I'm sure you'd agree that there would be a substantial amount of support for these protests, and similarly more for any country or executive that would align itself with the protesters. How much support in mainland China do you think the Hong Kong protests have? How do you think mainland Chinese would respond to the US overtly aligning itself with the protesters?
I fully agree that of course nobody would support censoring a view or political ideology that they agree with. The big question is what happens when the view or ideology is one we not only dislike, but condemn?
I think you make a great point. From my perspective there are some things that cannot be reasonably proven that people may have different views on. For instance I'm sure you'd agree that social media "platforms" (as well as various other "platforms") over the past ~6 or so years have been engaging in increasing censorship. And that censorship has been not only accepted but applauded by some segments of the population. So where we probably diverge is on who are these segments of the population? How big are they? What are their views on this recent censorship?
I've been unable to find any sort of polling or other objective data (for that matter even poll data on Hong Kong is basically nonexistent) so we're left to rely on anecdotal data. When stories of censorship against unpopular topics came out in times past, what was the zeitgeist in your view? In the Hong Kong story as of today, does that vary? I took as an assumption people sharing a roughly similar view on this question. But I think it's a fair point that perhaps this is an invalid assumption. If I've learned anything on the internet it's that we all live in our own little bubbles, try as we might to escape them.
Of course I'm certain I could dig up plenty of examples of people contradicting themselves but that no more proves your [implied] view incorrect anymore than you finding a examples of people remaining consistent would prove my view incorrect.
The original post I was responding to was pondering what would happen if the NBA pulled out. In order to try to predict this it's important to try to accurately characterize how people would behave in response. In the US we ostensibly value free speech, but especially in modern times this is increasingly often set aside faster than you can blink when it becomes an issue where somebody says something we disagree with. See for instance practically every major social media platform that has been censoring increasingly loosely, largely to stabilize (and ideally increase) their profit by satisfying advertisers. When people dislike the groups censored they not only could not care less, but are often genuinely enthusiastic about it.
Think of the countless times people have, rather enthusiastically, argued that 'free speech doesn't mean you're free from the consequences of your actions'. Yet when it's a group that individuals ideologically align with they rapidly segue from free speech being a technical legal requirement as defined by the first amendment of the US constitution, to a value - an ethos. And we are not speaking in hypotheticals - this is happening, right now.
In modern times people increasingly seem to not like defending the right of groups they disagree with. We could debate the reasons there, but I suspect a large part is because we now live in an era of never-ending social media virtue signaling. That's actually what makes what I wrote above so easy to show. If you are genuinely arguing in good faith and do not believe people are engaging in wide-spread hypocrisy, you could go obsessive-compulsive and digging through people's post histories and find many of the same people upset about corporate censorship today cheering it on not long ago. Because they felt that by cheering on nasty groups getting censored, that they were showing their own virtue in being so adamantly against such things. We are, in effect, living out the "First they came ..." poem. As always, what's new is old.
That's awesome to hear, but I expect you must see you would be a very small minority. Most people now a days seem to base their worldview not on any system of consistent ethics, but instead on who's being benefited and who's being hurt.
For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard stuff), many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's incredibly disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same people outraged ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been the first ones lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a player who chose to show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in an identical venue. It's safe to assume they also would have taken it further and done all they could to try to get said player banned from any other gaming venue as well, in an effort to kill his livelihood and, by proxy, him. In other words, they couldn't care less about free speech - but only speech that they support, or oppose.
This example here (in our reverso world China) would take this to an even bigger extreme since you would be expressing support not only of a group with next to no national support, but simultaneously expressing support of a deeply unpopular foreign government which could be framed as borderline treasonous. And all of this being done in a highly nationalistic nation? That's a tall order for sure.
I'd distinguish between prepping and doomsday types. Prepping can be as simple as having some basic supplies and nonperishable goods such that you're not going to die if, for any reason, you need to survive independently for some period of time. It's not like some lifestyle or even dependent upon an assumption that you'll even ever need these things. So it's a relatively low cost decision to be able to be at least somewhat prepared for an eventuality that, though extremely improbable, would have disproportionately negative consequences if you were of the 'do nothing' extreme on the other end.
To put it mathematically, if I said there was a 1 in a million chance of you losing a billion dollars sometime in your life, and you agreed with me, it'd certainly be logical, if you could, to provide insurance against that eventuality for $1. In fact it'd still be mathematically sound to spend $1000. But this is for an event that you are literally 99.9999% sure will not happen. I think the big difference is in seeing reality as a neverending stream of probabilities as opposed to seeing reality as a neverending stream of certainties. The probabilistic mindset can lead you to conclusions and decisions that look peculiar to a deterministic mindset. By contrast doomsday types are those who have a deterministic mindset and have decided that the world (as we know it) is going to end and thus make that a part of their persona and worldview. Granted, they could also be of a probabilistic mindset with a different weighting but, at least in my experience, that's not usually the case.
Reverse the situation and imagine how you would feel.
Say China was running extensive media in favor of an increasingly China-friendly group within the US equally unpopular with both average US citizens and the US government, but quite popular with Chinese citizens and the Chinese government. And now a Chinese executive in charge of a Chinese product popular in the US, spoke out in favor of this group. Following US pressure with implied economic threats, he not only refused to retract his statements but chose to completely pull his company's product from the US - perhaps iPhones, which we'll pretend could be made nowhere other than China for the sake of the hypothetical.
Are you going to be mad at the US government? Most likely this would just work to further evangelize anti-China and anti-China-friendly group sentiment within the US. And I think this is true without even getting into the cultural differences in terms of things like nationalism. I think in your comment you're probably transplanting the average US citizen worldview onto the average Chinese citizen. In that case your idea would very much work, but that's not the case here.
We hit "peak university" in 2011. [1] In 2017 there were 1.25 million fewer enrolled students than in 2010. But this [2] is the zinger: in that same time frame, more than 300 new degree granting institutions opened up! It's becoming a hyper-competitive business. Good students not only are likely to stay on for the entire term of the institution, but also increase the prestige of your school which means more students, higher fees, and more profit.
I think a big issue is that the regulations on loans are removing any and all notion of supply and demand, so costs just keep getting crazier and crazier. Living on campus at an average private nonprofit university now will run you more than $50k a year. [3] Spending $2,357 for what may likely be $200k+ for 4 years is a phenomenal return on investment.
As usual, non-profit in practice and non-profit in connotation really don't mean the same thing. I attended a top 10 university only to see them constantly tear down perfectly functional buildings just to replace them with more aesthetically pleasing buildings that otherwise functioned just about identically. In some cases the new buildings had less room than the older ones. All it seemed to achieve was to 'Amazon' their profit figures. I don't really understand why they seem determined to waste so much money. The cynic in me imagines it's easier to justify a million dollar administrative salary when that's a much smaller fraction of your gross, and a "non-profit" institution would have difficulty justifying constant cost increases if they're showing a massive profit margin.
Why would it be hidden away in some settings instead of right in your face with a nice fat button "Change how my videos are recommended..."? Even beyond that though, most online platforms today offer very limited general customization - and so there's not much reason for users to go digging through settings. They are designed to work primarily with the default configuration, and so that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
There's a very simple solution here that avoids any and all bias and hidden agendas: simply make everything transparent.
- Users get to create their own profile. For instance in your profile you get to selected whether you would like to see content geared towards men/women/any. And this would follow for a whole slew of other topics, similar to the opaque profile companies are creating on users today without their consent or input.
- All recommended videos have all their profile tags openly shown. And the reason for recommendation is also completely open.
The cool thing about it is that this also works really well with the current neural network based recommendation systems since they output a weighting of things. Simply transform those weightings into a nice output and the user can see exactly what's going on and exactly how they're being viewed. As a nice aside this would also remove a big chunk of the incentive for increasingly aggressive spying as companies try to get ever more extensive profiles on each and every person that uses their products.
One downside here is that users might not be consciously aware of their own preferences. This could again be resolved transparently. "Hey PhilWelch, we've noticed you like videos about underwater basketweaving. Would you like for this interest to be ticked in your profile? [Yes, No, No + Never ask again]
I'm curious why people aren't seeing China as, at least potentially, a very big customer. They have hundreds of millions of people with limited to no internet access, in spite of a rapidly increasing level of national wealth. Their government could change that, instantly, with a check.
Not that I'm in favor of a censored internet but it's a reality of China and it would perhaps work even better with something like the Starlink. Satellite internet relies on ground stations to know what to beam out on requests. China would operate their own regional ground stations resulting in a complete centralization of all access from China.
Only reason I see this not happening is if China chose to develop their own similar solution, which is perhaps a real possibility.
When forming opinions on things like this, I think its important to see what happened in context.
This [1] is the entire, in context, video of the controversy in question. Unfortunately I've yet to find a complete translated transcript so I am left on relying on potentially unreliable online translations. From what I've read the casters say 'Go ahead and say those 8 words and we'll wrap up here. There's nothing else to talk about. Let's lower our heads.' He then screams 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time.' Guess that's 8 words in [presumably?] Cantonese. This was done while wearing a gas mask. The tournament casters then laugh and clap.
This is actually the thing that most frustrates me about so many issues. How can people justify forming opinions on these things without seeing everything in context? Why isn't this entire video, alongside a professional translation, a part of every story on the topic? Of course providing in context video gets downvoted, because it makes the issues look less black and white. But that to me is the clearest example of idiocracy. We should not seek to create Hollywood villains and heroes in nuanced issues. We should consider these issues as they are, which invariably tend to be a million shades of gray as opposed to black and white.
Obviously yes it is possible for DDG to determine that result G is "better", and prioritize accordingly. "Better" of course is subjective, but this search is a pretty clear example that they're doing something right. They do source results from Bing yet their engine determined, quite accurately, that Bing's results are really quite bad.
But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:
- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)
- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service
- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.
I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."
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I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.
What would you suggest is the minimum evidence necessary to support the view that an ideology promotes violence?
- Isolated incidents of violence on behalf of the ideology?
- A "sufficiently large" number of incidents on behalf of the ideology? If so, could you elaborate on "sufficiently large" as you see it?
- A general tacit approval of violence?
- An explicit approval of violence?
- Something else?
The problem I think that many see is there tends to be extensive cognitive dissonance. People apply one set of standards to groups they like, and another to ones that they don't. I think you'll find that in trying to answer my above question it becomes quite difficult to include the groups you don't like, while excluding the groups you do like. That's even when my framing above which is unrealistically softball. For instance I didn't even mention things like harassment, destruction of property, etc which I think we should also generally be intolerant of - even when it's a group we like engaging in such things.
Yes, they source their results. This is not the extent of your claims. You were stating that they directly rip from other engines meaning that, in your words, "In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines".
That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.
Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.
You know there's something weird. You could prove your little hypothesis here wrong in less time than it took you to write it. So why state something that's wrong?
I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.
DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.
You literally have NSA whistle-blowers stating, under oath, that these programs are not legal and the NSA is knowingly and purposefully violating the US constitution. [1] That testimony was part of Jewel v NSA [2] which emphasizes what happens when you take intelligence agencies to court. That case was filed more than a decade ago.
The government has already managed to get numerous key parts dismissed under state secrets privilege. [3] The government was also directed to preserve key data related to what remained of the case. In 2018 they informed the court they'd accidentally deleted it. Oops. [4] Oh yeah, in the same statement they also acknowledged they lied under oath when previously stating that they had preserved all relevant data on magnetic tapes and stored them with counsel. Oops again! Penalties.. consequences? You can guess.
And yes, you can also sue the government in China. Just don't expect to win.
How would that reset their progress? The leaks have revealed that our secret organizations are pretty open (at least among themselves) about parallel construction. For instance this article [1] reveals some slides of the more harmless surveillance data on a target. Nonetheless, in a giant disclaimer at the top the NSA reminds their agents "This information is provided for intelligence purposes in an effort to develop potential leads. It cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings, or subpoenas, or for other legal or judicial purposes."
And as the leaks have fallen off the news cycle, along with an interesting rise of misinformation in social media, you gradually see people beginning to understate what was revealed and to show ever less concern over it. It's actually a phenomenal demonstration for how a secret agency should handle a leak to avoid any meaningful consequences of what is ostensibly ground-breaking information on programs that are, at best, in legally grey areas, all being released to the public en masse. Snowden no doubt felt that his leaks would change our approach to intelligence if not our entire nation. In reality, next to nothing changed.
Apologies on the formatting here. I think citing everything on this topic is absolutely critical since it's absolutely rife with misinformation. Dealing with formatting for extensive citations, alongside quotations of materials (for those who don't feel like perusing the first party sources) is tough in little more than ASCII and italics!
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The evidence is not too hard to find. This [1] site provides an extensive and ordered collection of most published Snowden related documents. It's also quite nice since it ties the documents to the first press coverage as well, if you'd rather peruse something other than the raw data. There seems to be a curiously large amount of misinformation on this topic, but when you actually look at the evidence - this situation is not in the least bit ambiguous.
These [2] slides give a broad overview of what PRISM is:
- Slide 3 describes PRISM: "PRISM -Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".
- Slide 5 describes what is collected: "What will you receive in collection (surveillance and stored comms)?" - "in general" : "email, chat - video + voice, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity - logins, etc, online social networking details, SPECIAL REQUESTS (caps added here to represent the bolding in the slide)".
This [3] is a document entitled "User's guide for Skype PRISM Collection". It gives some insight into how the program operates from an operative level including screenshots. It details surveillance of skype conversations, including conversations between skype and a landline connection. In skype-skype connections surveillance is available for audio, video, chat, and file transfers. It also mentions another program "DECODEORDAIN" which apparently maps different email addresses to a single person (used when engaging on surveillance on a target with skype registered under multiple email accounts).
That document also details that as data goes from Skype's servers, it also goes directly to the NSA. So this leads to situations where their agents can apparently become a bit confused about receiving multiple copies of the same chat log. That might happen, for instance, when a user logs onto a different device and his chat history is resyced so it goes from Skype to him as well as to the NSA. That's all made even more interesting by the fact that this was back from 2011 when Skype was still peer to peer. So while we get hints of how their process worked, the exact mechanisms are still a bit obscured.
There's a lot more really interesting stuff as well, but you could spend years going through all of it. Anyhow, suffice to say - no the government isn't just collecting just metadata. Anybody that says that is spreading misinformation either intentionally, or because they themselves have been misinformed and now think they're informing others.
I fully agree that of course nobody would support censoring a view or political ideology that they agree with. The big question is what happens when the view or ideology is one we not only dislike, but condemn?