There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers.
Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.
I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad.
We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.
Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
Awesome!
But, looking at the numbers the decrease in totals are due to fewer registered "street crimes", less fraud and legalization of cannabis (removing a 183k comparable from 2016).
Violent crimes however went from 193,542 to 212,335. With rapes almost doubling, going from 7,919 to 14,454 (82%). Murders remained stable though.
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem.
I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair
Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.
Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.
But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".
It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
> But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not
that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not just a race to the bottom. The idea of a free for all market is an utopia that doesn't exist ... thankfully.
He's stating a fact that you don't dispute.
You follow up with hyperbolic language; "eating rotten food" (as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety).
In a market that has been designed to let people take part in voluntary transactions, we also design methods for making sure that the counterpart takes responsibility, and delivers the agreed amount quality of product.
If you purchase a car that won't turn on, you're in your good right to make a claim against the producer. Same for all the other things you mention. And people do.
You're making a point about negative externalities. Agreed that a factory shouldn't just be able to poison a river, because there's no tangible cost to piping your dirty water to one. Here it makes sense to make artificial interventions, in my opinion.
I never tried to dispute the fact, I'm disputing the idea that we should be free to opt out of benefits that have been agreed as the minimum requirements to do business in a society. I would actually go further and argue that allowing that freedom would lead to everyone being worse off. Having minimum standards in a society gives a solid foundation on which to build, can't think of any society that doesn't have them.
A way more interesting conversation would be where to regulate, how much, for how long, what impacts would it have in innovation, etc not that I want to be free to get sold broken goods.
> as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety
How would you know they disregard food safety if there's no regulation on what food safety means?
The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.
You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.
The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.
The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.
Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.
I went to California earlier this year.
In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be.
It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good.
It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.
I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
I’m not sure that’s a function of regulation but more a function of most modern freezers defaulting to -18°, where an American or industrial freezer is -22 to -28°C.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
And it's not as if there aren't a bunch of somewhat arbitrary regulation in the US either.
But the general sense I got from the US, was that people still feel agency to improve their reality, and that there's fewer artificial barriers to that end.
(Except for building houses in California. omg. That sounds like a horrible horrible process. At least for those I spoke to).
I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith.
I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.
Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
- the overregulation narrative conflates two different problems
- and that you minimized too much the consumer benefits of EU legislation
I think the overregulation problem olis less that we have 200 EU regulations and we need to hack and slash 100 of them and more that we have 100 national regulations 25 are exact transcriptions of EU directives, 25 are transcriptions with tweaks and the other 50 are national scoped regulations and what we need to do is to make them uniform so that companies don't have to deal with 27x75 problems.
I'm a bit burned by politicians using the overregulation narrative and then not specifying a single example of a meaningfull rule that they would get rid of. Usually what is left in the air is that worker rights and consumer rights should be cut.
That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here.
As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.
You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)
Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions?
Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another.
Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head.
Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.
I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it.
I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.
> (48) The extent of the adverse impact caused by the AI system on the fundamental rights protected by the Charter is of particular relevance when classifying an AI system as high risk. Those rights include the right to human dignity, respect for private and family life, protection of personal data, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and of association, the right to non-discrimination, the right to education, consumer protection, workers’ rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, intellectual property rights, the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the right of defence and the presumption of innocence, and the right to good administration. [...]
> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,
> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.
> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy
I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.
I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative.
Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't).
I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
I've experienced something similar, I still think the quote works -
If you can explain difficult concepts well, it's a demonstration of true understanding. Not that poor communication demonstrates lack of it.
Oh but I think it can demonstrate the lack of it. There's a distinct difference between learning by memory and learning by understanding, and the only indicator is being able to explain it in a novel way. After all you can also memorize someone else's explanation. In practice, being able to explain it is the only actual difference, if you can't then it's the same as not understanding it and the burden of proof is on the one claiming otherwise. That's the approach upon which the world's education is generally built.
You can do things extremely well without having the foggiest about the actual underlying principles, just from observations and intuition. Doubly so if the process can be machine automated, which by this point encompasses nearly everything to some extent. Sufficiently advanced overfitting is indistinguishable from generalization.
For some tasks, this is absolutely true. We can identify e.g. a dog in picture in 100ms or so, and nobody is capable of explaining how. We can understand and speak languages, without the slightest idea of how it works. Maths is of course not comparable to these cognitive functions, but people with high levels of expertise do have a lot of their knowledge "automated", and not open to introspection.
You can also understand the very simple basic essence of something, but get lost in the complexity when scaling up.
Binary is very simple, but scaled up: look what we've created with software.
When it comes to explanation: pulling from rote memory, requires someone to attempt to hold all the short-term details in mind.
There are biological limitations to how well we can do this, but we can also exercise our brains to improve this ability.
But when something is deeply learned, in long-term memory, the effort of recall is much less than rote memory of short-term details. Our context window is limited, fills up, and we must recover. When you're remembering long-term details, context seems easier to swap in and out (sorry to sound like an LLM, but they do simulate thinking).
Whether or not someone is a master of any given domain of knowledge comes from demonstration. Maybe that is teaching the essence of a subject in a way that demonstrates you can visualize and move around the subject with ease. Or maybe you can create something very useful, or tasteful.
We accept that you have spent time in this area and probably can revral truth to us. You are credible.
If you can't demonstrate mastery through teaching, exchanging ideas to bring me closer to your level: them other forms of credentials are sought: like how well they code, or how useful their products become.
But life isn't about usefulness and will just lead to unhappiness. Just be the best version of yourself you can be. Life is too much to understand all at once.
Expert mathematicians may not be able to explain how they find a proof of a difficult mathematical statement, but once a correct proof is found, it can be, with sufficient work, be formalized (most mathematicians don't do this part). This formal proof can be mechanicaly checked, without any creativity, step-by-step according to the axioms and inference rules of a mathematical logic.
Up to the limits of the Goedels incompletness theorem.
Dependenting on the used notation the formal proof can be very long. For example, Principia Mathematica took about 300 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2.
It doesn't matter if you can explain it in a novel way if your novel way doesn't correspond to your listener's ability. So it is possible they can explain it in a different way but still don't know how to explain it in a way that their listener can gain understanding from it.
For every time the EU implements a new regulation... and sees it fail horribly... it seems as if their collective minds concludes that the reason is for not having even more central control.
Soon we will have our own, European, Gosplan. Comrades.
> I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controlled environments
I've thought a little about this.
First: I don't believe that you can have bottom-up autonomy, without taking clear responsibility over outcomes.
Previously the main bottleneck in engineering orgs has been figuring out scaling and reliability. So you could own the outcome of "99.99%" and everyone was happy.
But I think the bottlenecks in the orgs have changed. Partly due to increased productivity, and lower barriers to solve previously hard problems (thanks to good old AI), and partly due to shift in focus from maintenance of a product, to feeling forced to think about "which AI-native company/product will eat us next quarter".
Some of this shift is towards product. Like... what does a great product in market x look like given the condition that we now have cheap and good AI models? Should it be different?
These aren't engineering questions... unless you want to dip your toes in the business/management/product side of things (which I 100% think engineers should do!).
But it requires you to go from owning the 99.99% outcome to owning "how do we create a product with y user retention curve and k number of users".
The bullshit asymmetry principle suggests that once something is identified as bullshit, we shouldn't spend much time to write an excruciatingly detailed refutation.
Invoking the bullshit card on opposing views, in order not to have to elaborate your own pov, seems counterproductive, if the aim of your participation in a discussion is to test your own hypotheses about the world - or in any way gain or deliver insights.
reply