aninhumer

I would argue the opposite. We already have an intense culture of "individual responsibility" in many areas of society, and that's exactly the problem.

Because a culture that seeks to blame individuals for problems makes individuals extremely reluctant to actually accept responsibility for their decisions.

Consider how the airline industry investigates after a disaster: They investigate the circumstances leading to each bad decision, and then attempt to change the process such that it cannot happen again. This leads to individuals being forthcoming about their mistakes, and implements changes that actually solve the problem. This culture of focusing on systemic issues rather than individuals has made air travel extremely safe.

> It makes as much sense as caving to any other form of terrorism.

Addressing the systemic reasons behind hostile actors does not mean "caving" to the actors themselves.

Should we let ISIS take over the Middle East and establish a fascist theocratic state? No, obviously not.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't carefully consider how the past decades of violent imperialist foreign policy might have played a significant part in the conditions that allowed ISIS to rise, and use that to inform our future policy.

Whenever something like this happens, people like to dismiss the situation by saying we can't possibly understand "crazy" people. It avoids having to consider the systemic reasons why something like this can happen.

I'd imagine a significant part of it is that we live a society where some people can have their livelihood yanked away from them, with no support structure to help them, leaving them desperate and angry.

Wealth inequality is a problem because it is an inefficient distribution of society's resources. When we divert productive capacity to build someone a yacht instead of feeding the homeless, we allow many to suffer in exchange for the marginal improvement in happiness for one person.

It can be argued that inequality leads to more utility being created overall, but I feel this justification is rarely scrutinised in much detail. Instead it is elevated to a moral premise that those who are able to earn more "deserve" their excess share of society's resources, regardless of how many suffer for their consequently smaller share.

Personally, it seems to me we have the resources to feed and shelter everyone in our society, and I'm highly sceptical that doing so would create less utility overall than whatever it is we're doing with those resources instead. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this argument extends to the world as a whole.

An alternative explanation, given the difference in numbers here, is that discrimination against women means that the only women remaining in the field are those who are the most competent and well prepared for the job, whereas less competent men are given the benefit of the doubt, and allowed into the same positions.

>If it was not the case - consumers would not use it.

Consumers don't use it, producers do, and consumers have no choice about that.

What value does the consumer get out of it that justifies the producer spending billions on advertising?

Do you think this function is impossible to achieve without marketing?

Do you think marketing is the most effective way of achieving it?

And do you think the trillion dollar marketing industry that exists is really creating trillions of dollars of value for consumers?

> The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like.

But what does that actually mean in terms of how we structure discourse? "Better ideas" will do nothing if people are never exposed to them, so presumably we would like to structure things so they are.

Obviously we can't just identify the "better" ideas and amplify them, because the point is that people should identify them themselves. But if we don't amplify anything, it's likely people will not be exposed to them at all.

So perhaps we want to amplify things such that people are exposed to lots of different ideas? But everyone's ideas are slightly different, and we can't amplify all of them equally. Should we choose a selection of ideas, and amplify the best examples of them? How do we decide which ideas, and which are the best examples?

Or perhaps you have some other idea? I'm not trying to dismiss all the possibilities here, I'm just pointing out that statements like "better ideas, not power" get treated as simple and obviously correct, but are actually extremely complex when you get into details. And we quickly find that people understand these supposedly guiding principles in very different ways.

>People can advocate for social norms and different ethical frameworks without advocating for legal or regulatory changes.

Yes, but unless you're considering some means of achieving those social norms, even if that's just social pressure, it's unlikely to change anything. And when people do actually advocate means of changing the norms of discourse, people who don't like the proposed changes will call it censorship.

>They are called ideals because we cannot perfect reality, not because they are unimportant. There's nothing wrong with forming consensus about how things should work

I agree. The point I'm trying to make is that in practice "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.

If we just mean the government should not directly intervene to prevent speech, that's a reasonable ideal, and relatively few people actually disagree with that. But when people try to consider other ways in which speech is controlled, they still call it "Freedom of Speech", even when arguing for contradictory things.

And I'm arguing that the reason for these contradictions is that the debate tends to be framed in terms identifying speech restrictions and acting to remove them, rather than asking broader questions about the inevitable ways in which speech is amplified or silenced, and how we should structure discourse within those limitations.

>The same rules of freedom of speech should apply there.

If you want freedom of speech to apply in privately controlled media, you would have to compel them to distribute content they do not agree with, which is itself a violation of freedom of speech.

And this is the problem with a simplistic idea like "Freedom of Speech". It is not possible for everyone to hear everyone else's point of view, so some speech will always be restricted. Therefore, our society inevitably makes decisions about which speech to amplify and which to silence, and just because that decision is not being made directly by government, does not mean it is not being made.

In practice when people complain about censorship, what they mean is that these implicit decisions are not being made in a way that they like. And in saying this, I'm not trying to imply that their criticisms are wrong, or that they're being disingenuous or malicious in trying to change those decisions. I'm saying this to reframe the debate, because framing it as if access to speech can only be controlled by intentional malicious restriction prevents us from questioning the ways in which society already controls access to speech.

The most common way speech is restricted is economic. The rich can afford to amplify their speech, and the poor cannot. We have historically accepted this without question as an economic reality, but then the rise of social media gave us a glimpse of a world where economic restrictions are not as big a factor, and so when these restrictions start to re-assert themselves we question them.

People call it "censorship" and demand "free speech", because this is the most pervasive set of ideas we have to understand this dissonance, but the reality is we are always censored, and speech is never truly free, and unless we accept that, we will not be able to ask real questions about what kind of societal discourse we truly value.

>Nearly every culture that has ever existed has recognized that someone taking something from you by force is crime.

Yes, most cultures recognise some notion of property, few would agree with taking the clothes off someone's back. But the exact nature of these property systems is varied, and the idea that all things must necessarily have an owner, and anyone else using them is "taking them by force", is by no means universal.

Many cultures have some notion of public property, and indeed many of these public property rights were violated historically in order to establish the modern notion of private ownership.

It kinda sounds like that's an intentional reference to a common clickbait format. My guess would be the article is about how clickbait has affected journalism?

>Everything else should be able to be said and be heard

But what does that actually mean? If all you're saying is that the state should not stop them, then relatively few people disagree with that, but the argument usually goes further. There are many ways people's speech can be limited without the involvement of the state. Be that de-platforming, protests or economic or social limitations.

>Restricting Free Speech puts power among the ones in control of Speech.

This is true, but the reality is there will always be restrictions on speech. It is not physically possible to let everyone speak to everyone, or even just those willing to listen. However we structure our societal discourse, it will always privilege some speech over other speech.

We have to engage with, and be ready to criticise, the implicit decisions being made about what speech is privileged and why. Because if we don't, then we cede power to those who already restrict speech with these decisions.

Just saying "don't restrict speech", and thinking that gives everyone a voice, is incredibly politically naive.

> there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas

What do you think a "safe space" is? If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

And this is the whole problem with naive free speech advocacy. Unrestricted free speech is not possible anymore than unrestricted freedom in general is possible. People cannot possibly hear every single person's viewpoint, so some people will always be denied a platform to speak to some other people.

The question is how best to structure our societal discourse. What values are important, and how do we protect them? And the question needs an answer more complicated and nuanced than "free speech". Because when we don't acknowledge the complexity of this question, we become blind to the de-facto decisions that we're making about which speech to prioritise.

Not really. The places where people are most likely to defecate in the street are places without toilet infrastructure, which in a global context, is much more a property of undeveloped rural areas than it is of dense cities.

The problem in cities is usually that some people aren't allowed to use any of the many toilets that exist, which is a much easier problem to fix.

Does multicast do anything about last mile on wireless networks? My impression is that it's mainly about the backend, and you'd still have to duplicate the packets over each separate data connection from the cell tower?

For any important document, the signing is almost always witnessed by someone else. My understanding is that the act of signing is primarily the legal act of accepting the document, not a security mechanism. The signature provides a quick reassurance that a document has been accepted, but if there were a real dispute, the witness could be asked to testify.

There's a difference between the argument that people have an evolved biological preference for warmth and pressure, and the argument that this is because it evokes conditions in the womb.

Without elaboration, the latter sounds like Freudian psychobabble to me.

Seize all its physical assets and make it illegal to trade with. Bitcoin is arguably impossible to control, but real world assets not so much. Property rights as they currently exist are ultimately enforced by state violence. A number in a blockchain only has meaning if those who enforce physical property rights allow it to.

And if the AI manages to actually assert control of property on its own, it is no longer a market actor, it is a revolutionary army.

I think it's probably better than that though, because while some supermarkets have switched to using heavier bags, some are still using the lightweight ones.

>"Why is it that there are so few women in high level management positions?" frame it as "Why are there so much men willing to put up with the stress and pressure of high level management positions?"

Except this "framing" implicitly introduces the assumption that gendered differences in stress and pressure tolerance is the cause.

Uh, no not really?

That biases about race might be changing form doesn't "rule out" the idea of racism. You might as well say the increased inclusion of Irish people in the last few decades rules out racism in that period.

I'm not sure why it matters if they're "a sexist".

Whether they make a decision based on internal biases caused by societal norms, or make a decision by measuring those societal norms directly and responding to them, the decision is still an expression of societal sexism.

So the gendered assumption is the result of a gendered marketing practice which is based on gender differentiated responses to images (which are proven by stats)? But there's no sexism involved here?

Okay, I'm being glib, but this idea that thinking of a plausible causation with no further critical analysis means it's "not sexism" is kind of exasperating.

The perception that female photos look fake is still sexism. It suggests people believe it less likely that a woman would be on the other end of the conversation. And you suggesting that perception as an explanation without challenging it kind of demonstrates how this is a pervasive problem.

Now I agree that the model photo looks a little more artificial for reasons beyond gender, and they should probably have compared with a male model photo as well. Though personally I suspect people would still think it more likely that an attractive man was a real person than an attractive woman.

>How do we know other humans aren't "very sophisticated programs"?

We don't. Most people assume that other people have consciousness, with various justifications, but no one can know that.

>a magic thing with no measurable properties that makes us oh-so-different than a crude material object.

But it does make a difference morally speaking. If we consider a Utilitarian model of morality, then what is good or bad is that which causes the experiences of happiness or suffering. But if a philosophical zombie does not experience pleasure or suffering, then there is no moral consequence to harming them, any more than there is moral consequence to watching someone die in a movie, or to splitting a rock in half.

And this becomes even more worrying when we start to think about AI. If an AI can develop consciousness as a result of our actions, then perhaps it can also experience suffering as a result of our actions.

Of course, since we cannot identify p-zombies, possibly by definition, one can argue that there's not much point thinking about it. But, well, you could say that about a lot of philosophy. Personally, I think it's valuable to think about these things as an intellectual exercise, even if we can't really conclude anything from it.

>The real measure of success is how few people become junkies in the first place.

No, the real measure of success is how few peoples lives are ruined.

If a bunch of people end up addicted to heroin, but end up living fulfilling and productive lives regardless, that's a fairly good outcome. If implementing measures to reduce the number of addicts leads to the remaining ones living in poverty and overdosing, then that's not an improvement.

Yeah. In fact most likely, she's already written down "kitten4" in a notepad somewhere, because she doesn't trust herself to remember. So asking her to use a slightly longer password is not a massive change.

Obviously not all working class people are part of the same culture, but I think the very fact that the stereotype of "Chav" exists beyond merely being obnoxious (since there are obviously obnoxious people who we wouldn't consider "Chavs") suggests there is a cultural component.

And it's when you say including aspects like clothing that the idea starts to sound classist. How exactly does someone "dress like an arsehole"? Is their clothing somehow inherently offensive, or do you just dislike it because it doesn't fit your own aesthetics, and/or because you associate it with a negative type of person?

>The origins of the term are much older (before council houses in fact).

This may be true, but FWIW, the first time I heard the term it was introduced to me with a similar backronym. And not as some "isn't this awful classism" disclaimer, but as a gleeful denigration of the people it referred to. That there is an older etymology does not necessarily mean Jones invented the backronym.

>Actually I said chav because that group of loud, ridiculously dressed arseholes over there is starting to kick off

While I too have used the term, and feel like I was doing objection to genuinely unpleasant people, I remain suspicious of this argument, because it sounds a lot like "I don't mind black people, I just don't like black culture". A lot of what gets read as obnoxious is just cultural differences, and this is especially true of judgements like "ridiculously dressed".