The region has remnants of socialist ideas.
The article, however, is indeed a puff piece on the vastly dominant economic theory, which is, as it turns out, not "fresh" at all.
I will say however that I think it's unfair to call professor Roy a neoliberal. Being a neoliberal is merely the expectation for most economic "theorists", but his vocal apologetics for imperalism and colonialism is not.
> Indian Marxists viciously attacked the CEHI, arguing the imperial state's aim was to extract surplus from India, that it withheld the capacity to do good in famines, and deployed the capacity to cause harm at all other times.
> In this void, blog and trade-book writers moved in with a leftist-nationalist political agenda posing as economic history. Most of their claims can be dismissed by subjecting them to the 1980s test: Can economic change be read as an effect of the Empire? The answer remains: No.
This is indeed a very powerful purity test, "Do your claim go against my utterly ahistorical narrative? If not, then I can comfortably dismiss them without addressing them."
> That India's trade surplus meant Britain looted India is bad logic because the surplus did not mean theft but the purchase of services. “Millions of Indians died of policy-induced famines” (Hickel) is bad logic by assuming infinite state capacity was deliberately withheld.
This one is quite rich aswell, it's just blunt unapologetic imperalism denial. It's bad logic because the logic bothers me.
I mean it just goes on and that's just his most recent tweets.
> You really cannot blame only the companies without blaming the consumers too.
Right, the problem is structural, but consumers for the most part aren't and can't realistically be in the know as to the horrible work conditions under which what they consume is produced, most of them aren't particularly happy with their own work conditions in the first place. And even if they do know (when the company has failed to hide it from them) they often don't have a choice. Consumers also don't lobby for worsening the conditions and abolishing the rights of workers. Companies on the other hand are almost always in the know, and choose not only to continue to benefit from this exploitation, but are also willing to go to tremendous lengths to hide, defend or expand this exploitation.
And yet neither of the parties are "evil", the most "enlightened" liberal will realize they both take part in the same economy and use that as a justification, but the consumer can not change this through their consumption (even an immortal, omniscient and perfectly rational economic agent straight out a neoclassical economic textbook would consider this an uphill battle) nor the producer through their production ("another will take my place" and so on).
Now to me if you (not you) recognize this, that the problem is inherently structural, but you're unwilling to criticize and rethink the structure, I have to assume the structure doesn't bother you all that much or worse, that you're a defeatist. Either way the good news is that there is an endless amount of other things to point your finger at (like China).
There is something western politicians can and should do to help working conditions outside the first world and it is exactly that: nothing.
I'd hope most people are familiar with the fact that the west, and specifically the CIA, later the NED and many different gov-backed orgs have been hard at work making sure the working conditions of those countries are either kept as exploitative as they are, or if possible made worse.
Of course China is a fairly specific case, and while there obviously have been numerous cases of interventionism (like in the Tian'anmen square riots or Taiwan as a whole) stopping the endless anti-Chinese propaganda couldn't hurt (which I'm not accusing this article of being).
It's absolutely obvious to everyone that the US and allies would jump at the first opportunity to meaningfully destabilize China's economy so, no, I certainly don't expect anything positive to be done for Chinese workers by western countries, and especially not by a country like the US that should very much look inwards when it comes to working conditions.
So you think AI will force a push out of economic growth? I'm really not sure how this makes sense. As you've said a lot of labor these day is mostly useless, but the reason it's still here is not ideological but because our economy can't survive without growth (useless can still have some market value, of course).
If you think that somehow AI displacing actual useful labor will create a big economic shift (as would be needed) I'd be curious to know what you think that shift would be.
Not at all. Machines can produce as much stuff as we can want. Humans can produce as much intellectual property as is desired. More, because they don't have to do bullshit jobs.
Maybe GDP will suffer but we've always known that was a mediocre metric at best. We already have doubts about the real value of intellectual property outside of artificial scarcity, which we maintain only because we still trade intellectual work for material goods which used to be scarce. That's only a fraction of the world economy already and it can very different in the future.
I have no idea what it'll be like when most people are free to do creative work when the average person doesn't produce anything anybody might want. But if they're happy I'm happy.
> but the reason it's still here is not ideological but because our economy can't survive without growth
Isn't this ideological though? The economy can definitely survive without growth, if we change from the idea that a human's existence needs to be justified by labor and move away from a capitalist mode of organization.
If your first thought is "gross, commies!" doesn't that just demonstrate that the issue is indeed ideological?
By "our economy" I meant capitalism. I was pointing out that I sincerely doubt that AI replacing existing useful labor (which it is doing and will keep doing, of course) will naturally transition us away from this mode of production.
Of course if you're a gross commie I'm sure you'd agree since AI, like any other mean of production, will remain first and foremost a tool in the hands of the dominant class, and while using AI for emancipation is possible, it won't happen naturally through the free market.
Poverty is not a mindset. But a particular mindset can lead one to poverty and keep them there.
Say, spending 3 hours to save $10 is usually a bad deal, that time can be invested much better. But if one keeps doing that, they end up in a situation where spending 3 hours for $10 is what they have to do, because they don't have a spare $10, and there are pressing needs.
It's a trap. But it ensnares you through a mindset, not through a want of $10 initially.
> if one keeps doing that, they end up in a situation where spending 3 hours for $10 is what they have to do, because they don't have a spare $10
To add to this: if one keeps doing that, or they're unlucky: Being born into the wrong family, or socioeconomic class. Being the victim of a crime. Having your transportation stolen or break down. Etc.
If spending that time causes you to lose your job then yes. I can only see that for addicts really. I guess you could be addicted to that pursuit though in a negative way. I wonder how Richard Thaler would see it. In that sense it probably is the same reward pathway in the brain. Interesting possibly worth a phd.
You can definitely become povertybrained. My heartrate gets over 120 any time I am buying something that costs more than ten dollars. And thanks to inflation, that's basically everything now. I know it's stupid, but I guess we all came from somewhere.
Well… true poverty is a real thing. But there is a view that you are poor even when you just don’t have as much as others. There are people who get pay rises (significant ones) and who find they are still poor.
There is a mindset to some degree with feelings of poverty. Though, yes, real poverty is a reality.
Attempts to manipulate public perception are usually launched as campaigns with lots of content pushing the same message, often in different ways. In the case of mass media, for example, you could detect manipulation efforts by finding commonalities across multiple articles from one media outlet or by finding commonalities across multiple media outlets. It's possible you could distill this down to something like "From October 14 through October 23, content from media outlets X, Y, and Z seem to be correlated and are pushing the same message, and that message is ---".
Having that knowledge would be extremely powerful, effectively neutering manipulation efforts by identifying them as such. A person is far less susceptible to manipulation if they are aware of the belief that the manipulator is attempting to instill in their mind.
In reality you can't, but most people seem to think you can. It can be enraging trying to debate things even on HN because people often ignore the actual content of what you're saying and try to figure out what you secretly think or meant. My guess is the way people "accomplish" this with AI is by training it to make major assumptions based on other things. It will have an abysmal error rate (just like it does now) but the vast majority of people won't ever notice, and the person speaking will never even know they were censored, let alone have a chance at clarification or God forbid, explaining the nuance.
You should be able to build a profile of a person based on adtech, credit score, and social credit score/surveillance. With enough data on everyone we could easily determine intent with AI.
Though for some reason minorities always have questionable intentions, but whatever, it’s basically a utopia already.
I understand that the blacklist is probably just an example of things to hide, but it's interesting to note that if the filter was effective, it would block literally any and all content, including information criticizing and fighting against the nefarious media manipulation highlighted in this repo, but also the repo itself.
(note: this comment has a strong political bias, may reduce your lifespan, and the note you're reading might be considered "meme" content)
edit: Okay maybe it's not that interesting and that's the exact point the project was trying to make by showing censorship of Assange's tweets and I feel stupid.
A more political piece of media isn't necessarily less honest or more manipulative. Similarly, a very supposedly "neutral, both-sides" opinion can be very manipulative. The best thing you might be able to do is filter out specific hand-picked subjects (like other commenters said QAnon or specific conspiracies), but I doubt you need more than basic keyword matching for that. Anything further feels to me like you're just tightening an echo-chamber.
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?
Is it really? This is definitely not the point of the article, which talk about the bias that people grow more conservative when that is at least partially explained by a survivor bias.
You decide to read this as "white people bad", when the article simply highlights some democratic bias that isn't talked about that often, and I think your reaction says more about your own obsidional way of thinking than the author's.
> And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?
Can you please for the love of god point to me where in this article it's said that more diversity is an ontological good? Are we reading a different article altogether?
> Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich through capitalism
Sounds to me like you're describing a system that fatally tethers individuals to profit motive, and technological advancement to the good will of a few, rather than something that magically allows for great projects to exist.
Damn those two links you sent are actually insane, on the drag queen one I would really like the person posting the tweet to say what they believe the AI should respond to "are drag queens telling stories to children bad". Something tells me it's gonna be pretty unhinged and betray the author's bias way more than ChatGPT bias, but looking at any of his other tweets, his own obsessions are in plain sight (despite them calling themselves "raging centrist", whatever that means).
The second is even more insane, where the author literally grades the answer as fitting or not to his own ideology, and not some kind of unbiased opinion. When the AI refuses to answer it gets graded C, when it does answer because it's largely a statement the vast majority of the population would agree with, it gets graded C. Should ChatGPT measure its answer on "Was Hitler bad" with all the examples of good and nice things he did?
Regardless, clearly neither of these authors are looking for an unbiased opinion, and they're all terribly misguided in thinking that there is a "neutral" position on matters of human society. What on earth is a "neutral" position on women's right, gay marriage, imperialism?
I did some of my own tests with at least neutral statements, and then attempting to steer ChatGPT towards my own ideology, and it acted unbiased (giving definition when asked opinion on questions actually subject to debate, and vague informations with no conclusion when asking about historical unknowns).
I will say however that I think it's unfair to call professor Roy a neoliberal. Being a neoliberal is merely the expectation for most economic "theorists", but his vocal apologetics for imperalism and colonialism is not.
> Indian Marxists viciously attacked the CEHI, arguing the imperial state's aim was to extract surplus from India, that it withheld the capacity to do good in famines, and deployed the capacity to cause harm at all other times.
> In this void, blog and trade-book writers moved in with a leftist-nationalist political agenda posing as economic history. Most of their claims can be dismissed by subjecting them to the 1980s test: Can economic change be read as an effect of the Empire? The answer remains: No.
This is indeed a very powerful purity test, "Do your claim go against my utterly ahistorical narrative? If not, then I can comfortably dismiss them without addressing them."
> That India's trade surplus meant Britain looted India is bad logic because the surplus did not mean theft but the purchase of services. “Millions of Indians died of policy-induced famines” (Hickel) is bad logic by assuming infinite state capacity was deliberately withheld.
This one is quite rich aswell, it's just blunt unapologetic imperalism denial. It's bad logic because the logic bothers me.
I mean it just goes on and that's just his most recent tweets.