
You're welcome to argue whether I'm correct that americans would be better off without any of them, but it's simple math that every single one of them contributed to our current debt.
I think this might depend on where you intend to sell them. I think in life plus 50 countries (Egypt, China, many others) it should be out of copyright already. IANAL, so consult one before doing anything.
His theory on the cause is wrong, and using the wrong number is dishonest here. I agree he more or less correctly cited labor force participation rate (still basically the best in the world) but badly misrepresented what that number is such that he should be apologizing and not doubling down. Dishonest.
I actually think we should only be using labor force metrics for everything, if someone stops looking because their depressed and can live at home - suddenly that's ok? I don't think we should stop counting people like that
The problem is differentiating between those who've given up and who do not want to work (have other means to sustain themselves).
In general, either is fine by me as long we are consistent: they are both proxies for percentage of people needing work and should correlate to a large extent.
Countries have centuries of experience providing attestation services through notaries. Germany is even infamous for requiring them for things that would sound ridiculous even in Brazil (both movie and country)
I can’t see why governments couldn’t incorporate this existing infrastructure into the digital world. Make them sell hardware ID wallets, enforce the real identity owner to be present to invalidate a previous ID or whatever, and add legal restrictions for the government not be able to alter these registries
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