1,231 karma · joined July 3, 2015
Had Trump done what you have suggested here, it could have been easily construed as a coup, the real kind.
Ultimately the learning pattern of looking up what each individual property does and how interacts with the DOM remains regardless of if you know English or not. If anything I think the English semantics of CSS are more misleading than intuitive.
I've never heard of anything like this from AI ethicists though, the language they use tends to be more in alignment with HR people or priests in a moral panic than engineers, and is usually either completely fantastical doomsdaying, or all or nothing thinking, often implying the only way to mitigate the chatbot saying something naughty is to lobotomize it entirely instead of some external control measure, such as limiting the audience or presenting a disclaimer based on sentiment analysis for example. It's not surprising to me that they have lost credibility here, I certainly struggle to take them seriously.
We had a period where the FCC only offered a limited amount of airspace so News Orgs has certain obligations to keep the public at large informed. This required a more diverse set of perspectives and I really do believe these perspectives helped keep each other in check. However with these obligations gone, and the collapse of the integrity fostered during this period, legacy Journalists have grown into smug elitest who, drunk over the reputation they gained while they had this integrity, now think of the public as a group to be guided rather than informed.
Looking forward I believe the proper solution to all this will emerge naturally as legacy media's decline continues to glide downwards. Personally speaking I simply get my news from the front page of Wikipedia, maybe more options like this will come about as the priorities of society at large continues to evolve as it gets comfortable with the internet? I don't think we will get anywhere though so long as "unbiased" is treated as a taboo word, something I believe legacy media has grandly succeeded in spinning the public on in recent years, atleast in my eyes...
Now let's imagine 5 News Orgs: ABC, AC, A, B, C. These News Orgs are each aligned with the population letters reflected in their name. News Org: "A" for example will report on reality only through a lens that population "A" would find agreeable. While News Org "ABC" will report on reality through the combined lens of populations A, B and C, in essence looking at the issue from all angles.
News Org "ABC" would be considered "unbiased" despite the fact that it's still interpreting reality through a lens. This is fine though because the desire for "unbiased" news comes from a desire to understand an issue from all perspectives. Population B might look at the reports of News Org "ABC" so it can gain understanding on how Populations "A" and "C" are perceiving an event.
Suddenly population "A" says News Org "ABC" is harmful. It asserts Population A's lens is actually objective reality and that anything the contradicts it is false. It asserts "unbiased" news is actually a bad thing since it promotes things that disagree with "objective reality". News Org "ABC", buys this argument and becomes "Abc", still acting like it is "unbiased" but now inaccurately represents the positions of populations "B" and "C".
Gradually the media landscape shifts, it becomes just 4 News Orgs: "AA", "Ac", "A", "BB". Population "A" is now overrepresented across the media landscape, population "C" is represented but incorrectly and B is only represented by outlets that exaggerate its position on everything, over-correcting the issue.
Population C is aware there is an issue here but can extract some value by consuming content from multiple outlets and comparing things. Population A is no longer aware C exists and believes B is evil. Population B is also now unaware C exists and thinks A is evil.
Gradually the media landscape changes again, now the News Orgs are just "$ZZ", "AZ$", "A$" and "BBB$$".
- Population C is completely unrepresented and just looks at social media, it has no trust in any of the remaining News Orgs.
- Population B's exclusive outlet has become completely hysterical, and influenced by corporate interests taking advantage of the fact that Population B has limited options. Many in this population are enamored with it, many others have abandoned it entirely like with population C, but being less technically savvy, are now relying exclusively on local Facebook groups for their news.
- Population A, still believes it's lens is objective reality and has become accustomed to trusting all News Orgs other than "BBB$$". However, these organizations having long lost any sense of integrity, and have begun taking advantage of this blind trust by selectively reporting on things that align with the political interests of Party Z, believing that doing so will serve the greater good. Additionally, to make up for the fact that their audiences are now in decline, the remaining News Orgs are all selling their influence for extra cash. Some in Population A see the corporate influence in the remaining News Orgs but believe they can filter it out, however most trust them completely and fail to even filter out the corporate interest. Few if any are even aware of party Z's influence despite it being reported on "BBB$$".
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So I'll be upfront and say the above giant-wall-of-text-metapor is imperfect and something I just threw together and maybe got a little carried away with. To keep it terse I had to strip away some nuance.
Ultimately my goal here was to help highlight the difference between lies and a simple difference in worldview. The moment the dollar signs and Zs started getting into the mix of things was also the moment these orgs started burning the trust Population A had in them in exchange for influence over population A. I also think this results in a situation where someone in Population A, can no longer accurately assess what others in Population A actually believe.
I'd additionally argue that a proper "unbiased" News Org that attempts to represent the positions of all populations is less likely to end up in the situations described above, even if they are less popular. That multiple perspectives help keep bad actors in check like a natural pesticide, and the overly-partisan nature of contemporary news outlets doomed them into becoming what they now are since they have essentially abandoned their immune response.
The closest comparison would be like how a brand known for its high quality products might "cash-in" it's reputation for quick profits by reducing the quality and cost to produce said products (ex: Boeing, Craftsman). The key difference here is that rather than exchanging reputation for short term cash, Journalists burn their reputation for short term influence, usually to shepherd people into a common false narrative.
The irony in all this is that journalists obviously read the news too, so this shepherding has a kind of reinforcing snowball effect. Because of this, I suspect that individual journalists might underestimate how disconnected they are from reality compared to the average person, but this part is ultimately just speculation on my end.
Someone with integrity supports whistleblowers no matter who they blow the whistle on, I'm sure this revelation must be a surprise for you.
The whataboutism surrounding this feels completely disingenuous to me considering much of what was leaked by Wikileaks was war crimes, media collusion with Clinton's campaign and embarrassing mistakes the government tried to cover up, that they had no business trying to cover up.
States have secrets, but that is a privilege granted to them by the people to protect national security, their abuse of this privilege has been completely unacceptable even if the reveal made your preferred candidate look bad for actions they were personally responsible for.
If Wikileaks accomplished anything, it was revealing the hypocrites and those who lack even an inch of integrity.
The discord arrives not because they do not acknowledge the deficiencies but due to a difference in priorities, what one person values another may not.
It makes sense to me that their would be tension between people who want full control of their system & privacy in exchange for occasional performance cuts and unsupported anti cheats vs those that are comfortable completely giving up their privacy & control in exchange for occasional performance boosts and invasive anti cheats.
Well I did (again), so let's take it from the top:
- Russia hacked into various local & state election boards, scary right? But in the very same report we learn this from, it's detailed this had no influence on vote tallies.
- Russia's state media outlets preferred one candidate over the other and made efforts to promote them. This one shocked me the most since I'm sure everyone before now assumed Russia's state media outlets would never push Russian propaganda! Who would have thought? Guess I'll have to get all my completely unbiased news from Aljazeera, Xinhua and KNCA from now on.
- Finally Russia is credited with Guciffer 2.0 and DCLeaks. Which likely had the most impressive (relative) impact but are also the most likely to trigger an argument at the dinner table since the evidence crediting these hacks to them are highly dubious.
Not mentioned in the report, oddly enough, was the ad campaigns they ran on various social media platforms to promote fringe candidates to increase national discord. Sounds clever but these ads were pretty terrible, good idea bad execution.
Even if we credit Russia for the DCLeaks and Guciffer hacks, which I personally believe they are undeserving of, Russia's attempts at "interference" were rife with incompetence, much like anything Russia tries. It's noteworthy that one of your links detailed one of their failures as so dramatic it resulted in the arrests of 13 participants!
If you were to combine everything I've listed here and compare it with any single propaganda operation performed by Israel, would you truly consider Russia's attempts more impressive? Certainly not the person you were replying to, and certainly not me.
Not to mention China's attempts, which in both scale and scope eclipses anything Russia has tried:
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/ch...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/technology/china-facebook...
Lucky for you, I'm not some jackass who links a few things and then follows it up with any essay psychoanalyzing you. So I'll leave it implied ;)
I view the average journalist as a person who is educated in writing blog posts accessible for wide audiences. Therefore I believe a journalist will be better than the average person at writing blogs.
There used to be prestige to this, not everyone could write a blog before the internet, there was a whole production involved and the costs demanded a certain degree of talent and effort for economic reasons. This is no longer the case.
Certain specific journalists, with an earned reputation, still have that prestige. But that's all them and their individual efforts.
Words are meant to communicate things, if they aren't communicating your intent then why even bother using them? While they still have some vague relevance from a historical perspective, like when discussing the cold war, I think any contemporary discussion where one feels the use of these words might be necessary would be better off just listing their ideals directly instead of falling into this semantic trap.
While no one can truly be unbiased, I want them to try. Arguments against this are just sophist nonsense, and I'm not convinced they are made in good faith.
Plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic cup lids, styrofoam, plastic packaging, plastic candy wrappers, etc, frankly speaking, the average consumer does not give a shit about what these things are made of. Which is also to say, the average consumer would not mind at all if any of these things were required to be renewable. These are all things a manufacturer, restaurant, supplier, etc cares about, they are the ones on the hook for solving the problem of making these renewable, they are the ones who are usually impacted by most bans like this.
But plastic straws are something that the average consumer does care about, they stick this into their mouth, it effects the quality of their meal. For people with certain medical conditions, all their meals must be consumed through these things. When you ban plastic straws you push a bunch of neutrals off the fence.
Plastic straw bans don't effect the usual industries, so bans are naturally going to be easier. I'm sure that plastic straw manufactures would be upset, but largely speaking the usual lobbyists for this kind of thing are unlikely to care. This deceives environmentalists into thinking this is a low hanging fruit. So legislation is passed, consumers get pissed, and now the people who care about the environment are less likely to get re-elected.
Was it worth it?