I remember seeing discourse recently saying telomere shortening is a side effect more than a cause of aging as a function and happens as a function of DNA damage. Important to consider
I see so many people arguing against the effectiveness of propaganda as if they think an opinion is arrived at deterministically with the same access to facts. Utterly insane.
I don’t care how effective propaganda is, I am in a liberal democratic society and should be able to read what I want. Outcome-based reasoning for why I should have my reading restricted so I vote for the apriori correct things is entirely illiberal and anti-democratic.
J.S. Mill decided these arguments over 150 years ago and the arguments since have not gotten more compelling.
Your understanding of the situation is incredibly naive. TikTok can selectively suppress or emphasize viewpoints that are geopolitically advantageous to China that are not as overt as "China GOOD!" or whatever you imagine propaganda to be.
Surely you can't think propaganda is just spreading lies... Contextual presentation can change how true information is perceived. Seeing a perspective more will align your own with it.
I know of many instances in which Meta suppressed specific opinions, but I don't know any of TikTok doing the same thing. Examples are welcome, if you have any.
Or is this just about Tiktok not being owned by a billionaire who will use censorship to keep the USA government happy?
Is this a serious question? China has its best interests in mind, the US government has its best interests in mind. Which one of those two adversaries are more likely to align with your interests?
Why do we have to choose one? I'm not going to trust US-owned media on the topic of Israel and Palestine, I'm not going to trust Russian media on Ukraine, or Chinese media on Taiwan.
By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of "national security" you're creating blind spots that allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned from history but maybe I was wrong.
I honestly believe the answer is China—by living in the US, its interests and my own are more likely to come into conflict, whereas China’s interests are more likely irrelevant to me.
Huh. What are your interests? I'm curious why you think they would come in conflict with those of the US.
I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.
The US government generally works to maintain harmful institutions like health insurance, gun manufacturing, prisons and policing, etc., and will oppose me through violence if I work to weaken these. They can restrict my access to things online and control what online services I can run via laws like SESTA/FOSTA and this TikTok ban. China can't do any of that to me. I'm less concerned about geopolitics given our massive military and the position of the dollar, not to mention our cultural influence via the Internet (which bans like this directly weaken).
The issue isn't surveillance, it's the ability for China to 'put their thumb on the scale' of the black box algorithm responsible for populating every user's feed to emphasize or de-emphasize topics/ideas that are strategically beneficial to China, and bad for us. This is not hypothetical, this is happening, and has been happening.
Ok, I can accept that that kind of downweighting or delisting of inconvenient posts is definitely suboptimal, sure.
Does that mean we’re all going to sleepwalk into quoting from The Governance of China? Unless our congress sees us all as dangerously impressionable morons - which I actually seem to think is their opinion of us more and more.. - who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations… well excuse me for thinking that that is more than a little patronizing.
Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here…?
- China, if for every 100 Hong Kong related posts on Instagram there are only 0.7 posts on TikTok, or
- USA: delete every single post about every topic.
Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here? Really? The possibility that, just maybe, you might be served a video that would embarrass the CCP once in every 500 videos instead of every 100 videos… therefore you are not allowed to view the 499 other videos - no matter what they may have meant to you, or what value you might have derived from them, or what new connections or community you may have been building… well gee, thanks, I guess.
I have to say that when I came across this bit from that article:
“The move resembled a classic strategy of authoritarian governments: burying inconvenient information.”
the sheer lack of awareness of the irony had my eyes just about nearly rolling out of their sockets. If that’s the case then I can’t think of a single more authoritarian move Congress could make than just nuking TikTok outright since it poses an inconvenience for congress? Am I just taking crazy pills here??
Note: whether or not this all ends up being the right or wise move on the state, is not even the place I am really coming from here. It’s just that I haven’t heard a single justification for this ban that actually didn’t either just immediately fall apart under its own internal logical inconsistencies or otherwise just give the impression of a lazy half measure, or possibly blatant corruption, by being such a selective application of law.
In other words, yet more bad law by lawmakers who don’t care about getting it right. Nor will they be the ones to clean up their mess, if it ever does get cleaned up, by setting this precedent.
> who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations
I think it's easy to be insulted by this perspective if you spend too much of your time surrounded by people who fall more than one standard deviation to the right on the intelligence bell curve. 84% of people are to the left of that, and can vote.
> Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here
The expression "putting their thumb on the scale" means influencing subtly and deceitfully, so China. I chose this expression intentionally.
> Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here
Nowhere did I mention censorship. Its not merely about suppressing perspectives, it's about influencing them. Hong Kong is too obvious-- what about amplifying anti-AI sentiment to increase regulation and hobble AI progress in the US, giving a decisive advantage to China in the AI arms race? Amplifying anti-nuclear energy sentiment, to erode US energy security and create economic advantages for the Chinese solar industry?
I do agree w.r.t. the messiness of precedent, though.
...What? There is a spectrum of importance to national security, food and energy are very much on the side of more important, so not sure why you chose those as an example. It's extremely reductive to say any country that imposes limits on trade for its own strategic benefit is an autocracy.
Autarky, not autocracy. It’s an economic goal of having an economy that can continue to operate fairly well even if foreign trade is restricted. It’s associated (perhaps not exclusively) with fascist movements, which emphasized national independence from the broader world.
(I don’t agree that hedging against potential action by a single major strategic adversary is a strong move toward autarky, however—if, say, Canada had tons of fabs instead of the precariously-perched Taiwan, I bet we’d not be spending so much money on them)
Not having your country days away from starving if international shipping were disrupted isn't fascism, it's just common sense. Every country that can practically manage to have sufficient domestic food production will do so.
Meh. People still do athletics competitions even though cars exist and can outpace any human. Weightlifting is also still a thing even though even an entry-level forklift beats any human weightlifter. Chess is more popular than ever before, even though nobody has any hope of beating a computer anymore.
Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point.
I don't think the unaugmented qualifier is accurate. What matters is that there are well-established rules defining scope. People racing cars is still a very widely enjoyed form of entertainment.
> Out of all the fields that human do professionally, sports will be one of the last ones to disappear. The fact that it is (unaugmented) humans competing is the entire point.
This is my thought/hope for what we'll expect in the coming years as AI's automation becomes more commonplace. Society's interests will start going towards activities that showcase human ability - sports, livestreaming (very much its own industry now, but mostly for socializing, art, and gaming), performance, dance, etc. Sure AI can 'do' these things, but not at the level elite performers can or with the subtle nuisances in human personalities.
Even in the future when the AI is provide everything and we are no longer able to understand it, humans will be doing human competitions, playing chess, etc... The human on human action will be only thing left, and only thing humans care about. Chess is already unwinnable, but humans still want to measure themselves against other humans.
Chess, Go, what next? Pizza delivery? Accountant Simulator? Humans are already being outclassed one feature at a time.
