The early models were uncensored, but people seeing early llms give meth recipes and how to make car bombs made them quickly get neutered before public release (additional controls, for pirvate info, nudity, swearing etc all come from additional guardrails and improvements of the protection they can offer the company and not end users)
Should be mandatory. Things like facebook took off because of network effects not because of the quality of the platform. Being able to migrate all your contacts/ chat/ tweets/ etc somewhere else seemlessly should be enforced by the gov to allow for actual competition. else you end up with first player advantage and network effects being unsurmountable and creating de facto monopolies with 0 benefit for the customer, in an environment that has low set up costs and you should see fierce competition.
> I've followed him closely since ~2016 so I can say this with some conviction.
Its sad that you fell for it then. Read Phillip Long's post on him, not someone who follows him but someone who has worked with him for years. It should be eye opening in the kind of man he is.
There will be no Mars terraforming, his goal is being the worlds first trillionaire. The emperor has no clothes, the companies run despite him not because of him and the cult of personality only appeals to people who somehow still fall for it.
Thanks, I think I know him pretty much as there is to know. People will try to shoot him down and project their own demons on him. He's an actual maverick who provably has lead his technological companies to success as a Technological lead.
The arguments against his capability to lead cross-field technical operations should be disproven by his successes that he has proven several times in sequence. The argument of him being a fraud is basically hinging on him rolling d20 several times in a row, and only acceptable to those not knowing his personality and attributing his actions to malice (through self-projection of the viewer). Philip's arguments tell as much.
He's done plenty enemies while at it! Wouldn't really expect anything else being as disruptive as raw autism in fixing the species might be. They'll fade.
The first guy has no concrete examples of Elon choices being against his engineering team recommendations and the last quote about "getting his hands dirty with epoxy" is rehased "and he was there clearing the roadblocks" that train and oil barons would say when something went wrong in their mines.
Like how is the same advertising tactics that worked in 1900 when the US had a literacy rate of below 12% working on you now?
> The arguments against his capability to lead cross-field technical operations should be disproven by his successes that he has proven several times in sequence.
Most of those companies have been bailed out by goverment contacts. That is not an ability to lead a team but an ability to win goverment contracts. This is proven by the fact he literally bought the US election in front of the entire world.
His venturesoutside of already fully financed goverment programs liek space, and EV tech remain huge failures. Boring company, neuralink and Twitter are all abject failures if you look at them from a prespective that isnt "Elon will somehow make it work".
> Philip's arguments tell as much.
Phillip has not only worked side by side with him for years, but invested millions in his ventures. He has more at stake than anyone in those interviews which some are over a decade old and all have interests that align with Elon (either work for him, or are writting a book and need access)
> Wouldn't really expect anything else being as disruptive as raw autism in fixing the species might be.
Fixing the species? The dude has a weird breeding hyperfixation, is autistic, is positively demonstrably short sighted (cutting Lidar out of tesla, saying mars boots before 2020, pushing the fda tests for neuralink).
His best bet to improve the species would be removing himself from the pool, and yet he keeps paying for tube babies with crazy women to polute it further.
What you just wrote reads like bad LLM output. I read very little "puff pieces". Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years. And I've seen how the media has turned against him, and him doing mostly the same things he did before is now somehow bad.
Nah. He's the same man. And every common argument against him is so easily shot down. But you don't seem to care and act like a flat earther, given my first link shoots your "counter-argument" down given it's about people you as a HN reader should know saying that the praise said about him is just quite simply true.
>Most of those companies have been bailed out by goverment contacts.
To be devil'ls (yours) advocate, NASA did save SpaceX. But. NASA is one of the very few agencies that could hire SpaceX, especially due to things like ITAR. But it is obvious to anyone that SpaceX has always more than deserved those contracts, delivering value that is about 20x as high when compared to NASA's own efforts in cost to orbit, a figure that is bound to go 100x with Starship which is progressing not unlike Falcon 9 which is by far the most successful and most used launch system in the US, and the world.
Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes. Which is by design. Remember that they were THE guys who managed to turn EV's from compromises to cars that can surpass ICE's. Actual good cars instead of inferior hippie mobiles like the G-whiz. Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very capitalistic and succeeds well, doing its own technology, great products that don't even need advertising to sell, and being one of the most looked after employers by high achievers.
>Boring company, neuralink and Twitter are all abject failures
You saying Neuralink is a failure is not just a failure in your humanity but proves your abject ignorance, given it has basically saved a person, giving him his agency back. And you shouting about "puff news pieces" LOL. Kiddo you're losing any sense of believability left. Boring company is being succesfully boring in all aspects. Slow work, but succeeding. Twitter is dead yes, X is the successor who manages to be better with 20% the employees. Use it everyday while Twitter was a censorious hellhole. On X you can say what you want without being systematically censored, something that I not just heard from, but saw personally before.
>breeding hyperfixation
That is not what I was talking about but proves you don't understand the slightest about biology. Not making enough kids makes humanity die, that is just math. Fixing the species means getting humanity back on track to what we were crudely approximately doing till ~2010 after which the western society started getting very self destructive while authoritarian governments rise in power with technology. I think there absolutely is a way to win this without losing ourselves.
>removing himself from the pool
How about you start with yourself given you've contributed absolutely nothing but hate, misinformation and overall sense of envy.
> Instead I've followed him and directly what he says for about the last 8 years.
and you are comparing that to the first hadn experience of some of his closest associates. The dude pays 3 different PR companies full time salaries, you haven't followed him, you have followed his propaganda.
> him doing mostly the same things he did before
When he said that he was proud Tesla got 100% on the lgbtq score 4 years in a row, and that homophobes should nt buy his cars in 2017 has that not changed?
> And every common argument against him is so easily shot down
if "you sound like chatgpt" is your idea of shooting somethign down, then yeah everything is easily shot down.
> Tesla benefits from selling some carbon credits yes.
thats not what I said though. I said the company was saved from bankruptcy due to goverment contracts. For Tesla the credits where only part of the equation. First of all they got a 480 million loan, on almost no interest in 2010. The EV credits of around 7,500 per car totalled a goverment investment of over 3 billion of free money. Despite this Elon said the company was around 1 month away from bankruptcy in 2017 when making the Model 3.
He took 480 million almost for free, and 3.4 billion for free and still was weeks away from insolvency. That company is literally unviable without goverment funding.
> Tesla operates in a system that anyone would call very capitalistic
Goverment funded sports car for tech bros is not a system anyone would call capitalistic. Luxury goods (Veblen) are notoriously unaffected by market laws, thus terrible vehicles, no pun intended, for capitalism to thrive in.
> You saying Neuralink is a failure is not just a failure in your humanity but proves your abject ignorance, given it has basically saved a person, giving him his agency back.
You really need to stop believing everything you read dude. Nolan Arbaugh lost 85% of the neural link connections less than a month after the surgery. He cannot do 90% of the things they showed off in his presentation. Neural link said they could try and help him with software updates, without a timeline.
BCI's are notoriously hard to do, many companies make better products that neural link, without killing thousands of monkeys and using human suffering for presentations to impress dimwits online.
> Boring company is being succesfully boring in all aspects.
Over half its projects have been cancelled. the ones remaining do not give enough funding to pay the employees they have. And multiple sources have corroborated the company only existed to push California to cancel the high speed train project so the dependency on cars and tesla remained. The company was a ruse to enable car dependency over better alternatives. And it will be cleared for parts by some investment fund in the next 5 years.
> X is the successor who manages to be better with 20% the employees.
X has more bots than before, worse reliability, it has no content moderation so gore, pdf, porn, and scams are all up, and it has a way diminished userbase and advertiser base on a platform that was barely breaking even. "better" is certianly a word, but not one that describes twitter nowadays
> Use it everyday while Twitter was a censorious hellhole. On X you can say what you want without being systematically censored
the word cis is banned lmao. You cant even talk about organic chemistry nowadays. But at least you can say the n word while you attempt to do a rug pull on a bunch of porn bots.
Also you know when the platform hid likes? It was the day Elon got caught liking degrading porn about having a small penis. That is a weird day to hide public likes which had been a feature since forever.
> Not making enough kids makes humanity die
Most of the planet is well above replacement rate. Humanity will peak at around 10-12 billion people, we are at 8. We are nowhere near an extinction event level problem.
> ~2010 after which the western society started getting very self destructive while authoritarian governments rise in power
the dude took 20 billion from the Saudi monarchy to buy twitter, he cosied up to Trump a dude who openly denounces democracy, and has praised absolute shitbags like Erdogan who think his illiterate cousin could make a good economic minister (they had the highest inflation on the planet the next year).
The dude is the poster child for venerating authoritarian goverments, he would never speak badly of china because he has a massive factory there. Despite the govermetn openly hating him and giving way more money to local chinese car manufactures. They spit on his face and he says "thank you Xi"
> you've contributed absolutely nothing but hate, misinformation
"misinformation" is quoting his close associates, the economic reports of his own companies and his public statements? Damn, his words are lies?
You took 13 days, came here with a weirdo blog of no relevance but let me just highlight what i think is the cherry on top of this shit sundae.
"Here John repeats a popular talking point (“Elon hates Jews”), but the “great replacement theory” is a ludicrous far-right conspiracy actively promulgated by Trump and his surrogates, and while Elon’s reply managed to get him in the middle of a simmering controversy between certain factions of the American Jewish community and other progressives, it didn’t read to me as antisemitic. "
Elon Musk funder of a dude who promotes antisemetic tropes, who has said things that makes those people think he is one of them well I random indian guy who writes blogs "didnt read it as antisemetic". Also lets ignore the seig heil twice on stage for some reason.
This is the level of unfounded self assurance that describes elon musk fanbois. "I know better than the entire jewish community because I dont think he is racist". Doesnt matter that they have dealt with this for 2 millenia, or that they are keenly aware of dog whistles, or that he has done overtly hate symbols in public, because I KNOW BETTER. You know better than Elon Musk friends because you read a fluff piece 6 years ago.
Dunning Kruger wants your address, they need to make a part 2 of their syndrome and name it after you.
Well I think a fairly easy counterexample is that if you keep going, and the information falls outside its context window then the questions you had about the driver stop making sense.
So lets say you ask about a driver who swerved, and the response by chatgpt correctly talks about his possible state.
Then you talk more about cars, about road conditions etc and once the context is far away enough you ask, what was the driver doing again?
And you are prompted with a hallucination. Because there is no state in the llm, there is no "driver", there is contextual statistically accurate responses but you hold a "driver" object in your mind while maintaining the conversation, the llm doesn't.
Its like a conversation with someone with short term memory loss like in memento
And people with short term memory loss nevertheless have theory of mind just fine. Nothing about LLM's dropping context over big enough windows implies they don't have theory of mind, it just shows they have limitations - just like humans even with "normal" memory will lose track over a huge context window.
Like there are plenty of shortcomings of LLMs but it feels like people are comparing them to some platonic ideal human when writing them off
> Nothing about LLM's dropping context over big enough windows implies they don't have theory of mind
ToM is a large topic, but most people, when talking about an entity X, they have a state in memory about that entity, almost like an Object in a programming language. Thta Object has attributes, and conditions etc that exist beyond the context window of the observer.
If you have a friend Steve, who is a doctor. And you don't see him for 5 years, you can predict he will still be working at the hospital, because you have an understanding of what Steve is.
For an LLM you can define a concept of Steve, and his profession and it will adequately mimic replies about him. But in 5 years that LLMs would not be able to talk about Steve. It would recreate a different conversation, possibly even a convincing simulacrum of remembering Steve. But internally, there is no Steve, nowhere in the nodes of the LLM does Steve exist or have ever existed.
That inability to have a world model means that an LLM can replicate the results of a theory of mind but not posses one.
Humans lose track of information, but we have a state to keep track of elements that are ontologicaly distinct. LLMs do not, and treat them as equal.
For a human, the sentence Alice and bob go to the market, when will they be back? is different than Bob and Alice went to the market, when will they be back?
Because Alice and Bob are real humans, you can imagine them, you might have even met them. But to an LLM those are the same sentence. Even outside of the argument about The Red Room/ Mary's room there simply are enough gaps in the way a LLM is constructed to be considered a valid owner of a ToM
ToM is about being able to model the internal beliefs/desires etc of another person as being entirely distinct from yours. You're basically bringing up a particular implementation of long-term memory as a necessary component of it, which I've never once seen? If someone has severe memory issues, they could forget who Steve is every few minutes, but still be able to look at Steve doing something and model what Steve must want and believe given his actions
I don't think we have any strong evidence on whether LLMs have world-models one way or another - it feels like a bit of a fuzzy concept and I'm not sure what experiments you'd try here.
I disagree with your last point, I think those are functionally the same sentence
> ToM is about being able to model the internal beliefs/desires etc of another person as being entirely distinct from yours.
In that sentence you are implying that you have the "ability to model ... another". An LLM cannot do that, it can't have an internal model that is consistent beyond its conversational scope. Its not meant to. Its a statistics guesser, its probabilistic, holds no model, and its anthropomorphised by our brains because the output is incredibly realistic not because it actually has that ability
The ability to mimic the replies of someone with that ability, is the same of Mary being able to describe all the qualities of Red. She still cannot see red, despite her ability to pass any question in relation to its characteristics.
> I don't think we have any strong evidence on whether LLMs have world-models one way or another
They simply cannot by their architecture. Its a statistical language sampler, anything beyond the scope of that fails. Local coherance is why they pick the next right token not because they can actually model anything.
> I think those are functionally the same sentence
Functionally and literally are not the same thing though. Its why we can run studies as to why some people might say Bob and Alice (putting the man first) or Alice and Bob (alphabetical naming) and what human societies and biases affect the order we put them on.
You could not run that study on an LLM because you will find that statistically speaking the ordering will be almost identical to the training data. If the training data overwhelmingly puts male names first or whether the training data orders list alphabetically you will see that reproduced on the output of the llm because Bob and Alice are not people, they are statistical probably letters in order.
LLM seem to trigger borderline mysticism in people who are otherwise insanely smart, but the kind of "we cant know its internal mind" sounds like reading tea leaves, or horoscopes by people with enough Phds to have their number retired on their university like Michael Jordan.
Do you work in ML research on LLMs? I do, and I don't understand why people are so unbelievable confident they understand how AI and human brains work such that they can definitely tell what functions of the brain LLMs can also perform. Like, you seem to know more than leading neuroscientists, ML researchers, and philosophers, so maybe you should consider a career change. You should maybe also look into the field of mechanistic interpretability, where lots of research has been done on internal representations these models form - it turns out, to predict text really really well, building an internal model of the underlying distribution works really well
If you can rigorously state what "having a world model" consists of and what - exactly - about a transformer architecture precludes it from having one I'd be all ears. As would the academic community, it'd be a groundbreaking paper.
This prety much seems to boil down to "brain science is really hard so as long as you dont have all the answers then AI is maybe half way there is a valid hypothesis". As more is understood about the brain and more about the limitations of LLMs arch then the distance only grows. Its like the God of the gaps where god is an answer for anythign science cant explain, ever shrinking, but with the LLM ability to have capabilities beyond striking statistical accuracy and local coherance.
You dont need to be unbelievably confident or understand exactly how AI and human brains work to make certain assesments. I have a limited understanding of biology, I can however make an assesment on who is healthier between a 20 year old person who is active and has a healthy diet compared to someone with a sedentary lifestyle, in their late 90s and with a poor diet. This is an assesement we can do despite the massive gaps we have in terms of understanding aging, diet, activity and overall health impact of individual actions.
Similarly, despite my limited understanding of space flight, I know Apollo 13 cannot cook an egg or recite french poetry. Despite the unfathamobly cool science inside the space craft, it cannot, by design do those things.
> the field of mechanistic interpretability
The field is cool, but it cannot prove its own assumption yet. The field is trying to prove you can reverse engineer a model to be humanly understood. Their assumptions such as mapping specific weights or neurons to features has failed to be reproduced multiple times, with the weight effects being way more distributed and complicated than initially thought. This is specially true for things that are equally mystified as the emergent abilities of LLMs. The ability of mimicking nuanced language being unlocked after a critical mass of parameters, does not create a rule as for which increased parameterisation will increase linerly or exponentially the abilities of an LLM.
> it turns out, to predict text really really well, building an internal model of the underlying distribution works really well
yeah, an internal model works well because most words are related to their neighbours, thats the kind of local coherance the model excels at. But to build a world model, the kind a human mind interacts with, you need a few features that remain elusive (some might argue impossible to achieve) to a transformer architecture.
Think of games like chess, an llm is capable of accurately expressing responses that sound like game moves, but the second the game falls outside its context window the moves become incoherent (while still sounding plausible).
You can fix this, with arch that do not have a transformer model underlying it, or by having multiple agents performing different tasks inside your arch, or by "cheating" and using a state outside the llm response to keep track of context beyond reasonable windows. Those are "solutions" but all just kinda prove the transformer lacks that ability.
Other tests abour casuality, or reacting to novel data (robustness), multi step processes and counterfactual reasoning are all the kind of tasks transformers still (and probably always) will have trouble with.
For a tech that is so "transparent" in its mistakes, and so "simple" in its design (replacing the convolutions with an attention transformer, its genius) I still think its talked about in borderline mystic tones, invoking philosophy and theology, and a hope for AGI that the tech itself does not lend to beyond the fast growth and surprisingly good results with little prompt engineering.
With computer use, you can get Claude to read and write files and have some persistence outside of the static LLM model. If it writes a file Steve.txt, that it can pull up later, does it now have ToM?
I don't think this is a counterexample or even relevant.
I can assure you if you had a conversation with an LLM and with a human, the human will forget details way sooner than an LLM like Gemini which can remember about 1.5 million words before it runs out of context. As an FYI the average human speaks about 16,000 words per day, so an LLM can remember 93 days worth of speech.
Do you remember the exact details, word for word, of a conversation you had 93 days ago?
once the context is far away enough you ask,
what was the driver doing again?
Have you tried this with humans?
For a sufficiently large value of "far away enough" this will absolutely confuse any human as well.
At which point they may ask for clarification, or.... respond in a manner that is not terribly different from an LLM "hallucination" in an attempt to spare you and/or them from embarrassment, i.e. "playing along"
A hallucination is certainly not a uniquely LLM trait; lots of people (including world leaders) confidently spout the purest counterfactural garbage.
Its like a conversation with someone with short
term memory loss like in memento
That's still a human with a sound theory of mind. By your logic, somebody with memory issues like that character... is not human? Or...?
I actually am probably on your side here. I do not see these LLMs as being close to AGI. But I think your particular arguments are not sound.
> It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine,
Its worse than that. I thought that Youtube worked as you described, trying to find videos suited to your interests but it actually works the other way around.
Youtube has a series of rabbit holes that it knows maximise engagement, so its trying to filter you the human down one of those rabbit holes. Do you fit the mr beast ssniperwolf hole, or the jordan peterson joe rogan rabbit hole? Howabout 3 hour video essay rabbit hole, is that one your shape?
Its designing paths for engagment and filtering humans down not filtering videos for humans, its perverse and awful and it explains why the algorithm simply does not work for humans, because you are not the target audience, you are the data being sorted.
> For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
Then why is the richest man in the world buying a social media platform? Why is Bezos buying newspapers?
Why are christian preachers shouting at everyone all the time?
Why are republican think tanks and lobbysits spending their entire career fighting tooth and nail against public education and healthcare?
Why are those preachings not demonised, or considered a problem and why is no one asking them to do it quietly?
> Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all
The loudest president of all time just won re election despite being a convicted felon, he will walk next week into the white house with his wife the ex playboy model voted by Evangelicals who say gay people are the devil.
Idk it seems like empirically the attempts to demonise wokeness as a loud abbrasive movement that "doesnt work" is an attempt to disuade the fact that it DOES work the only issue is one side is much much much louder due to owning the means of communication and can create consent around their behaviour.
Or is Zuck coming out and saying " we need more masculine energy" and removing all DEI iniatives at FB a week before trump takes office not the same kind of pandering behaviour just "anti woke"? Or Elon talking about how we need "Christian values", when he has 11 children from 7 women, 3 of whom worked for him, he has more money than god and wont share it with any good causes, while he buys a social media platform to force everyone to hear each one of his brain farts not the same kind of pandering?
That aint quiet, subtle or living anyones best life. Yet PG is not writting an essay about their behaviour, or calling that pandering and katowing to anti intellectualism which is a much worse cause than social justice btw
> I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus.
So would anyone with even 4th grade critical thinking skills. Sadly the text is riddled with the kind of naive, unearned confidance that dominated Sillicon Valley in the early 2000s.
I grew up then, every kid on a computer was smarter than the entire world put together. If only things were run by engineers all the problems would be fixed. We werent racist, or sexist, as long as you used Latex for your work, and Vim for your coding and looked down on humanities you belonged.
Only problem is, engineers did end up running everything. FB replaced traditional media, and what it achieved rather than the mass of uninformed working class, the mildly educated propagandised working class and perpetrating owner class. Well you ended up with heaps of misinformation, 2 genocides (one in africa and another in asia), 2 stable countries brought to the brink of civil war with brexit and trumpism, an arab spring that led to a decade of unstable countries from Lybia to Afghanistan. And the same safeguards that have been built for traditional media are now being built for FB, just 2 decades late and with way less regulatory teeth than the goverment fines imposed to early yellow newspapers.
Uber and wework were another engineer led proyects. Transport and Offices all gonna be cheap, available and with that magic Sillicon valley sauce, where people at google use a slide to go to work. But now wework is a documentary of failure and hubris and Uber is on a long term bet for self driving cars to try and abate its unionising workers who are recreating the old taxi system without the medallions or insurance.
Tesla and Airbnb were gonna change our lives. But one is a plastic badly built car with no lidar because its owner made a bad bet a decade ago, and the other is being demonised in every city for aggravating the housing crisis while remaining less safe and more expensive than most hotels.
Engineers like PG run the show and we are recreting 100 years of guardrails, while they become billionaires over our inability to stop them and punish them. They then buy newspapers, social media platforms and think tanks and destroy words made up by marginalised communities to use as insults. Then useful idiots like PG read the insult, and not the original word and write lengthy essays with nothing interesting to say because they are attacking a strawman created by a republican think tank because some billionaire cant say the n word anymore.
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drivel, including those that are state-sponsored though I agree the latter will have more power to counter, but it will certainly act as a drag.
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
> The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drive
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
