Brian
1yr ago
it's better for readers
It's certainly better for readers, but I'm not sure that translates to "better way to learn to read". Learning how to sound letters out is easier than memorising every word in full, and thus lets you make progress on your own without having to be told, or remember, every word every time. Sure it'll be slow, but you'll pick up the full words from experience, and be able to practice that on your own. Bootstrapping with the tools to teach yourself to read seems a strong strategy in learning to read, rather than trying to skip to the finish line.
I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me
Yeah - I have the same issue: I can't really remember a time before I could read, and so don't really have personal knowledge of what was actually effective. Save that yeah, my parents reading to and with me was probably a part of it. I'm pretty sure I started with the "sounding out" approach though: being able to read quickly a word at a time came from practice - letting me skip that more often as more words became familiar, not a different approach from the outset.
learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools
The converse applies too though: it's too foundational a skill for schools to trust that parents will have done it: it's vitally important that they ensure the kids who lacked such parents learn to do it too. And so I think it does become pretty important as to how they teach that if what they're using doesn't achieve that goal.
Brian
1yr ago
That sounds very much like the "geeks, mops and sociopaths" model of subcultures, though that adds the notion of "sociopaths": those in it to make money from the new popularity that end up focusing around the more easily monetised influx, rapidly diluting the original thing towards mass appeal.
Brian
1yr ago
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
Brian
1yr ago
How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense"
Even if fakes become indistinguishable from real footage, it'll still remain valuable. After all, there are plenty of forms of evidence we accept today that are even easier to fake.
Eg. we accept witness testimony, even though just lying is even easier than photoshopping. So I think we'll just see the same standards applied: we'll trust footage on the basis of things like whether you have a motive to frame those particular people etc. So it's still going to be stronger evidence than, say, just reporting that you saw them, since doctoring footage would require actual malice on your part, while you could have been mistaken if it was just your recollection. And it should also be noted that just being indistinguishable from a fake "from the pixels" doesn't make it impossible to distinguish in general: like all lies, you're opening up yourself to contradictions if there are other reliable pieces of evidence to compare with (eg. if the kids have an alibi, or if your footage differs from your neighbours in terms of things like expected shadows / ambient light etc for the same time, you could be caught out). Even if no such evidence happens to exist, you can't reliably know that in advance, and so the fact that you're implicitly opening yourself up to prosecution in turn should it be wrong makes your footage more credible.
There are also probably ways to improve this further should such claims become more prevalent. Eg. cameras handled by third party companies that archive the realtime footage and provide a documented and consistent chain of custody for the evidence: faking footage in such a system would require a lot more technical knowledge.
Brian
1yr ago
I don't think I'd agree - I think there's an interesting question there, and I think I've already learned something from the answers given.
The point of such questions is not predicated on it actually happening, but on creating hypotheticals that identify why people might object to things by removing one of them. Personally, I actually thought more people would be fine with this - that the real objection was, ultimately, the falseness of claims: that people were pretending to be something they're not, and others were being forced to go along with their "delusions" on pain of social punishment. I've seen this objection frequently made, and it always seemed the most reasonable position in trans opposition: that they were redefining words and demanding obedience to falsehood: being asked to call someone they don't consider a man by their definition a man.
As such, I expected a lot more responses to be along the lines of this being fine - that it would indeed solve the main aspect of the objections, even if there may be some other issues In practice, this doesn't seem to be the case: virtually every response I've seen from those who already object to trans identification has been that this wouldn't be sufficient, and brought up different ones (often ones that seem weird to me: predicated on things like static gender being inextricably linked to self, or even humanness, or that it was important to stigmatize non-standard
As such, I do think this thought experiment has been useful and compelling, in that I've genuinely learned something I didn't know before, and have re-evaluated my perspective on how much the "performative truth" aspect is the real objection vs a stalking-horse / side issue for many. That alone has answered "Why is this worth spending time thinking about?" for me.
Brian
1yr ago
he can algorithmically suppress certain content/accounts
Can he do so without enough backlash to make it counterproductive though? I think the main power behind being able to nudge opinion like that relies on doing so unnoticeably. Making it overt can make it actively counterproductive due to the Streisand effect, as the fact of what you're suppressing itself becomes news.
Musk has been bringing up the degree to which that was going on behind the scenes at twitter prior to his takeover (eg. publicising the twitter files). However I don't think he's in a good position to do so himself - he can't just directly press a button and tweak the algorithm: he needs a technical team to make those knobs available, which could be a big issue. First, he's much more likely to get noticed / caught doing so: one twitter insider leaking those details is all it takes, and I think there are going to be more willing to do so than when those tweaks aligned with the politics of the average twitter employee. Second, the fact that he's spoken against this leaves him open to charges of hypocrisy when he does it, and again, the mismatch in politics is going to make the push-back more severe.
In some ways, you could argue that the Bored Ape stuff was one of the more justifiable uses of NFTs, in that they were, ostensibly "club membership cards". Ie. they were tradable tickets that marked you as a member of the "Bored Ape Yacht Club". Which seems clearly not worth the price of admission, but rich people spending stupid money on irrelevant status markers, including clubs that are all about networking with other rich people by screening out those too poor to afford dues isn't really a new thing, so arguably this is no stupider than a lot of stuff.
However, a lot of the dislike for all this is that uses of NFTs are 99.9% scams - and even if not, are typically cases where the NFTness isn't providing any actual value. Ie. most clubs don't need NFTs to prove membership, just keeping a database of who's paid their dues and is considered a member.
NFTs promise to move that database outside the control of the club - making the database public such that trading tickets, proving membership etc is outside the control of the club. Which sounds like it might have some value, except that recognition of that NFT as denoting membership (ie. using the forums, perks etc of the club) is still under the control of the club: if they decide to refuse to recognise your NFT, there's still nothing you can do (except the same legal remedies you could seek without them). It probably wouldn't do that of course, but only for the same reasons it wouldn't do it without NFTs: it'd destroy the club's ability to attract funds). Which all means that being an NFT doesn't really add much, except perhaps provide tradability that the club doesn't have to be a party to - but that could still be done without needing the complexity of blockchain involvement.
And that's probably the core issue with pretty much all uses of NFTs. There are theoretical cases where such a trustless distributed database of ownership could have value, but for pretty much all actual uses, it's not providing any value whatsoever, and is just a vehicle for scams relying on obscuring that point.
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