Oh good. Let's replace universities with trucker blockades. The broadly focused activities at UC Davis consist of many narrowly focused projects.
Non sequitur: when I graduated from high school I applied to only two universities: UC Davis and one other. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, Feb 15, 2022, 1:42 PM glen <[email protected]> wrote: > Hm. Marcus' layout was pretty clear, I thought. If we take the utilitarian > seriously, there is some calculus for more good, less bad. But that > calculus isn't simple. And even if we can simplify it, there's no reason to > believe it'll be useful in the end. What the Neuralink ⇔ UCDavis kerfuffle > demonstrates is that capital[ism] is ethic[al|s]. It's similar to the > conclusion that technology is not agnostic to ethics/values. > > But, as Marcus has pointed out in past threads (and I've agreed with) is > that some problems (may) *require* the consolidation of funds. If > consolidation happens through celebrity or taxation may be irrelevant to > the fact that large pools of money are necessary ... Big Science, Big Tech, > whatever. So, in the end, in a capitalist society, we pool our assets via > private ownership of things (or the "means of production" ... whatever that > means). But our universities, largely socialist in the past, pool their > money through taxation and award funding. > > We're seeing the death of the university. But we're also seeing the birth > of some things like "community organizing", trucker blockades, Consilience > Projects, etc. The ethical [ab]use of animals is just one small part of the > ethical calculus we use to reason over all these things. But it's an > important one, not merely because of our technological progress in AI (if > not AGI) but because of our progress in consciousness studies. > > Can the world remain funded through private ownership? Or, asked in > another way, should broadly purposed research universities like UC Davis > accept funding from narrowly purposed corporations? If so, why? If not, why? > > On 2/15/22 12:26, Steve Smith wrote: > > Thanks for having this conversation in front of us, I'm pretty invested > in these kinds of issues and they are rarely discussed openly IMO. > > > > Perhaps you can unpack for me a little (or say it another way so I can > gain my own parallax): > > > > /In our capitalist society, is it reasonable for Neuralink to be > less susceptible to the flattening you describe by aggregating (not summing > over) all subjects' projections from a high-dimensional construct? > > / > > > > / > > / > > > > On 2/15/22 12:56 PM, glen wrote: > >> Excellent! Thanks. However, it's also important to note that the > lawsuit is against UC Davis, not Neuralink. So, to whatever extent that > Neuralink funding, mixed with tax payer funding, drives university research > (and possibly other things like overhead or paying a percentage of salary > for some with teaching loads, etc.), those backseating costs can deeply > impact whatever it is we call a research university. > >> > >> I'm about halfway into my "evaluation" of > https://consilienceproject.org/. What I've seen so far has a healthy > plating (I was going to say veneer, but that's too thin) of pretty words. > But those pretty words sound a tiny bit like Neuralink's corporatized > strawman/response to these accusations. I bring up Consilience because it's > placed in between a for-profit company and a research university. On > Consilience's About page, you see 2 ethical commitments: > >> > >> • collective attribution of authorship, and > >> • transparency in methodology > >> > >> These may seem a bit contradictory to some observers. My guess is that, > given some time and effort (maybe even semi-automated NLP computation), I > could ferret out who wrote which featured article. What I'd like to be > transparent is who contributes what to each article. (This is a > professional task I have to some extent with my clients ... so it's not > mere hobby.) > >> > >> Going back to the lawsuit against UC Davis and the 3 example spectrum > (and perhaps even the political tangent SteveS raised), where does > Neuralink end and UC Davis begin? In our capitalist society, is it > reasonable for Neuralink to be less susceptible to the flattening you > describe by aggregating (not summing over) all subjects' projections from a > high-dimensional construct? > >> > >> We see a similar thread in the "academic free speech" rhetoric the > alt-right is pushing these days (though there are lefty exceptions) ... aka > when is an academic not talking as an academic? And in the Barret and > Gorsuch exhortations that they're not partisan hacks ... even when talking > at a partisan event. > >> > >> [sigh] I know these fluffy issues aren't interesting to most people. > It's way easier to shut up and calculate. But not only are they interesting > to me, I think they're necessary, then, now, and later. > >> > >> On 2/15/22 11:30, Marcus Daniels wrote: > >>> For some activity there will be a mesh of consequences, that perhaps > with enough transparency, debate, and observation the facts of the matter > could be quantified as a large graph. Across this graph, one could apply a > subject's function of the utility of each one of those consequences. If > some of the consequences are both illegal and observable and a node > represented a risk to the subject doing the assessment of the graph, then > that node would probably result in a negative utility for most subjects and > perhaps it will overwhelm other positive evaluations across other nodes. > One could perform the same procedure across all possible subjects. The > sum would be a social evaluation of the mesh of consequences. I think it > would not be very useful, and not even address externalized costs. > Throughout this procedure the subjects' utility functions would all be > subject to advertising, propaganda, religion, blood sugar and hormones. > Measure twice you could get different > >>> answer. > >>> > >>> If there are externalized costs that need to be recognized for the > survival of humans, then humans will have to create laws with large risks > for those that don't comply with them. (Case-by-case harassment, > vigilantism, or terrorism wouldn't scale as well.) My guess in this > Neuralink case, is that if there were any deviations from best practices, > they will be aware of this risk in the future. In the cynical view of it > being propaganda, well, yes, they'll be motivated to make the best kind > they can and to set things up to compartmentalize the most sensitive or > emotionally charged information. > >> > > -- > glen > When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. > > .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: > 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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