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Aaron Swartz fought to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.

What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.

In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.

> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).

A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

I'm curious what history Jack Clark is referring to here.

If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.

That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.

> is it not reasonable to assume that the number of security flaws just reflects how insecure most public code is?

It sounds to me like that's not an inference that can easily be drawn. Copilot was trained on predicting code, it doesn't understand the code it produces syntactically. Security issues can be highly context dependent. For example, in most cases it's fine to log a variable, but when it happens to contain a password, it's a security issue. This is a flawed example as the algorithm may be able to learn that variables with names or contexts suggesting that they're secrets should not be logged, but I can imagine much more subtle issues can crop up.

There needn't even be a confounding variable, the direction of causation may simply be reversed: not personality traits -> superager, but superager -> personality traits.

Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.

Right, but a well trained ear is exactly what those who don't focus on reading music tend to have ("instead" I might add since someone focusing on reading music doesn't necessarily need to understand it, although understanding of course helps a great deal).

It's interesting that you talk about replicating pieces. This is a "peculiarly Western" way of treating musicianship (and even in the Western world it applies primarily to classical musicians). In most of the world, musicianship is first and foremost judged by ability to improvise and to perform an orally transmitted repertoire of music. Music tends to be made in an improvisatory manner, but within the rules and constraints of a particular style.

It really depends on what kind of musician you want to be. Do you want to play Western classical music, or professionally in recording studios then reading is probably essential. If you just want to make music, it might still be handy and practical but by no means required.

They carry incomparable levels of responsibility

Similar false friends in Dutch: Concurrentie

I really don't see how it matters. It is this specific comment that is going to "manipulate" you into donating? The disaster happened. Stories as told in this comment happened. The hospital exists, it was severely damaged. In that context, does it really matter whether this person is speaking the truth?

I assume you mean hands off approach?

Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?

While peer review has its problems, I have the feeling that the problems that we're talking about here are not primarily caused by peer review per se, but by a set of perverse incentives that surround academia these days. I'm talking about the "publish or perish" culture that is results from the (sometimes) automated metrics based on which promotions are decided, grants are handed out and academic staff is assessed. Isn't it these incentives that can create attitudes like "Who cares? It's one more publication!" (as quoted by another commenter in this thread). And isn't an overwhelming amount of mediocre journal submissions that result from this one of the reasons peer review is under pressure, qualified reviewers are rare and politics are so common?

But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence since we obviously can't change the past.

> Slavery was enforced (and subsidized) by many governments; it wasn't exactly a creature of the free market.

Chicken or egg. You can make this argument either way. The fact is that slavery has been around for a lot longer than the governments that "enforced" it and it eventually took governments to abolish it completely.

> As we saw with toilet paper (and hand sanitizer), the average person will hoard anything they are afraid will not be available tomorrow. Companies have shown more restraint in this crisis and others.

Luckily in a well functioning democracy it would not be the toilet paper hoarders that'd be charged with coming up with ethical legislation.

It's not either or. Legislation doesn't solve everything, but neither does a completely free market (which doesn't and couldn't exist anyway).

> If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the action would have been seen as an overreaction.

I admire your optimism, but I don't share it. Many are right now (and have been for decennia) foreseeing catastrophic effects of climate change (floodings, mass migration, disruption of ecosystems) and yet we fail to act. Health experts have apparently warned for years that we're not prepared for a pandemic (I believe they recently discussed this in NYT Daily https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/podcasts/the-daily/corona...). An additional problem is, like the other commenter points out, that many people see many crises coming all the time and there's no objective way to tell who's right and who isn't.

> "It all boils down to this philosophical question: Are humans special? Do they have parts of their brain predestined to become these special things?" Livingstone says. "Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals?"

I found this remark by Margaret Livingstone, quoted in the article, very surprising. What if anything does innate functional specialization have to do with whether "humans are special"? How does the presence of such specialization distinguish us from "lower animals"?

Perhaps the reasoning goes that what might make humans special is the presence of human-specific innate specialized brain mechanisms. But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". We know brains are highly context sensitive and plastic, and judging by Livingstone's earlier quote, she agrees. So why is the charged question of human exceptionalism (which she already seems to accept given the reference "lower animals") suddenly linked so strongly to the presence of innate specialization?

Mass consumption and CO2 emissions aren't independent problems. It already is an insurmountable challenge to meet current energy demands with green energy. Producing things costs energy, energy costs CO2. Producing things in a carbon-neutral way still requires energy and that energy could have more usefully been spent to replace carbon non-neutral energy.

There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.

I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.

I think this is absolutely right. I've heard people on this website wondering why climate change and plastic soup are seen as the same problem. This is it. We live in an economy based on burning through huge amounts of resources and generating tons of waste. Climate change, plastic soup, and I dare say almost any other environmental problem are all consequences of this mentality. The economic cost of waste is way too low. This is really the fundamental problem.

> We're getting to the point where there really has to be a financial incentive to do a peer review

IMHO, a free book is an insulting and scientists shouldn't accept to do this work for commercial publishers for free to begin with.

I know many people feel it's their responsibility to provide "services to the community" which is great, but it's ridiculous that commercial publishers get to profit from this when they proceed to claim ownership of academic work and hide it from the public behind a paywall.

If they want to make money off research, fine. But reviewing costs time and money. Academic publishing may well turn out to be not so profitable anymore if reviewers have to be paid. Maybe then we can finally move to university-hosted open-access publishing.

You're criticizing this article for failing to meet standards it never purports to uphold. This is an essay / personal account of events, not journalism.

For an essay, in my opinion, it stays in rather neutral territory, making some uncontroversial observations that climate change is bad, that big oil plays a major role it, and expressing some enthusiasm for standing up against partnerships with big oil, but not otherwise making strong claims about what should be done.

I didn't study law, but as far as I understand, illegal is not the right word here. They (govt) do things for which there is no legal precedence all the time. The court could also have found no problem with these searches. Now that they did take issue with it if the searches would continue then yes, that would be illegal.

Surprisingly, what makes tones sound consonant is a matter of controversy in music perception research. The ratio between fundamental frequencies theory is most easily debunked: if that were true, equal temperament tuning would sound unbearable, but the over-tone matching theory is not confirmed either thus far.

In fact, here are two recent studies that suggest life-time exposure plays a significant role in the perception of consonance. If that's true your own judgement of consonance of two sounds is not a good evaluation of a theory of consonance, because that judgement may be shaped by your cultural exposure.

Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18635 pdf: http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/McDermott_etal_2016_conso...

Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609... (paywalled but sci-hub is your friend)

I see them both as symptoms of the same underlying problem: an economy based on generating enormous amounts of waste for short-term profit.

> It's like saying - there's a trained neural net with input

It's not. There's a world of difference between a neural net and a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are some our closest evolutionary relatives. They are living animals with whom we share a great deal of our DNA (98.8% seems to be an often quoted figure). Therefore, conclusions that are likely given the observation "neural net shows similar behavior to humans" are vastly different those given the observation "Chimpanzee shows similar behavior to humans".

> Are we morally obligated to not cut the nip of societal development in the bud for these species? And if this species suffers in developing and advancing, are we obligated to ease and accelerate their development?

Perhaps we can start by preventing their extinction by stopping the destruction of of their natural habitat.

The point that's missing from this discussion is that beavers have been building dams for an eternity because it's part of their natural behaviour. The ecosystem has had ample time to adapt to it. An ecosystem is a delicate balance between systems that results from these systems co-evolving in the same environment for millions of years. The systems (plants animals seasonal change, climate) are all highly fine tuned to each other. Yes, this balance is sometimes abruptly disturbed under "natural" circumstances, but this is rare. What humans are doing in the last couple hundreds of years involves much more sudden changes to which eco systems have no time to adapt. It's the suddenness of the changes what's unnatural about it. Whether you call it natural or not is besides the point though. The point is that human dam building is a phenomenon very different from beaver dam building because, besides scale and impact, it did not gradually co-evolve with an eco system, but is an abrupt and disruptive change.

That's because that's only half of Hill's argument. If you read on you'll see the main point is about the size of the largest groupings, which in humans appears larger than what has been found in Gorilla's to date.

> “[T]he extreme social brain hypothesis doesn’t claim other primates don’t form hierarchically increasing groupings,” Hill wrote in an email to Science. “It focuses on the size of the largest human groupings.” Humans recognize and remember details about more than 1000 individuals, he notes, whereas the “highest level groups in the gorillas are not even as big as large chimp communities.”

Independent of whether this is true (and I'm sceptical), Bitcoin mining requires computation (and lots of it). Computation requires power. Even if that power is renewable and would be difficult to use for things other than computation, there is still a huge demand for computation. Hence it's still a choice to spend that power on Bitcoin mining rather than other computation tasks such as simulations for scientific research.

Not to mention the difference in CO2 emissions.

Your post introduces an imaginary issue. The question is not whether a company "gets to decide social norms", the question is whether a company gets to decide whether it agrees with terms set by a government that conflict with the social norms of the company. The the answer to that question certainly is positive.

I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.