Your tweet links to an unmasking of a police officer committing false-flag violence in order to justify counter-violence towards protestors and rioters.
People are rioting because they are angry. It happens that people are constantly, very gently, angry at the entire capitalist complex. When people riot, therefore they are going to burn down the capitalist complex, because it irritates them and they are in a provocative mood.
>Your tweet links to an unmasking of a police officer committing false-flag violence in order to justify counter-violence towards protestors and rioters.
Please link some proof or stop spreading this rumor on HN.
>White guy breaks windows and.. walks away? Holds an umbrella?
Is this evidence that he's a cop or just your imagination?
There's a very short list of what that person can be:
Either the video is fake or real. Let's pretend it's real.
Either the video is staged or not.
* if staged, then this is a person trying to spread the idea that there are agent provocateurs
* if not staged, then this is a real person that did this
If this is a real person that did this, then:
* they either did it of their own free will, or
* there is a group of people encouraging them to do it.
If they did it of their own free will, then either:
* they want to steal things
* they want to break things
* they want to get back at Autozone
* they want to cause a suggestion that there is violence in the protest at that location
* they want to _start_ violence in the protest at that location
If they did it as part of a group effort, then they were either coerced or not; but, in both cases, the intention of the group that caused it is what matters:
* the group wanted someone to steal things / break things / get back at autozone
* the group wanted to cause a suggestion that there is violence in the protest at that location
* the group wanted to _start_ violence in the protest at that location.
Then you need to look at the probabilities of each of these situations, especially the person themselves and their attire.
I think it's reasonable to conclude either:
* this guy just wanted to do harm to the location for themselves
* somebody, acting alone or with others, is trying to either make the protests violent or make the protests look violent
* it's staged and the people staging the video are trying to make it look like there are agent provocateurs
out there trying to either make the protests violent or make them look like they're violent.
Did I miss any combination?
2 of that final set are especially bad, in my opinion; and, they're sufficiently likely as to not rule them, out.
( edit: formatting )
edit: sorry, I did miss one:
* he's trying to cause an insurance claim for the autozone
> * this guy just wanted to do harm to the location for themselves
> * somebody, acting alone or with others, is trying to either make the protests violent or make the protests look violent
> * it's staged and the people staging the video are trying to make it look like there are agent provocateurs
out there trying to either make the protests violent or make them look like they're violent.
This is not reasonable at all.
2/3 options assume that this is an agent provocateur, which, again, no evidence has been produced to support, which was the entire point in the first place.
Again, someone please produce evidence that this person was a cop or agent provocateur, or stop posting this rumor.
Sure. The oral polio vaccine was given away for free, undercutting and disrupting any attempts to region-limit its availability. To this day, it's hard to charge more than a dollar per dose, and nearly all countries have eradicated or are eradicating polio using this vaccine.
Might be hard to find examples that are business-friendly, though; the growth-hacking of a business usually means harm to its customers. The prior polio vaccine, manufactured using Salk's method, had had quality control problems leading to illness in hundreds of vaccinated people; maybe they shouldn't have rushed to market.
You are over-complicating this. People are not infinitely deep; they have strange loops which make one level of depth look like many levels. Consciousness is a hallucination.
So, take a second. We don't understand fully how the brain's memory system works. There are some people who have an extreme ability to recall autobiographical details about literally every single day they ever lived. What the weather was like, what clothes they wore, who they talked to, things that happened. That's far beyond most people. But that establishes that clearly the brain has both the capacity and wiring to this at some level, and it can actually be turned on. We only need to be open to the idea that perhaps all brains do this at some level, recording our whole experience at some level of fidelity, below our conscious mind. I say, "at some level of fidelity" because we don't really know how detailed our memories really are. If it was just a heartbeat counter, it would only take 33 bits (!); if it was a transcript of the words we spoke, it would fit in less than 100mb. Of course it is probably not a full dump of any kind, but a patchwork of cross-referenced, reinforced, compressed, maybe slightly damaged things. Sometimes just emotions. It really doesn't matter what format it is, because the following will always be true.
At some point in your life, there will come a "midpoint" where more you have already experienced more before that point than you will afterwards.
Before the midpoint, there are still more events in your future than in your past, so you are fundamentally not capable of imagining all the future events--not only their nature, but the weight of their existence. The fidelity of your memories really doesn't matter here; you cannot fully appreciate 20 years of experience when you have lived only 10.
After the midpoint, one of two things is true:
Either,
1. We cannot remember all of the details about our lives. We have a radically simplified and compressed form which pales in comparison to the real moment-to-moment experience (i.e. low resolution).
2. We can remember all of the details about our lives (i.e. high resolution), but we don't have enough time left to replay them all in full quality.
Either way, our past life, in its full glory, is beyond our capacity to imagine.
So that means before the midpoint and after the midpoint it is subjectively infinite; there is always more, even in our own experiences, than we can experience or re-experience.
And that's just our own minds! If we aren't completely solipistic and believe all the rest of this vastly complicated world really does exist, then its doubly infinite, because every time we learn something new about how it works, we have to reimagine and reinterpret the complexities of the past with the new information. Like learning about people. Sometimes you seem them do things that make no sense; only when you get to know them later do you understand why they might have done that, and what they might have been thinking. Or looking at an old photograph you see someone you didn't know then but know now, and the past is even more detailed and rich than what you knew.
So I don't know who told you that consciousness is a hallucination, and that it must be meaningless and trite. Maybe they just lived a boring life, because TBH you're missing a hell of a good show as this whole thing unfolds.
Yes. Worse, as I understand it, public figures may have lawful claims for defamation even if all statements are already known true to the court! This is a mind-boggling situation, and helps contextualize why the United Nations Human Rights Committee recommends that libel and slander be decriminalized. It makes the USA's defamation laws, SLAPP-happy as they are, look positively humane by comparison.
> even if all statements are already known true to the court
Can you expand on what that means?
In my understanding, courts don't presumptively "already know" anything at all, except law and precedent. The whole point of a suit is that two parties are contesting knowledge, interpretation, or law. Even if a court's judge(s) suppose(s) something to be true, isn't the whole point that the defendent claims it to be false and is therefore entitled to a hearing?
Another "bad actor" here. I think that it's a combination of two phenomena:
* I have accounts not just here, but also at places like Lobsters and Something Awful. In those places, because accounts are rare and can be banned so easily, discourse is constantly trying to stay much more civil than here or Reddit.
* As a former community moderator, I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed. You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street and give their opinions; you can't then wonder why discourse is trash. Here, it's even worse; the moderators are paid for their work, which lends a clear bias to every moderation action. Similar happenings on Reddit led directly to user protests and revolts, and it's amazing that the community tolerates paid moderation here.
The idea of the well-tended garden is a potent one. I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before and it is always irritating to not ban them, despite knowing that they are good for the garden.
> I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed.
We don't put barriers to signup because we want it to be easy for authors, experts, and people with firsthand knowledge of a situation to step into a thread. Those are some of the best comments HN receives. If you put up barriers to keep out hoi polloi, you end up keeping out the likes of Alan Kay and Peter Norvig too, and plenty of lesser known people who have made first-rate contributions.
Besides that, there are legitimate cases when throwaway accounts are needed in order for a person to post on a topic, often when they have first-hand knowledge of a situation as well. How do you allow that while keeping out trash?
Obviously, if there were a way to allow the above good stuff while keeping out trolls, toxic comments, etc., that'd be grand. But as long as there's a tradeoff, I'd rather have the long tail at both ends—I think the forum would be more mediocre and stale without it.
p.s. I'm puzzled by your comment about paid moderation. It seems to me that unpaid moderation would be more likely to be biased, since people are going to extract compensation for the work in some form or other. If it isn't money, it's probably going to be power or an ideological or personal agenda, or something else that manifests as bias. In any case I'd be curious to hear what sort of bias you think is showing up in mod actions on HN.
> I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before
I understand where you are coming from here. I struggle with this. I think there is a legit theory for it, usually given in the context of how to reconcile shitty behavior of geniuses (Picasso comes to mind: legendary artist, shitty human.)
Even if toxic people have something good to say once in a while, do the ends justify the means if they stomp all over the roses in the process?
> You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street
The garden analogy is potent because where I live there is a huge rose garden that anyone can wander in off the street and visit. Some people come in and do stamp on the roses. And it sucks for everyone else. Which is why I can understand the desire to keep those people out.
However, shouldn't the gardeners KNOW that there are and always will be shitty humans?
I'm truly ambivalent on this one: I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair. And if I was tending a garden, I'd want to keep the "me"s out.
> I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair.
Yes, it is, because the problem is not the garden, it's you. You want to participate, but you don't have a basic skill (impulse control) that is required for participation. It's like saying you want to be a concert pianist, but you don't know how to play the piano, so you're excluded and that's not fair.
That is why I said I'm ambivalent to the previous comment's statement about benefits from toxic personalities.
I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.
And I admit that is a big gray area. There's a continuum of toxicity online, and there are going to be some moderation rules that are subjective.
Unlike a pianist, I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people. A visitor can't get better at not being blind. Of course, the analogy breaks down because blind people aren't adding noncritical discourse (aka what one mod may consider "flamebait"), but now we are back to subjectivity and affordance as to what is noncritical. We clearly know how to make the web accessible to blind people, but we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.
However, I can create as many accounts as I want, so I got that going for me.
> I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.
First, we're not talking about a binary distinction; things aren't either "can control" or "can't control". It's a continuum.
Second, if it's really true that you can't control your impulsive behavior, that still doesn't change the fact that that behavior will make it virtually impossible for other people to deal with you in certain contexts. It's still up to you to recognize the impact that your behavior has on others, and to make choices about what you can realistically do or not do--or about how much work you are willing to do or how much risk you are willing to take to be able to participate in certain activities (for example, if it turned out there was a drug that enabled you to control your impulsive behavior, would you take it in order to enable you to do something you wanted to do?).
> I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people.
Ok, so what "alternate or semantic constructs" could the programmers of HN, for example, put into their code so it won't exclude people who can't control their impulsive behavior?
> we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.
It's not that we don't have a "universally clear way" to do this. We don't have a way at all. "Sucking at discourse" is simply not something we know how to accommodate for. The only way we know of to deal with it is for the person who sucks at discourse to learn how to not suck at it.
Perhaps at some point we'll have an AI or something similar that can mediate such discussions so all parties can participate. But we don't have anything now.
from what, playing the piano? Do you maybe see a connection here to why somebody might not know "how to play the piano"?
Or in other words: A garden without "you" is not really a garden, except in theory, if the proverbial tree makes a sound when nobody can hear it fall. That's a slippery slope argument.
Many people may lack impulse control, but preemptive judgement can't weed them all out. That's one reason why it's "not fair". It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same. It is however futile to assume that life were just not fair, because then "you" have already lost.
If entry is taken to afford the gate keeper, it is not an open garden anymore, open to the public. At least not if the submission requirements are arbitrary to an uncertain degree. Maybe it's the wrong approach to take that internet discussion is not important and impulse control therefore let down too easily. But then again, the impulse to post or visit at all might be the problem to begin with, as in this post.
Really, who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age? That's a weak rhyme, unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument.
I didn't; the person I responded to did, by using the word "I". They were specifically talking about themselves.
> from what, playing the piano?
From being a concert pianist. Read what I actually wrote.
> It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same.
My statement that impulse control is a basic requirement for participation applies just as much to moderators as to any other participants.
Who gets to decide what the forum rules and norms are is whoever owns the forum. That's as fair as it gets.
There are some forums where lack of impulse control isn't much of a problem, because nobody else on that forum has it either. So strictly speaking, I should have restricted my comments to forums where that is not the case. I don't think that makes much difference in practice for this discussion, since as far as I can tell the forums where lack of impulse control is the norm don't have moderation problems since they don't have moderation at all.
> who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age?
Googling "how to become a concert pianist" gets plenty of hits, so it looks like plenty of people are trying to help aspiring concert pianists. Perhaps they're all speaking to an audience of zero, but I doubt it.
> unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument
Let's finish the analogy. Rose gardens and other community parks are usually community-funded; my local gardens are funded with taxes. There are not only paid moderators (police), but paid curators (gardeners and arborists) who deliberately build up and cultivate an appearance for the garden. Some of the more expensive gardens, like the local zoo, also have an entrance fee, because taxes alone would not fund the garden at its given size and occupancy.
There are communities like this; Something Awful is the first which comes to mind. These communities deliberately acknowledge that money is required to fund community spaces, and use the money to improve the space.
There are also extensions to the analogy. A local park has a bulletin board. Postings to this board are generally made by community consent; anything that any community member feels strongly enough about can be removed immediately. This is also how postings on telephone poles work. Sometimes a community will lock up their bulletin board after a wave of abusive listings. This is analogous to primitive message board moderation, as seen here on HN.
Are we here to advertise to each other, like on a bulletin board? Are we here to produce a great knowledge base, like in a garden? What should the shape of conversation be?
The author talks about three people, two of whom are accomplished mathematicians and one of whom draws pretty pictures. I don't quite understand where they are headed; they're researching for a novel, which is a path that I've been on for a few years as well, but I'm not sure what they've actually drawn on from physics in order to write their linguistics-focused story.
I don't really understand why "innocence" is used here; I know that it can be used to denote novelty rather than naivete, but I'm not really sure that podcasts were ever so innocent. After all, podcasting draws heavily on over a century of public radio broadcasting for its media encoding and tropes.
It's nigh-impossible to take this sort of posture seriously when podcasts like "Behind the Bastards" spend their time either talking about horrible people, or talking about the evil of iHeartRadio and how terrible their sponsors are. This isn't the "end of podcasting's innocence;" this is mass media moguls realizing that they missed out on squeezing money from Joe Rogan.
Beyond the title, there's a whole bunch of folks slapping their cheeks and being amazed that Joe Rogan has a popular podcast. Lots of money-making is discussed. I am criticizing the entire orientated worldview of the article.
I wonder if there is a name for this sort of behavior, which seems common to evangelical Christians, where older folks are coerced to question their earlier works in life in order to try to effect some appearance of "deathbed conversion" or similar. Famously, a similar happening occurred to Charles Darwin while he was in decline [0].
There may be no good antidote for this. If Roe could not be unwavering in her convictions, or could not maintain the optics of being unwavering, then who possibly can? How could we better prevent evangelical Christians from lying about these false recantations?
Nobody's mentioned the Conway-Specker-Kocken Free Will Theorem!? It lines up perfectly with the idea of "quantum choice" discussed in the article: Free will is when particles choose to reply to quantum measurements with non-predetermined values.
From this perspective, electrons are a little conscious, while humans are a lot conscious (because we have lots of electrons in our brain), but we don't have to define consciousness beyond the ability to be forced to make choices.
Yes. We know, more specifically, that genes are to blame for diseases like hemochromatosis [0], sickle cell anemia [1], or Tay-Sachs [2]. We also know, from pedigree collapse [3], that humans broadly form one single race.
Therefore we know that correlations with any definition of ethnicity or race are spurious, because those definitions must be socially constructed, because the gene pool simply does not have the shape that race realists claim that it does.
Think in terms of contraposition. Sure, if race were real, then maybe it might make sense to talk about racial demographics. However, since race clearly is not real, any demographic correlations must be bogus. There is a much simpler explanation for why some skin colors seem socioeconomically advantaged: Because our society itself has bigoted opinions about skin colors, and has practices like redlining [4] which systematically oppress folks.
People are rioting because they are angry. It happens that people are constantly, very gently, angry at the entire capitalist complex. When people riot, therefore they are going to burn down the capitalist complex, because it irritates them and they are in a provocative mood.