This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The only clause about “open source” I found in EU reports, says that current regulations should apply irrespective of whether software is open source or not. Brookings doesn’t discuss details of regulations at all, but makes a bunch of empirical claims (I chose interesting):
Open source GPAI (osai) promotes competition and erodes monopolies
Regulation of osai would disincentivize its development by introducing liabilities and delays
1 Since osai has public good features, any breakthrough would be instantly adopted by everyone, but only big players have enough resources to continuously integrate and build off others’ breakthroughs. Some startups would be consumed altogether. If anything, releasing and adopting open source seems to profit monopolies more than anyone else. And curiously, Brookings admits this in their other article about benefits of osai:
2 Most influential open source DL libraries like pytorch, tensorflow came from BigTech. And since almost every big company released its own library, it appears to be a common strategy – in a competition to entrench your own de-facto standard. Same about cloud infrastructure. Whether you like this status quo or not, it is monopolies who provide most services and tools at the moment.
Would regulation change this situation? Big players would certainly endure the bureaucratic costs, but many small but valuable innovators (esp nonprofits) might be effectively barred from releasing open source.
The document (pdf) mentions “AI regulatory sandboxes” as a measure to alleviate the burden of small entrants:
Would be interesting to see more substantial analysis of the regulations themselves.
More options
Context Copy link