I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.
So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?
I'll spell it out in case someone else truly doesn’t understand since you're just determined not to.
Pro-social actions are taken more often if you believe others will also take pro-social actions. The best way to do it is to believe you're the same as other people and that other people are good, and that you're not the patsy when you take a pro-social decision and others don't. Because you're the next guy for someone.
The causal loop you mentioned makes social science hard, but I’d argue that falsification and hypothesis-driven research can still work. Otherwise all the behavioral targeting Meta and Google and co are doing would not work.
So what? I pay taxes too, and I want social scientists to be paid using tax dollars for the work they do, which I find valuable. There's plenty I take issue with my taxes being paid for but I just put up with it because we live in a society where my priorities aren't the only ones. Why can't you take that approach with social scientists?
> Why should it bother you that my interests don’t align perfectly with yours.
That's exactly what I'm saying! It doesn't bother me that your interests don't align with mine, I help pay for them anyway... why can't you take that position with social science?
Thanks for the clarification. For others, here is the full conflict of interest disclosure from the linked paper in the article:
ML has an equity interest in Ksana Health Inc. No Ksana Health services or products were used in the current project. SS serves on the scientific advisory board for Headspace, for which he receives compensation. He has received consulting fees from Boehringer Ingelheim and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. CO serves on the Youth and Families Advisory Committee for YouTube.
I agree that this could be a conflict worth noting but I don't know the structure of that board to say how big. The link to the board is here [1] and implies independence and doesn't mention that youtube does or doesn't give funding/other support. (at least I didn't see any)
Always good to look into potential conflicts of interest though.
- The world has very diverse ideas about how media regulation works. Germany has a strong public service broadcast tradition that is constitutionally anchored. You may not like it, but that's the cultural and legal tradition and changing it is not easily done. Please respect that especially coming from a country with a more liberal tradition (and perhaps a less functional media system, e.g. in the US).
- The source is a fringe right-wing outlet that most Germans would consider a bit suspicious (not necessarily factually wrong, but tasteless and a bit hysteric perhaps?)
- Public service broadcasting in Germany is not influenced by the state (note this says state, not politics or politicians) by design.
- Prioritizing public service broadcasters is a pretty logical conclusion from a certain tradition of media regulation and has precedent, e.g. in must carry rules for cable, EPGs etc.
So sure, debatable whether this is sensible, but it's at least neither surprising nor evidently nonsensical.
Source: Was a tiny bit of an expert on this for a short while.
How is it guaranteed that public service broadcasting in Germany is not influenced by government?
To me this seems like a gross intervention in the media so I'm struggling not to be critical here. Just because different cultures have different values does not make them equal.
I mean, that's a very intuitive question if you're not used to the system, and a bit surprising if you are.
The historic precedent is that Germany's first Chancellor wanted to establish a state-funded and state-directed TV station. This was explicitly shut down by the constitutional court.
As a result, a system was established to (1) ensure funding is not decided upon by state institutions but instead by an independent body of experts (KEF). (2) control over the meta-level content decisions is exercised by a body (essentially like a parliament) of representatives from societal groups (e.g. including politicians, doctors, churches etc etc.)
Now the "gross intervention in the media" is a very recent American idea - up until pretty recently the US did have the fairness doctrine, it has licensing and so on, all of these are gross interventions in media. And so are libel laws etc. So the German insight that underpins its media regulation is: You cannot have functional mass media without enabling them through some form of state action, you can only try to be light-handed and implement checks and balances.
I understand it's difficult for an outsider to understand the system, especially since I don't know who is part of the KEF or how it's run, same with the body of representatives. And I also acknowledge that having foreign tech companies curate media isn't much better.
In my country the federal government heavily subsidises media in addition to their own state-run broadcaster, and there is noticeable bias which is a point of contention. Perhaps the German system is superior in this regard. But I am heavily skeptical of interventions like this.
It was installed by the US after WWII, because the Nazis took over the media and this public broadcasting system was installed to prevent that in the future. It's technically not paid by tax money and the government can not shut them down or stop their funding.
I believe watching some "tagesschau", the primary format of the public media in Germany would be something of interest for every US citizen. Just to experience the style.
It's part of German culture, all movies on all channels start at 8:15, because that's when tagesschau ends. The structure, the style, how news are reported has not really changed since the 80s, maybe it has basically never changed.
They do framing, I don't think you can report news without framing them, but it never gets wild and they try to show what different sides have to say about a matter.
Others have already pointed out that the source of this article is not reliable, so we should wait what actually gets proposed.
It is influenced by the government indirectly through complaisance. The heads of the stations are always aligned with CDU, SPD and the positions are passed on accordingly.
Thanks, that's a great point. I know a huge amount of the literature exactly in this area, and I'm honestly still pretty skeptical of the theoretical idea of the diversity principle. Mostly because there doesn't seem to be a good consensus what actually is a good amount of diversity.
But in practical terms, while there are some very obvious gaps and biases, I think the German media system is still pretty good in a lot of ways and everybody does have a lot of freedom.
I'd even go so far as to say - the typical accusations of censorship are mostly from right-wing actors who are not censored, but who demand more views and make a spectacle out of claiming to be censored.
Public service broadcasting is influenced by the state in Germany. Not directly, but there are clear common boundaries and influences. The Rundfunkräte (broadcasting boards) have the job to ensure impartiality, but are often occupied by party officials.
As for tradition, I do think the model should be reviewed...
The problem space that ducklake solves is smaller, but it helped me to get a working metabase dashboard quickly on ~1tb of data with 128gb ram. Queries were much, much faster than all alternatives.
Some downsides are: No unique constraints with indexes (can accidentally shoot yourself in the foot with double ingestion), writing is a bit cumbersome if you already have parquet files.
It's interesting how the sentiment around Apple has turned, for the first time in what feels like 20 years.
The true reason is, as the recent norwegian report quipped: We love our tech, but it betrays us - that's an abusive relationship.
Consent prompts are a band-aid for users being exploited: They are not fixing the root but covering it with legal painkillers.
But the only true remedy is actually feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised, but now has less and less legitimacy of heralding.
> feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised
Legitimately, when? I got started on an Apple II, I used the puck mouse without right click, I watched people buy the insanely costly hardware that was always integrated and you couldn’t service yourself. Windows was always more open than Mac - people just didn’t use Linux because it required you to know how things worked under the hood.
Just like the rest of large technology companies, and the economy as a whole, we are all being squeezed for every drop. Eventually the well will run dry, there’s already practically no more data to pull, and the apps will get shittier as revenues need to keep going up, and all the pillars of tech will fall over like a tree hollowed out by pests.
> people just didn’t use Linux because it required you to know how things worked under the hood.
This is how Windows feels to me now. The very first interaction with Windows when I buy a new computer is to do Shift+F10 and type away some magical terminal commands to get it working.
That I have to use the terminal to get Windows operational after unboxing my new device is insanity.
Publishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for holding editors accountable.
A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely among them.
I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy, he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of this and what will change.
It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is interesting about it.
Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in other shady business. It's detailed in the article... There is a personal component to it, but that's a very minor part of the article which documents the various misdeeds.
I had to go back and re read the article. This blog has a rather generic design on mobile, with one big glaring flaw: in the middle of the article there's a picture (I didn't look at this, I usually ignore images and this I've does a good job of blending into the dark background as part of the styling), a quote, a subscription button, and a button to leave a comment - all at a natural stopping point for a short blog post, which usually implies you've reached the end. It also happened to be at the bottom of my screen given the way I scrolled.
If you read it as I did initially, it simply looks like a post by someone pointing out that someone they don't like had some trouble.
> Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers
Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:
> After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement
That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team after the research is done and asking to be put on the paper in exchange for publishing it.
The dataset contains ~80% of food sold and inclusion in it is very probably skewed towards large volume. So the lower bound is something like 56% (if the 20% rest are not ultraprocessed)
Here it actually means 70%, but the paper is in a paper from mdpi which have been under criticism for predatory (i.e. fraudulent, junk-science enabling) practices.
From TFA:
"We report results of a cross-sectional assessment of the 2018 US packaged food and beverage supply by nutritional composition and indicators of healthfulness and level of processing. Data were obtained through Label Insight’s Open Data database, which represents >80% of all food and beverage products sold in the US over the past three years. Healthfulness and the level of processing, measured by the Health Star Rating (HSR) system and the NOVA classification framework, respectively, were compared across product categories and leading manufacturers. Among 230,156 food and beverage products, the mean HSR was 2.7 (standard deviation (SD) 1.4) from a possible maximum rating of 5.0, and 71% of products were classified as ultra-processed. "
I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.
So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
reply