pelliphant

Isn't the entire argument based on the belief that businesses would do a better job than politicians at being a government? And that "the invisible hand" is an acceptable replacement to accountability?

Hm, I'm actually not sure where I draw the line for what is avdertising and what is not.

The part about non-personal is copy-pasted from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

And the 3rd sentence on that page is: "It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual."

I would probably say that it is still advertising if it is using some form of automated targeting, such as: buying a list of people who just got kids and sending them a letter with their name printed on it.

But If someone stopped me on the street and asked if I have heard about the latest pyramid scheme, I would not call advertising but rather "personal selling"

Isn't it easier to see the evil parts of advertising if one calls it a form of propaganda than the other way around?

In my opinion: using the first sentence of the wikipedia articles for advertising and propaganda, I would argue that advertising is a sub-set of propaganda:

Propaganda is information that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.

Thnx for the link. Found it to be more interesting than the main article.

Not op but I'll answer:

Advertising works, on everyone, including on me.

No matter how hard I try to not be affected by advertising, I can't stop it from working.

Now, with that said, if I have the option to be exposed to an advertisement for a category of products that I am likely to purchase anywhay, or a category that I will never purchase: Isn't it obvious that my behaviour is more likely to be influenced by the relevant add than the irrelevant one?

Some people might think that the word "brainwashing" is too strong to be used for describing advertising, and maybe it is, but is it really that strange that I would prefer a tiny amount of "brainwashing" over a small amount?

Sure, Assume that there are twice as many men in this room, then if a sexual remark is made by a random person, then it will twice as often be made by a male. If the target of said sexual remark is always of the opposite sex, then a specific sexual remark made against a male will have twice as many males to choose from, meaning that a particular male has half the chance of receiving each comment than a female would.

So as a summary: if there are twice as many males in the room and everyone is equally likely to make a sexual comment against the opposite sex, then females would get 4 such comments for each comment a male gets.

Now, for normal everyday examples like walking down the street, asking a question in a class, taking the train, etc.. Does it seem likely to be twice as many males in this "room"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio says that there are 1.01 males to each female, I would say that this is not nearly enough to account for this difference.

> any bureaucracy, regardless of locale.

So, not only in america then?

The reason why I am asking is because as a EU citizen, my experience is that that bureaucracy in northern europe is very different from bureaucracy in southern europe.

Sure, It's not perfect anywhere, but framing this as a problem that can't be fixed, that it is equally bad everywhere is in my view not just wrong but actually harmful to society.

> and save the symphonies for consensual sex...

mmkay, thats nice, but what do you listen to for non-consentual sex?

/s

Ok, I can understand that it sucks that your language is excluded, but I think it would make way more sense to try to get your language recognized as an official eu language instead of critizising a finnish project for limiting their selection to official eu languages.

With that said, if catalan was added, would you actually use that instead of english for a course like this?

do they only collaborate with people from their own university?

What about the tools that they use? do you get german translations for all those popular python-libraries?

How do you handle scientific papers? are those also translated, or do you only look at german research at german univiersities?

I would think that it would be pretty non-controversial to say that english is the lingua-franca of science today.

With that said, I could argue against myself in saying that it's nice of elementsofai to use as many languages as possible since this might be of use to people who are still far from university-level.

I don't disagree with you, except for the part about actual benefits, it might be true for the general "hacker news crowd", but anything that makes people understand statistics slightly better is good in my book.

If it takes hype, advertising and buzz-words to do that, I'm ok with that.

I'm from sweden, and I would say that the answer is "yes" over here.

When actually talking to people that is, but if I instead looked at social media, tabloids and tv-talkshows, I would only find extremes.

Why? Sure, it would be nice with more languages, but if someone from germany/france/spain want's to learn study AI, isn't it probable that they are used to reading english anyway?