[FRIAM] by any means necessary

[Steve Smith]

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.
>
>
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