>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?
All of the above.
Don't take this as a slam, but given your responses in this thread, it's probably a good idea to get a primer about how anticompetitive practices work.
So, access to the court system is limited to those with the income to defend themselves. Is this a good thing? Or, is there a fund setup for people who need to sue/defend against a suit for defamation?
There's a common issue in philosophy and epistemology over how we come to know things. We wanted to know what 'knowledge' was, and settled upon the concept of a 'justified true belief' for a fairly long period of time.
However, one day, a philosopher found a situation in which a justified true belief was incorrect. This is the Gettier problem.
What you describe is something akin to a network of baysian conditionals attached to certain proposition, which upon confrontation with new information update their relative weights. We know with certainty that this process has significant benefits in general (it's certainly better than most systems not internalizing new information), but can and does create false reasoning.
In short, it's good but not sufficient to create knowledge. The problem of individuals creating ideological filter bubbles around themselves is very related to the idea that their evidentiary priors become more and more rigid as they note confirmatory evidence over time that justifies their views over time. The issue isn't that they stop intaking new information, but that their priors and the new information are interpreted based upon that belief network.
Thankfully, as a super-organism, we have a great solution for that mental ossification. We die. New people who have less evidentiary accumulation can address the issue with new priors and often that's all that's needed for huge breakthroughs.
The question is "what is knowledge?", not "do we know that we know p?". And I see no issue with the definition of knowledge as justified, true belief. Now, if I believe p, and you ask me whether I know p, I may say yes. But whether I actually know p will depend on whether my justification is valid (that it really is a justification and a sufficient one) and whether it is true, which has nothing to do with whether anyone knows whether the justification is valid and the belief is true. It's a separate question, and conflating the two questions leads to an infinite regress of skepticism. So the definition of knowledge qua knowledge still stands.
I would also suggest you try to apply your general approach to the very theory you are proposing. I see an opportunity for retorsion arguments.
I approach it with words using the idea that everyone has the foreknowledge of the Merriam Webster dictionary definition of the words they choose to say in conversation... and something often taken for granted when it shouldn't be.
I know what I mean when I'm explaining things - the definition of the word in context, with some Grammer etc.
What is being interpreted tho? What thoughts come to your mind when I type "Planet Earth" and you read it? Whenever I see the words Planet Earth I recall a memory of an HD DVD BBC Documentary titled "Planet Earth" sitting on the lowest shelf on the endcap display at my local Best Buy - I noticed that many years ago and I've told a few people that, so now it's likely my forever. Lowkey nostalgic almost.
Say I'm having a conversation with a friend that shows a headline about "Planet Earth Be Doomed" how could they ever anticipate my nostalgic correlation with that headline? Am I actually listening if I finish an entire conversation while reliving a childhood trip to best buy?
This only seems like a tangent - knowledge and truth are exactly the same.
I know what I know. I know what I expect you to know. I know what I'm trying to convey and so I use words I know the definition of and feel appropriate in the moment, sometimes I even try my best.
I never know how someone will react/respond/understand.
Death forces our species wide belief set to go through the constrained channel of education and communication, the same way that our bodily attributes go through the constrained channel of our germ-line genes.
This process lossily compresses the signals, which allows for drift or attenuation when the next generation reconstructs the beliefs and associated behaviors. Transmission also applies stress that acts as a filter to weed out beliefs that are no longer adaptive.
Pfft, death isn't necessary to evolution in the sense your implying.
Transmission of ideas and wealth - even societal restructuring doesn't require all the old people to first die.
Adapt or die. We cease to adapt and so we die. We're we as a species to overcome death individually, we would still collectively be bound by the same mantra.
Not that our evolution would stop - rather I think the opposite.
Assuming cellular commission is similar to a 30 year old and as healthy/mentally capable as a 30 something; so truly overcoming those obstacles - a 300 year old version of me would be better than the me now.
Taxi drivers brain composition changed by driving around London - I'll bet an extra 200 years will do something.
As long as our populace remain "Mentally Liquid" we will be fine - something 300 years of seeing and living constant changes should all but guarantee. Can't be yelling at the kids on the lawn for 200 years right?
I think elongation human life will be necessary in the not so distant future and I expect it to happen.
>But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response
Not all mutations are equal; the flu has antigenic factors that rapidly change in response to evolutionary pressure that don't significantly affect the fitness of the virus. If you're able to target another element of the virus that is conserved, or target a large segment of the possible antigenic conformations in a single vaccine, you'd force immune evasion mutations to significantly lower the virus's fitness, which is a very big deal.
>Ambulance shows, guy says "No!" and so everyone says "Oh, this person is doing just fine, leave them alone."
No, no one says 'this person is doing fine'. It's 'we're medical staff and we can't arrest people - they are clearly withholding consent, we can't do anything else'.
I've stayed with distressed homeless people trying to hurt themselves while social worker teams, cops and medical staff came to the scene; if the homeless individual doesn't want help and is not an active danger to others there's very very little that can be done to forcibly detain them.
> If the people advocating for the homeless and mentally ill have a better solution than leaving them on the streets to rot, then I would like ot hear it.
Fund shelters and support groups well enough that trying to get off the streets and get help doesn't require that you bunk next to someone who has a shiv and is experiencing a massive heroin withdrawl event while you try to sleep. There's a reason homeless people dodge a lot of so called 'help'. It's because the help is often worse than the alternative.
I've befriended and fed a certain individual in south San Jose who would stand on a the corner of Bernal and Santa Theresa and yell at the air. Anyone familiar with the area knows who I am talking about.
He is extremely lucid most of the time. And a very grateful and warm hearted individual. But he cannot for the life of him access any services, food stamps or healthcare or anything. The police can't even help him. They all know him. No one seems to be able to help him. I've fed him and been his friend, I don't know what else I can do.
>Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away".
Because an admission could be used against you in future litigation, thus defeating the purpose of settling in the first place. Settlement functions as a method of allowing litigants to liquidate their conflicts without wasting court resources and expending exorbitant amounts of money going through all steps of the court mandated conflict resolution procedure.
Even if you don't agree that you are at fault, there is some chance that a judge may not agree with you. If you think that chance is 10%, and the suit is worth 100M + you expect to pay 20M in fees, wouldn't it make sense for you to settle for 10M? Regardless of how the case turns out, you're 10M ahead of your anticipated fee spend and 20M ahead of your risk adjusted expected result, and the other side ends up with the risk adjusted value of their claim.
There is a risk that settling sweeps chronic, bad behavior under the rug. Which is especially bad when powerful actors can use settlement to coerce victims into hiding the truth, and enabling future bad behaviors.
Sure, I think it's clear that settlements work from a game theory perspective, in the sense that two rational actors working for their own best interest can accept one.
But the larger question is about whether this state of affairs is good for society. As citizens of a democracy, we (theoretically) get to have a say in how courts are run, and if the way the courts are run permits wealthy corporations to buy their way of repeated violations and be utterly unrepentant about it, maybe the rules need re-examining.
> As citizens of a democracy, we (theoretically) get to have a say in how courts are run
That’s not the point of civil cases between 2 private parties.
If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation. (Or whichever process your country uses).
Not every proceeding has to be about deciding good vs evil. Things have their place.
That is what the comment is talking about. It says "maybe the rules need re-examining". That is not about a particular civil case. That is proposing exactly what you are saying.
> If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation.
Or they also can post publicly on a forum where people discuss things. Such as this one. As such raising awareness about the issue by bringing it into the public consciousness, thus making it vastly more likely that the issue will be addressed.
You are acting as if that is not a valid use of this forum. As if private letters to your congress person are the only permissible avenue to discuss issues like this.
"You are acting as if that is not a valid use of this forum."
I didn't read it that way. GP wasn't suggesting calling a congressman as an alternative to posting on a forum, but as an alternative to a civil suit.
AIUI their point is that the purpose of civil suits is to settle disputes between two parties and (unlike calling your congressman) not about establishing laws defining good and bad.
You neglect that civil trials often result in relevant case law, which benefits society when similar actionable events occur. This is a clear benefit to society which settling cases destroys. Legislation is the start of the law, judicial interpretation is the implementation and will of it. This too applies to civil cases to which the state is a party - if you want to avoid any possibility of creating case law, binding arbitration is what you desire. If you want the power and will of the people to solve and enforce the solution to your civil problem, you owe the people something also.
Settled out of court does not mean not involving the court or using those resources - of course the use of the court and those resources is a strong means of coercing parties and, as such, yes they very much have used the courts' resources to secure a settlement instead of a judgement. Be it settlement or judgement, they will again use those resources if the party who settled or was judged violates that contract and or judgement. It's not nearly as simple as you suggest.
Settlements apply to anyone who could be a potential victim and strip them of their rights to sue, unless they opt out (this is insane to me!). So in this case the lawsuit filers settling actually does enforce bad behavior for society at large.
> Settlements apply to anyone who could be a potential victim and strip them of their rights to sue, unless they opt out (this is insane to me!).
How would you solve the problem that class action suits are trying to solve while fixing the problem that someone else might end up speaking for you without you wanting them to? Note that this feature isn't specific to settlements; it also happens with judgments.
Direct government intervention seems like a better solution to most class action lawsuits.
Company causes significant harm to millions of people, gets shut down or massive fines seems like a better solution than having them send out a token payment vastly smaller than the harm caused. The first is an existential threat, the second just becomes the cost of doing business.
Class action lawsuits sit in a strange middle ground where reputation damage isn’t enough but the government doesn’t care or the penalties are too small.
This is the issue though with these large companies. They have such immense wealth and power in the courts that they're basically untouchable. They do what they want and then pay people off without ever admitting guilt to make the flies go away.
>It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public
One of the historical high watermarks in legal history is the existence of the twelve tables, a highly condensed, shortened version of roman law which was prominently displayed in public market places and other easily accessible fora - specifically to allow non-patricians to understand and have access to the law.
Other moments in legal history have ruling classes enacting legislation in languages which the common-folk don't even speak.
We exist along a spectrum between 'everyone knows and understands' to 'nearly no one knows and understands', but don't take the difficulty of fixing the issue with the idea that it isn't a problem in the first place. It is a problem, and it's a large one.
I'm not going to discuss any of the tie-ins with capitalism, because frankly I don't care to, but I'm going to point out that as a historical note this is not an accurate representation of legal history. In fact it largely ignores it.
Our current system of real property ownership is a result of adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments on land during the advent of industrialization. The 'fee' in fee simple is etyomologically derived from 'fief', a system in which land titles were granted to people in exchange for fealty and servility.
Agrarian societies had significantly different needs and organized their affairs differently and they didn't starve during the winters. Except for those that did, like the settlers in iceland, who died from potentially too many property rights as landholdings became concentrated in the hands of a few small families which left their society brittle enough to be wiped out by inuit raids.
Anyways, the naturalistic fallacy isn't good support for current property rights, which are about as artificial as any law gets.
> adopting feudal legal structures to the growing need of society to build durable capital investments
I would agree with the former, and not the latter. As soon as dispute resolution and contract negotiation became sufficiently formalized, and our societies became sufficiently nonviolent, a class of people emerges who are able to accumulate capital legitimately (merchants, bankers, landowners). This all happens prior to any sort of industrialization, and can rather be seen as a prerequisite for it. Nowhere is this more clear than in Edo Japan, which was hardly industrialized, yet saw the emergence of a wealthy merchant class due to the legal structures which protected their assets from arbitrary seizure and redistribution. Wealthy non-ruling classes also existed all over Europe prior to industrialization.
> the naturalistic fallacy
The assertion that property rights ought to exist isn't a naturalistic one. I was simply pointing out that property rights are hardly a new development in civilization. Property rights can be asserted morally, without any naturalism, by equating the outputs of one's labour with an extension of one's self. If you have produced something for yourself, with your own time and labour, it should be yours do dispense with as you see fit, in the same way that your body is. A claim over one's property must therefore be justified as though it were a claim over one's own person, and this rather reduces the scope of legitimate claims.
Both neoliberal and classical definitions of capital make it nearly tautologically required as an input for production. 'Wealth' and 'Capital' aren't the same thing.
Yes, but the assertion is that so much capital is required that it's a barrier to starting a business. And that's just not true. It is definitely possible to bootstrap a small business, and there are many government programs available to help. The bigger barrier, in my opinion, is an appetite for risk. In that capacity, America is definitely following in Europe's footsteps.
Capital isn’t the only thing that prevents workers from starting companies.
Vision, good ideas, the ability to inspire, bringing people together, luck, etc. all factor in. To single out capital is to say if anyone has money they will be able to start a successful business.
>I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life.
Well, there's clearly a spectrum between 'the government controls everything' and 'it's legal to release chlorine gas into the vents of buildings'.
The bigger question should be whether or not it's a good idea for government to intervene in this issue with some specific policy rather than litigating whether or not government should be able to exercise any power at all. Is the concept of air quality regulation inherently dystopic?
More like - is the government even capable of the outcomes it wants?
COVID hit. Millions of americans, primarily obese, with multiple comorbidities, died.
The government closed gyms and kept mcdonalds open.
If the government instead forced everyone to go to the gym once a week instead of wearing masks, we'd solve the health crises of our lifetimes and had fewer deaths.
All of the above.
Don't take this as a slam, but given your responses in this thread, it's probably a good idea to get a primer about how anticompetitive practices work.