If philanthropy became a bigger part of our culture, I believe we could achieve something similar to basic income. Of course, that starts with individuals getting in the habit of giving and encouraging others to do the same. A couple things I have found:
1) The starfish parable ("it made a difference to that one") is the right mindset. It can be daunting when you consider how much is needed compared to how comparatively little is in your bank account. Instead visualize at what was made possible by your donation.
2) As a general rule, I think it makes more sense to give habitually over the course of a career than it does to wait until the end of your career. This probably applies more to stable jobs than startups, though.
I have been on Reddit for eight years, and only came out with my name today. People should be encouraged to use aliases for any number of reasons. To name a few:
* You should be able to express an idea without that idea being attached to a known identity (partly because people may judge the idea based on the known identity)
* You should be allowed to "start over" (heck, I might want to start over soon)
* In the face of an Orwellian government or an unaccepting society, you should be able to safely express your true opinions
You must keep in mind Google's perspective. They have a firehose of great candidates to choose from, requiring an assembly line of recruiters and interviewers to filter them. They could use any filtering method, no matter how inaccurate or impersonal, and still get a large group of great people.
The Snowden documents revealed that Germans visiting the Tor project website would be subject to permanent NSA surveillance. Does that make you more or less likely to click the link below? If the answer is "less likely", how does it feel to be intimidated out of your free expression?
Every tyranny is predicated on saving civilization.
Also, every idea that actually helps civilisation is incubated in a tiny minority (perhaps in just one mind). Since that minority is engaged in creative work, it is almost certainly an out-group. Adopting the morality of the ruling class and building connections with it are the surest way to power. But these are a full-time job.
I think the idea of quantifying morality might be improved by basing it not on cooperation but simply upon communication, e.g. how well do you know the opinions of those you disagree with? Note that this is almost the opposite approach of the path to power.
I don't think "tyranny of the majority" applies here. The proposed system makes minority opinions more visible, if anything. There would even be an incentive to have a minority opinion, if you truly believed the majority was incorrect about something. In response to your last point: that sounds like an interesting modification: letting every bot see every other bot's (possibly evolving) code. But perhaps to avoid Skynet, bots should use the other bots' published APIs (which could opt to include a "getCode" method), and judge each other by their actions.
This made me realize: Reddit/HN wouldn't be nearly as valuable without usernames. They allow you to scan someone's posts to see if they have a history of being mean, intellectually dishonest, etc.
I think this is true for HN, less so for reddit, and that it generally depends on the nature of the site.
On HN, we have a small-ish community of people (who are often experts in a particular domain) and an expectation of on-topic, high-level discourse. Comment history is worth a lot here, as it's been vetted by an intelligent, serious community.
On reddit, you have a huge number of people and a very low expectation of what's acceptable to post (in general, of course--specific subreddits are often different). The relaxed atmosphere promotes users who tell jokes or pander to the large userbase, making it harder to identify users whose posts are worth actually reading through. Of course once you have identified a quality poster, it's nice to be able to go through their history. It's just that signals like karma score end up being meaningless at that scale.
Then there's 4chan, with opt-in identity. You can't inspect most users' histories, which means you have to take a submission at face value. And for serious, constructive submissions--admittedly hard to come by sometimes--this rivals the HN model for intellectually honest discussion. You're not just nodding along with well-known users, and you're also not ignoring submissions from people who may have simply slipped up in their past. But users can take a name if they choose, and there are 3rd-party archives which catalog their submissions.
Reddit actually brands itself as a "platform for online communities". Given the nature of subreddits, this does not seem like an unfair characterization.
Sure, but your identity persists across all subreddits. If someone makes an insightful comment on a programming subreddit, for instance, and has a high karma score, you may be disappointed to discover that 90% of their previous submissions consists of cat pictures, jokes, in-depth cartography discussion, and porn.
I guess reddit just feels 'diluted' to me. It facilitates a broad range of discussion and does so fairly well, but I can't think of a subreddit that is actually the best place to discuss any particular topic. It's generally my second or third stop.
Well, it could be highly relevant, but the system isn't (yet?) designed to recognize when two sibling sites have significant overlap, which does occur.
Although throwaways are generally considered acceptable, especially on Reddit. Without some means to enforce single account registration or a real name policy, the same problem exists.
Persistent usernames on Reddit create a culture of identity on the site. Throwaways with no user history that post inflammatory comments frequently tend to get called out and downvoted. That's a very different setting from something like YikYak.
It's worth noting that Reddit exists to discuss topics, hobbies etc. Yik Yak doesn't have a defined purpose to the same extent Reddit does.
This lack of definition combined with the geographically-centered design (you know your audience) makes Yik Yak far more dangerous than Reddit IMO.
There are a lot of good use cases for throwaways (suppose a former cult member wanted to share their experiences, for example). And the fact that an account is brand new is also a data point. You'll notice that Reddit/HN have produced a lot of insightful/informative comments from throwaways.
"people whose opinions the majority of voting members disagree with"
Still true, but I think it is probably easier to allow controversial or less popular opinions in a ranked system than it is to deal with harassment in an unranked system, given the propensity of the voters towards "good." The harassment seen on reddit is very different from the harassment on Yik Yak, Juicy Campus, etc. That guy they thought was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, for example.
Of course, Yik Yak and Juicy Campus were designed for this LCD speech.
If Twitter and Yahoo really wanted to disclose this information, there is nothing the government could do to stop them. Civil disobedience is one of the most important tools we have against Orwellian governments. And doing the right thing is infinitely more important than following authoritarian orders.
Selective prosecution is a key tool of an oppressive government, reposting one of my comments here, which was related to a politician seemingly getting a similar treatment:
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the
very embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the
law, and they SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full
knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if
they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew
every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose
the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible
people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or
unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete
and total political power.
You an absolutely be sure that at the bare minimum a large minority of CEOs of large company are in or have been in a similar situation. Laws on insider trading are very all encompassing and are broken on a regular basis by practices that are considered normal. It may have been fraud, and it may have been illegal, but that dosen't make it any less of a leveraging tool for people like the NSA.
That might be true, but law enforcement agencies are trained to reconstruct evidence via a process called "parallel construction" to avoid revealing their sources (NSA for example) so you might never know the whole thruth: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parall...
Your link isn't even an account of the trial or the details of the charges, it's just one guy disputing one version of the Nacchio story.
The "fraud" involved an overly optimistic assessment of Qwest's future. That might indeed legally be fraud but it's hardly blatant in the sense one might argue it's a fairly common occurrence and most instances of such behavior go to civil, not criminal court.
"In its case, the government stated that Nacchio continued to tell Wall Street that Qwest would be able to achieve aggressive revenue targets long after he knew that they could not be achieved. This helped it buy up regional phone rival US West, the government alleges."
I don't know if I would call it blatant guilt. The prosecution of insider trading in this case seemed to be very selective. How often do CEOs go to jail for that?
With enough budget and motivation, it'd be easy to paint even you -- regardless of who you are and what you have done -- as a villain, especially with the cooperation of the press.
- It's easy to believe a CEO is guilty of insider trading, because all CEOs are guilty of insider trading. (Few people take the next step to wonder why insider trading is a crime at all.)
- He's actually in prison, which makes him less sympathetic.
- He's a Bellhead, which makes him less sympathetic to me. (I've worked at multiple descendants of Ma Bell, so my prejudice was earned.)
- The biggest thing, I think, is most of us imagine that if we just behave in socially-accepted ways, that's enough to keep us out of trouble. It's uncomfortable to consider the possibility that isn't true.
Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted. That's one reason that B-Corps now exist in many jurisdictions. They allow for officers and directors to avoid liability for "doing the right thing."
> Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted.
And individuals run the risk of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, depending on the issue and the area. If civil disobedience was risk-free, it wouldn't be necessary.
I think fighting through ACLU is more fruitful. What you are asking for could cause both companies to shutdown, effectively killing one of the few places (Twitter in this case) through which the same distress you are feeling against governments is voiced throughout the world.
I think if Twitter was forced to shut down, a PR shitstorm of amazing proportions would erupt. There is no way the government would win that battle. And that's part of the point of civil disobedience: publicity.
Twitter is a godsend for unbiased news. In many developing countries, Twitter is playing a very important role of spreading the revolution against incumbents. Granted that it's penetration is a tiny fraction of print & TV media but going forward, it'll be an essential fabric for survival of society.
What kind of "unbiased" news do you find on Twitter? Its role in revolutions around the world has been greatly overstated by Western journalists and techies.
I agree with you, but I don't know if you'll agree with me. In my experience, revolutions generally do not generate any sort of unbiased news. As a rule of thumb, it attracts extremist/opposition groups from both sides of the spectrum with their own agendas. Not to mention regular people themselves fall victim to bias.
How much can you really discern about the situation from a few tweets without context?
That's why I think regular investigative journalism should still be the norm.
India is witnessing an arguably revolutionary uprising against crony capitalism, their political nexus, unchecked flow of black money & corruption from top to bottom. The elections in the capital (Dec '13) were a strong indicator of what people want as opposed to what media portrays. Social media played a very important role in bringing a party from inception to near majority in almost a year. That was phenomenal. Now the same party is resource stretched to reach out the masses in the biggest election in the world (at country level). The media has blacked out most of the positive news (for obvious reasons). This is where twitter comes in. It's cementing day to day advancements of a revolution across the country. Unfortunately twitter is still limited to a very tiny fraction of the population.
Twitter has been systematically silencing voices on the right that apparently someone in their org disagrees with. Twitter is a political machine, and you'll see it used more and more in this way...
I'd argue "unfiltered" or "less filtered" rather than "unbiased". You're going to get multiple biases, including both the party line and the opposition (either or both of which may have its own distortions).
Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.
The IRS could make the head honchos' lives miserable. This
seems to be all their Achilles heal? And when it comes to
their money--it all gets a bit fuzzy.
The question is, what law(s) are being used by the government to take these actions with Twitter/Yahoo? For instance, are these NSL letters?
If these are not actual laws, but rather gray-area interpretations of laws being used, then each company can decide whether to challenge them and have their days in court.
But, if the government is clearly operating within the law, then it is the law/lawmaking itself that should be challenged.
This post does a great job of showing a simple truth that many people forget: when you genuinely help a person, you are also helping everyone in that person's "sphere". There is a kind of exponential echoing effect when you are good-to.
