[FRIAM] by any means necessary

[glen]

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.