This is such an instructive story in how social media messes up discourse. Yes, fine-tuned shadow banning of stuff one does not like politically is BS (point taken, Musk). But promoting a bunch of randos with personal endorsement so they run important debates is also a very questionable service to democracy (see https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/10/20/new-elites-twitter-x-most-...). Overreacting to some of the stuff that then floats to the top on the part of advertisers and commentators is again not right, but calling this reaction "blackmail" is probably a little over the top. So what have we learnt? Make time for reading paper books and sniffing the flowers sometimes maybe?
"[C]alling this reaction 'blackmail'" isn't "a little over the top," it's petulant and incoherent. The basic idea of blackmail is "I know a secret about you and I'll reveal it if you don't give me money."
Musk's present position is that he keeps saying and promoting repulsive stuff in public and so some advertisers prefer to stop supporting or being associated with his business. This isn't remotely like "blackmail": the repulsive stuff is all public to begin with.
The Sorkin guy said maybe advertisers don’t want to be associated with it, and he said “let’s see what the courts say“.
So he’s going to sue people for not advertising with him? How can anyone who says this kind of thing claim to believe in free markets, libertarianism or capitalism?
I'm not sure, but he could be referring to the case filed against Media Matters. In any case, you're right, nobody will be forced to come back and yelling the f-word after them will likely not persuade anyone either. I think Musk has principles, but they reliably go down the pipes when he's losing it, which seems to happen regularly.
True, but... personally, I've never been in the position of having 40 billion dollars vaporize because of my bad decisions. I like to think (or hope) that I would stick to my principles in such a situation, but I can't be sure I would...
40 billion is a ton in absolute terms but is only, I don't know, 1/7th his total wealth. Many people have had that kind of loss without turning into raving lunatics.
Correct, and the basic pattern persists: Someone in a larger group of people does something objectionable, and this is then attributed to one "side" in the debate (fundamental attribution error). This transgression of the "side" is then interpreted as being indicative of its intentions (ultimate attribution error). The imagined intention is then being fought with polemic and exaggerations. I'll stick with my flowers and I appreciate your correction.
No, you're as wrong as he is about blackmail. The links you cite show that.
There is no coercion. Your first wikipedia link says "[c]oercion involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner by the use of threats." Saying, effectively, "I no longer wish to be associated with you" is not a threat.
It's also not extortion. Your second link says "[e]xtortion is the practice of obtaining benefit (e.g., money or goods) through coercion."
Again, there is no coercion, and advertisers choosing not to advertise on his platform are not "attempting to gain benefit" at all. They are trying to avoid what they perceive as harm to themselves.
He is not "off by a hair," and neither are you. You're both miles away from even being able to see the ballpark.
> "I no longer wish to be associated with you" is not a threat.
Some people take this as a threat, because they believe they have a right to force you to listen to their opinions. To my eye, this belief is what caused Musk to buy Twitter in the first place. I think it’s breaking his brain that he still can’t get what he wants out of Twitter after spending $44 billion on it and reshaping it in his image. Must be tough.
If somebody walks past a shop and does not buy the wares on offer because they are offended by the horrible decor, I assume, under this definition, this will be called coercion in that that they 'coercing' the owner to change the decor?
Infrasound measurements are used for monitoring of violations of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Large atmospheric explosions reverberate around the whole planet bouncing back and forth between the ground and wind shears or temperature inversions in the Stratosphere. At shorter ranges, this might also happen in the audible spectrum. Fascinating stuff: https://www.ctbto.org/our-work/verification-regime
One thing they struggled with was ballast. If you plan on carrying 100+ metric tons, what do you do once you're done? Suck up the nearest lake maybe and dump it back at base when you load your next cargo? Now this restricts your use cases. Not that many lakes people wanna part with in Africa...
The long answer to your question can be found in Pinker's "Blank Slate". In a nutshell: the nature/nurture discussion went off the rails after WWII. 'Scientific' racism and eugenics had culminated in the Holocaust. One generation later (i.e. 60s and 70s), a strand called "radical science" had emerged (in the US) that was into deconstruction of ideas. They creatively came up with the assertion than any notion of human nature was the bedrock of racism and eugenics.
When Wilson published "Sociobiology" and mainly talked about non-human animals, they lost their shit completely. All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. The most aggressive tactic in that sphere was research on the nature of humans. Another generation later (90s), some of those "radical scientists" had secured tenure and made it their gig to teach creative deconstruction and cancel culture to students (yes, for real in the 90s). Pinker's book is from 2002, but you know the rest of the story.
All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe.
Precisely. The approach seems more “ends justifies the means”. If your entire political theory depends on outcomes being socially determined, not genetically, then any science counter that must be attacked by whatever means necessary.
Legacy papers are very popular these days in econ, history, and political science. I don't have the time to dive deep into this one, but spatial identification of long-term causal effects is prone to errors. Specifically, the error terms in regression specifications capture unexplained variance that can be very persistent over long periods of time. These errors can also be spatially correlated across treated observations: https://voxeu.org/article/standard-errors-persistence
For a long time, the scholarly consensus was that you are born with a fixed number of neurons and then start losing them over your lifetime. Now there is good evidence of adult neurogenesis and it seems to be linked to endurance exercise, such as walking. These links can be a starting point for reading up on it:
>For a long time, the scholarly consensus was that you are born with a fixed number of neurons and then start losing them over your lifetime
It's worth pointing out that this is one of those old-school ridiculousnesses that many scientists believed in for much longer than the available evidence ought to have afforded. Much in the same way that North American hospitals used to refrain from analgesics when performing minor surgeries on very young babies, as they were assumed to not experience pain (?!), up until the late 80s, so too was the mounting evidence (Merzenich in the 80s, etc) of adult neurogenesis generally dismissed because reasons.
Please look at the VAERS data yourself: https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html. The combined number of adverse reactions for all vaccines under the sun in 2019 is 48,444. The same number in '21 is 316,929. The difference is due to COVID-19 vaccines. I'm getting it, because the benefits outweigh the risks, but let's be real about both sides of the equation.
Yes, a fire brigade needs to put out the fire. The analog to that in the social realm are non-profits, democratic policies, and grassroots activism. But fire brigades would be really bad at putting out fires if we hadn't studied them scientifically since about the 17th century. We would not know the difference between electrical fires, fires involving oil, and bush fires. Today, woke academics declare some social 'fires' to be bad, others to be necessary, and some to be underrepresented, instead of asking what causes them. I doubt this will lead to a coherent and ultimately actionable understanding of reality.
Fire brigades didn't stand by idly studying from the 17th century until now to act against fires.
Ethics is an old field, and also one that's been applied for a long time. It changed too. For the better even -- since social Darwinism was seen as ethical to some extent at the start of the 20th century.
I really have no problem with people being both subject-matter experts and activists. Chomsky is the prime example: world-class linguist and outspoken leftist intellectual. But the one mistake he never made was to try to established 'leftist linguistics'. Contemporary 'AI ethics' feels like leftist activism with a very superficial understanding of machine learning technologies. Versions of "ML researchers are white males, so their creations inherit their biases"[1] are objectively wrong. Biases exists, but they come from the human-annotated training data fed into ML systems and not the gender of the programmer.
