The IPCC, being a UN body of government appointed scientists, economists etc, consistently take an overly conservative view
No, IPCC predictions have been wrong/over-aggressive in the past. Their 1990 long range predictions can be compared against the present now and are 40% out:
People have a tendency to cherry pick predictions that worked out or which assert a requirement for even more panic, whilst ignoring predictions that didn't work out (of which there are many).
Your argument is basically unfalsifiable: scientists must be listened to because they all agree (itself a dubious or false claim), but the internationally agreed consensus must not be listened to because it's "bland" and influenced by people who might disagree (but who in the end endorsed the report anyway).
It appears that evidence is only accepted as legitimate if it's more alarming than past evidence: how could this argument ever ramp itself down? And how can the argument both be argument by authority whilst simultaneously attacking the credibility of those authorities?
That seems to be exactly what you are doing -- one cherry picked alleged mistake at your link as against 8 instances of under-estimate in that old Scientific American article, and the instances picked up by this NYT piece. A link I might add that is a highly dubious source[1] who is already demonstrably wrong on extent of current warming, and has written for the Heartland Institute[1][2], a bunch of extremist idiots -- notably with no scientific credentials -- who think CATO too moderate. All you need to know is revealed by their continued denial, even today, of the link between tobacco and health[3].
Her about page quotes proudly Matt Ridley and James Delingpole - two outright and consistent liars on climate and multiple other topics over decades. Both well known UK climate deniers who you absolutely don't want to be lauded by if you want a shred of credibility. Ridley, the man who brought down a bank (Northern Rock) in 08, then claimed the answer would have been less regulation and he was in no way to blame - the inquiries found him to blame and specifically criticised him for bringing Britain and British banking into disrepute.
So at the very least I would want independent confirmation from a reputable source that her outlying view of climate sensitivity and the IPCC's alleged error is even accurate. She can't even quote SkepticalScience accurately or honestly, but cherry picks part of what they wrote to try and paint them incorrectly as fools.
I'm not suggesting we do not listen to the IPCC either, just that they have on past performance been found to be consistently conservative in their estimates. That's borne out by their structure, their errors of omission, and that they give little to no consideration to tipping points and non-linear impacts -- which is understandable given that some are unknown and none are amenable to modelling. Both issues highlighted in that Scientific American piece. Put another way IPCC reports are the least impact we can probably expect, which the data is bearing out as years pass.
Without getting into who is a crank and who isn’t, I think the following point from the post you’re replying to really gets to the heart of my consternation:
> And how can the argument both be argument by authority whilst simultaneously attacking the credibility of those authorities?
If people are supposed to believe the IPCC because it’s a consensus statement, how can you then ask them to then assume the IPCC is wrong? Who is the scientific authority we’re supposed to trust more than the IPCC?
Your assertion that the IPCC “gives too little consideration to tipping points” highlights the issue. The IPCC seems to have considered runaway greenhouse gas effects and rejected them as “unlikely.” Why should we disregard those conclusions?
I'm not suggesting to assume the IPCC is wrong - but that the reports have a conservative outlook. In some respects that's a good thing in that outlying and unclear studies and predictions will be omitted, yet some of those outliers may turn out to be accurate and the middle of the road view wrong. That's fine and expected, if frustrating at times.
In other respects, notably the structure of having a political approval stage for reports has, if that Guardian Saudi piece is to be believed, subsequently toned down those consensus views -- under pressure from home for political or economic reasons. There's also an awful lot of "he said, she said", meaning it's impossible to reach certainty from those reports. Without criticising any nation's scientific and economic representatives involved in the preparation phase, there are multiple representatives criticising that final political approval phase... Draw your own conclusions.
The upshot for those of us trying to make sense of it is IPCC tends to a very diligent presentation of the least contentious, which subsequent measurements have shown to have underestimated it on multiple occasions. Which leaves me thinking IPCC reports a best-case scenario: I believe them, it's the best consensus we have, but am not surprised if something crops up that turns out to be worse or more significant than projected. I still find that far better than had they been over-estimating impacts consistently. YMMV. :)
Specifically on tipping points, they're likely to always be something of an unknown before they actually tip. Once a threshold has been passed and an ice sheet thought safe for decades collapses, or permafrost tips into catastrophic melting it's clear the threshold was passed, and we know from hindsight. Predicting and modelling on the other hand will probably remain near impossible - we only really know after it's switched. Which is, of course, after it's too late and tipping them back effectively impossible.
That said, that old Scientific American article mentioned they would be including some consideration to threats from tipping points and non-linear effects from 2014.
Is it? Political threads are pretty routinely allowed and surface. This one is patently being killed because a lot of people really hate the implications.
Who underwrites the investment risks taken by Bill Gates exactly?
Wealth mobility in the USA is pretty high. It's entirely possible for billionaires to stop being billionaires, or for people to temporarily become rich and then lose it again. Lots of stories like that out there. Elon Musk has made fortunes and lost them several times, I think.
Taxation is not an illegal or immoral appropriation of property
Obviously it's not illegal by definition.
Immoral? Yeah, I think a 100% tax rate i.e. communism would be deeply immoral. And taxes today are very high, and frequently lead to huge misallocation of resources. I think you could easily argue for lower taxes from a moral position.
I think it's a difference of additive vs subtractive distortions.
Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas.
Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert.
The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want.
But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work.
Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want.
On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.
No. What money does is redistribute limited attention.
Information may (or may not) be freee, and nonrivalrous. But its complements, attention, distribution, discoverability, access, reach, are all rivalrous. Time is the ultimate rival good: a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime, spent on one thing is that interval not spent on all else.
"Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan.
Money is an amplifier, or at least, provides access to amplification. It can also be an eraser, a gate, a gate keeper, which determines who shall and shall not pass.
The more I read on the nature of monopoly, the more I'm convinced that the critical element of it is not prices or "consumer welfare", but of role as gatekeeper. The monopolist (or monopsonist) faces a constant queue of approaching supplicants. Each supplicant has the best alternative of ... no service. Or at best, extraordinarily reduced service (fewer capabilities, higher costs, most often both). The monopolist, particularly if already at or near capacity, though even at levels of service far beneath that, need only consider the next supplicant.
What people miss out on with money is scale.
The typical US household would be hard pressed to meet an emergency expense of $500. When Facebook purchased Instagram for $19 billion in cash and stock, it expressed a liquidity of nearly 40 million such households -- about the population of California. That is, a single corporate entity, and more significantly, the single individual effectively controlling that corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, has a greater effective voice than the entire rest of the state.
In a land dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, that seems inimical to its very foundations.
As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.
As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.
1) This is the case, isn't it. In America the Republicans were far more relaxed about the ruling allowing unlimited US campaign money, then spent around half the amount the Democrats did and won.
If they were really being duplicitous about it you'd have seen major freakouts amongst Trump supporters about his very low levels of spending, but I don't remember much of that. You saw far more angst amongst Democrats about the "free" news coverage he got by virtue of saying popular-but-unpopular things.
I'm not saying people are totally consistent on this, but at least in the last election, Trump's behaviour appears to have matched the overall right wing pattern of not really believing political spending is a big deal. The US needs a pretty high baseline of political ad spend just to communicate "there's an election on day X, vote for candidate Y" to 350+ million people in a very short space of time. Beyond that it doesn't seem to matter.
2) Why shouldn't they protest? It's perfectly possible to both believe that government control over speech is bad on principle, and also that political advertising isn't as powerful as your opponents believe.
3) Why should people doing political ad spending be forced to be identified, but people posting political views on the internet not be? A good reason to not force identification of such people is to stop retaliatory attacks by extremists designed to silence people, a very real problem. This is especially important in elections where there's a risk whoever comes to power will try to get revenge on people who supported their opponents. Not normally a risk in US politics because of the First Amendment but it's been seen elsewhere.
It's easy to write laws such that totally blocking automation is allowed, totally blocking human written content is 'censorship', and categorising/hiding by default/ranking content is allowed.
Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).
Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so.
Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.
You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.
In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.
The idea that it's OK to implement an algorithm that takes some user's input to censor posts but it's not OK to do so directly seems like it skirts the central question.
If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.
Maybe I'm misreading this comment or the context (because I think the biggest single piece we're currently lacking in platform moderation is maximal transparency into what/who gets moderated and how)...
but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
Spam didn't break email's network effects. Yeah, it hurts it a bit, but there were lots of attempts to build competing email networks that didn't go anywhere.
This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.
This might just come down to why I'm not sure I'm interpreting you right.
It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on).
I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts...
Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts.
An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.
Yes, for sure any implementation is very much about the design subtleties. I did work once on an email spam filter so I have a pretty good idea of the complexities involved in that space, which includes things like some people's spam being other people's ham, people replying to spams, problematic user interfaces and so on.
My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.
I don't, because you can still see such comments (it may require an account and flipping a switch). And in fact I browse Hacker News with showdead turned on, and I often start from /active so I can see stories and comments other people don't want me to see. This isn't censorship because Hacker News itself still makes them visible: it's more like spam filtering in that regard, where content is being categorised but not censored.
Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.
In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.
That's what cryptocurrencies allow, since Bitcoin. People can pick a dispute mediator who gets involved and can reverse the transaction only if there's a dispute. It's all done with OP_CHECKMULTISIG. The mediator is not an escrow service and can't steal the money. So you end up with a competitive market of tiny "courts".
No, IPCC predictions have been wrong/over-aggressive in the past. Their 1990 long range predictions can be compared against the present now and are 40% out:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/the-ipcc-1990-far-predictio...
People have a tendency to cherry pick predictions that worked out or which assert a requirement for even more panic, whilst ignoring predictions that didn't work out (of which there are many).
Your argument is basically unfalsifiable: scientists must be listened to because they all agree (itself a dubious or false claim), but the internationally agreed consensus must not be listened to because it's "bland" and influenced by people who might disagree (but who in the end endorsed the report anyway).
It appears that evidence is only accepted as legitimate if it's more alarming than past evidence: how could this argument ever ramp itself down? And how can the argument both be argument by authority whilst simultaneously attacking the credibility of those authorities?