Category: Article Share
Bernardo Kastrup on Universal Mind, Artificial Sentience, the Great Void, and the Universe’s Telos
What the Twitter files don’t tell us
“journalists Weiss and Taibbi shared details of some of the documents and their own analysis in two long Twitter threads. The revelations are ongoing, with plans to post more in the coming days. Their central accusation so far is that Twitter has long silenced conservative or contrarian voices, and they reference internal emails, Slack messages, and content moderation systems to show how Twitter limited the reach of popular right-wing accounts like Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, and Libs of TikTok.
But these claims and the internal documents lack crucial context.
We don’t have a full explanation, for example, of why Twitter limited the reach of these accounts — i.e., whether they were violating the platform’s rules on hate speech, health misinformation, or violent content. Without this information, we don’t know whether these rules were applied fairly or not. Twitter has long acknowledged that it sometimes downranks content that is violative of its rules instead of all-out banning it. It’s a strategy that Musk himself has advocated for by arguing that people should have “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” on the platform.
And while Weiss has surfaced specific examples of Twitter limiting the reach of conservative accounts known for spreading hateful content about the LGTBQ+ community or sharing the “big lie” about the US presidential elections, we don’t know if Twitter did the same for some far-left accounts that have also been known for pushing boundaries, such as some former Occupy movement leaders who have complained about Twitter’s content moderation in the past.
Musk, Weiss, and Taibbi are also assuming these decisions were made with explicit political motivation. Historically, most Twitter employees — like the rest of Big Tech — lean liberal. Twitter’s conservative critics argue that this presents an inherent bias in the company’s content moderation decisions. Former Twitter employees Recode spoke with this week insisted that content moderation teams operate in good faith to execute on Twitter’s policy rules, regardless of personal politics. And research shows that Twitter’s recommendation algorithms actually have an inherent bias in favor of right-wing news. What’s been shared so far in the Twitter files doesn’t offer clear proof that anyone at Twitter made decisions about specific accounts or tweets because of their political affiliation. We need more context and information to clarify what’s really going on here.
But to right-wing politicians, influencers, and their supporters, none of this nuance ultimately matters.”
Iran’s months-long protest movement, explained
“the Islamic Republic, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, executed 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari for the crime of “waging war against God,” or moharebeh in Farsi.
Shekari was the first prisoner to be executed due to the recent unrest, in what Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, head of the Norway-based organization Iran Human Rights, characterized as a “show trial without any due process.”
With Shekari’s execution — likely the first of dozens — the Iranian regime is reverting to a tried and tested playbook of executing political opponents and dissidents. But it’s not clear that the mass imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and further possible state-sanctioned executions will deter the protesters who have for more than two months now defied crackdowns and curfews to call for an end to Khamenei’s regime.
It’s also not clear what success looks like for the protesters should they somehow manage to topple the regime that’s had an iron grip on the nation since the 1979 revolution — or how they would manage to do so in the first place.
The inciting spark for the now 11-week-long protests was the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16 while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Amini, a 21-year old Kurdish woman, was arrested while in Tehran for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly; since her death, she has become a potent symbol of many Iranians’ contempt for the country’s oppressive theocracy.
The protests have gained momentum since they began in Amini’s hometown of Saqez, in Iranian Kurdistan, appearing in dozens of cities throughout the Islamic Republic despite the government’s efforts — including internet and mobile network disruptions, mass arrests, and civilian killings — to quash them.
There are some ways this protest echoes past movements, but there are also key differences — not just the longevity, but the degree of societal cohesion and solidarity, too. Women have led and become the public face of this movement — a particularly notable fact in 2022, given the ways that women have been repressed under the current regime.
All of that, however, doesn’t mean that this movement will bring down the Islamic Republic; decades of repression, a poor economic outlook, extremely limited opposition in the political establishment, plus the fact that the military and security service as well as the economic elite continue to throw their lot in with the regime make it difficult to imagine an alternative vision for the future of Iran.”
A Lame-Duck Congress Should Reject the Extended Child Tax Credit
The Labor Market Is Broken
“labor force participation remains stubbornly low, with only 62.3 percent of the civilian population working or actively looking for work—well below pre-pandemic levels. And even before the pandemic, that figure had been steadily declining for years.”
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“the largest component of the most recent reduction appears to be older people who took retirement early and/or previous retirees who have not rejoined the work force at the rates they once did. This trend may well reverse itself if the stock market continues to decline and retirement accounts evaporate, but for now it looks like baby boomers turning on, tuning in, and dropping out—however belatedly—are at least as much of a labor force problem as wayward youths.”
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“”The process of contracting a worker is often close to ultimatum bargaining,” explained Elwyn Davies (then with the University of Oxford) and Stanford University’s Marcel Fafchamps in a 2016 paper exploring the effects of competition on behavior within the ultimatum game. “The employer specifies a job description and proposes a wage and the worker accepts or rejects.
So if employment is an ultimatum game—where playing along might get workers less than employers, but refusing to play gets everyone zero—what is causing the perception that the terms of employment are no longer worth accepting, even when both parties would benefit?
Positive views of capitalism more generally have slipped since 2019, with 39 percent expressing negative views in an August Gallup poll. Another Gallup poll found an uptick of 3 percentage points in people who say they are “completely dissatisfied” with their jobs, while the number of people who were “completely satisfied” fell 8 points.
The perception that conventional jobs are essentially offering workers a pittance while greedily holding back the bulk of the wealth is common in places like the r/antiwork subreddit, which has 2.3 million members. In fact, there’s at least one discussion of the ultimatum game itself on that subreddit, which pulls some figures on companies’ revenue vs. worker compensation and concludes: “If working for Apple was the ultimatum game, the proposer just got $100. They’re offering you 23 [cents], and they keep $99.77. Deal or no deal?” The relative sizes of these numbers might also explain why simply raising wages hasn’t brought people into the workforce, especially when paired with increased awareness of and dissatisfaction with the gap between CEO pay and worker pay in large corporations.”
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“Right now there’s something broken in our economy that is preventing employers and employees from cooperating with each other. The result is that too few deals are being struck and everyone is suffering. The challenge ahead is how to rebuild a sense that the game is fair and everyone is playing in good faith.”