Wikipedia: We've won. Now what? - <AUTHOR> http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2014/05/22/weve-won-no-tail-lights-now-what/ <comment><USER2> Wikipedia is, at this point, truly "encyclopedic" in that it covers all manner of topics, but I think it still has a loooong way to go before it can consider itself _the_ universal reference.

The primary problem, as I see it, is consistency of voice/target audience. For example, many math topics read as if they are the intro section of some Mathematics graduate student's thesis, whereas most biology topics read like some high school biology student's book report. Compare the article for "Markov Process" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_process](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_process)), which starts with a nice introduction but quickly devolves into foreign symbology, to the article for Caspase 9 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspase_9](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspase_9)), one of the most important components in the process of apoptosis, itself one of the most importent processes in growth, development, disease, cancer, etc...which has barely 4 sentences and a dozen references.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing other encyclopedias have similar weak points. Wikipedia is a truly fantastic resource, not just for academia, but for the world, and we need to hold it up instead of beat it down.

<comment><USER4> The blog post invited feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've noticed a phenomenon happening quietly on Wikipedia: articles are being copied to Wikia and then removed from Wikipedia.

For example, there's an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation titled "Unfriendly Skies". Once upon a time, there was a Wikipedia article for that episode. I know, because I contributed to it. Well, that articles is now _gone_ from Wikipedia and the text I wrote is on Wikia.

[http://csi.wikia.com/wiki/Unfriendly_Skies](http://csi.wikia.com/wiki/Unfriendly_Skies)

I'm fine with Wikia copying what I wrote. The CC-BY-SA license allows it. I am _not_ fine with Wikipedia deleting it.

Wikipedia needs to decide what it is. Is it the sum total of all knowledge or is it just the subset that the deletionists deem "worthy" (or "notable" in their jargon)?

<comment><USER6> Actually, _you_ need to decide what Wikipedia is. An episode of CSI should not be detailed in an encyclopedia. Do you really think that Wikipedia is the best possible place to display that content on the whole internet? I'm not saying that Wikia is much better, but at least it is targeted to the fans of the TV show. So much of this "It's information so it should be on Wikipedia" appears to be driven by ego, rather than what is good for the reader.

<comment><USER7> Why shouldn't an episode of CSI be detailed? I'm an (inactive) Wikipedia admin, and that meets my criteria. I don't care at all about the show, but it's factual material that can be described neutrally from reliable sources and verified by anybody who cares to take the time. It's also the kind of thing that people provably refer to.

More broadly, I think pop-culture topics are great material for Wikipedia because they serve as a gateway to deeper editing. Most people find editing Wikipedia intimidating. But if you ask, "Hey, can you improve something about the article on your favorite show?" that's a lot less scary, because a) they're comfortable with the material, and b) it's pop culture, so they're not as worried about getting it wrong.

<comment><USER8> Some shows do have that level of coverage. Look at The Sopranos, for instance.

So it's useful to compare The Sopranos to CSI. One difference that is apparent to me is that for any episode of the Sopranos, encyclopedia editors have a much richer body of source material to draw on.

Gateways to editing are good, but gateways to "original research" editing are just painful for the whole project; also, if you attract someone to an editing task and them smack them over the head with how they're doing it wrong, you've probably lost that editor forever.

Just a thought. I'm not sure about the distinction between CSI and The Sopranos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Wikipedia has won. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone actually consults, ever. In fact, it's the first in history that everyone actually reads, rather than just having fond high school memories of._

This is a curse. The sheer power that Wikipedia has over shaping public thought is disturbing. I'm curious if anyone has actually done studies on this, and whether it's feasible to shape public interpretation of history by making very subtle factual edits over long periods of time.

People don't really "read" Wikipedia, either. Not frequently. They primarily skim through it, and very few actually follow the linked references, which, as it turns out, do not always overlap with Wikipedia's summarized content.

As a practical example, although a minor one (it's the first that comes off the top of my head), take the Nuwaubian Nation. They're an underground new syncretic religious movements with some very colorful beliefs. For a long time, their Wikipedia article was titled "Nuwaubianism". There was no such thing as "Nuwaubianism," it was a completely made up term. Yet it has since memetically spread throughout places such as the SPLC and RationalWiki, despite Wikipedia long correcting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> >This is a curse. The sheer power that Wikipedia has over shaping public thought is disturbing. I'm curious if anyone has actually done studies on this, and whether it's feasible to shape public interpretation of history by making very subtle factual edits over long periods of time.

For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces something that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has awful prose.

>Nuwabianism

Thankfully we killed "analogue disc record" before Wikipedia got popular.

<comment><USER9> > _For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces > something that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has > awful prose._

That's not really true unless you include the talk page. On any sufficiently contentious topic where there are two or more sides, what happens quite often is that one faction has more persistent editors _successfully_ adding slant and sources in their direction and keeping out slant and sources in the other direction. You have to look at the talk page to see what facts and points of view are being actively omitted from the main page.

A true NPOV is hard to maintain, because people often tend to think their own point of view is "fact" and the other side is "fringe". People also seem to fear that to allow a point of view to stand and be explained legitimizes it.

I've noticed this phenomenon most in articles involving climate or medicine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia's epistemology is shitty, shallow and brittle and it's trivial to find cases where it breaks.

However, it's observably true that it's almost always enough almost all of the time, and certainly enough to have won utterly and not have even many readers complaining.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, I just did a spot-check and medicine (including alternative medicine and supplements) seems to be getting better - the articles I recalled being terrible have improved. Climate is still pretty broken - the article on "climategate" is exhibit A - but maybe that'll come around eventually too. One can hope.

<comment><AUTHOR> WikiProject Medicine has come down _hard_ on anything even tangentially medicine-related, including alternative medicine practices. (Although wikiprojects don't "own" content areas, obviously sensible application of the content rules in a manner anyone not stupid would support is likely to pass.)

<comment><USER9> Right, that might have been the problem. The thing I had noticed as an issue is that if you walk down the "supplements" aisle at Whole Foods or whatever, you'll find hundreds of pill bottles with cryptic labels (eg, "Tonalin CLA" or "Garcinia Cambogia") with recommended dosage info ("take twice a day before meals!"), and _no info whatsoever_ explaining what the product is _for_. If it's on the shelf, thousands of people must think this product is good for _something_ but the FDA won't let the manufacturer say what.

So you might think you could type the product name into wikipedia and see what's up. When I do that, what I want to know first of all is:

(1) What is this product _for_? Why do people take it, what benefit do they expect to obtain?

(2) What _evidence_ supports the claims that advocates make for this product? What's the backstory behind how this product came into the public eye?

(3) Last but not least, what does mainstream medicine have to say about it?

When you actually look up these products in wikipedia, most of what you get is (3). (2) is nonexistent and (1) is at best given short shrift.

I'm sure the editors who want to keep any claims related to what they see as "quack" products out of wikipedia are well-meaning but I think they are misguided and thereby do more harm than good. It'd be better if wikipedia pages reliably told both sides. Then supplement enthusiasts would learn to go to wikipedia first where they might _see_ the medical caveats alongside the info they originally seek. But if wikipedia only tells one side, the nuts/enthusiasts just learn to avoid wikipedia and instead seek out alternative sources that DO include info of type (1) and (2), even at the cost of omitting (3).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good idea to me. If you think third-party sources for this stuff are findable, then [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED) might be a place to suggest it, with negative and positive examples (something that would inspire volunteers to take on your idea).

<comment><USER9> I'm positive third-party sources are findable to answer at a minimum "what is this supplement supposed to do and who is supposed to take it and why do people think it's useful". I'd expect to find that stuff best laid out in books like this:

[http://www.amazon.com/NutriSearch-Comparative-Nutritional- Su...](http://www.amazon.com/NutriSearch-Comparative-Nutritional-Supplements- Professional/dp/097325386X/)

Thanks for the link suggestion - I might go ahead and do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something that worries me - Checking facts in Wikipedia articles becomes more difficult as it gets more popular. An incorrect fact on Wikipedia can get picked up and dissipated out into articles and reports.

That FIRST time it happens, the error is traceable: You can confirm that the error was published on Wikipedia BEFORE the external Article, and invalidate it as proof.

BUT the external article never disappears. Years later a new Wikipedia editor may come along and re-insert the incorrect fact into Wikipedia based on the article.

<comment><USER11> How is this different from an incorrect fact being written in a research paper, then referenced again and again for centuries? The battle against incorrect facts is yet another struggle we're always facing.

With this tool, people have at least _some_ information. Which is worse, incorrect data or no data? With incorrect data, at least the mental framework gets established.

<comment><USER12> Incorrect data that you think is correct is obviously worse than no data:

a) You're likely to stop looking for better data once you have it.

b) You're more likely to act on it than acting on no data, and the work you do based on your incorrect data is likely to be either be less useful than is acceptable (otherwise you would have acted on no data at all and gotten a similar result) or it could even be harmful/counterproductive, depending on how wrong the data is.

c) Worst of all, you might help disseminate the incorrect data (and perhaps even argue against the correct along the way), compounding the damage demonstrated above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not part of the Wikipedia community, but a thing I don't understand about wikipedia is the excessive deletionism. Plain text is not that expensive to host. Keeping this in mind, if an article is not vandalism, spam or nonsense what reasons are there to deleting it? If there is actually a vote happening to delete an article, why not just keep it: there are actually people who care enough to vote on it. I don't think that form of authoritarianism belongs on a website like Wikipedia. It's very demoralising for new users seeing the article they care about and spent time on getting deleted by a single click from an administrator. Even administrators quit after working on Wikipedia for years due t frustration with deletionism and similar issues. In my opinion, "too much" information wins by default. Before wikipedia is "all information" and not "information others find notable", there's still work to do.

<comment><USER7> Hosting cost is the very least of the concerns.

One important one is impact. Most people treat Wikipedia content as "probably true", so any time where the truth of something matters, zero content is better than bad content. That's true for all sorts of scientific, medical, and commercial content.

Another is impact on living people. The folks who wrangle the rules for biographies of people still alive [1] have put a lot of thought into recognizing the impact that Wikipedia articles can have on people. Having nothing is often better than having a bad article.

A third is self-promotion and vanity. People are willing to write endlessly about themselves. Bands formed by teens in their garages, companies trying to promote themselves, blatant spam, subtle commercial manipulation: Wikipedia doesn't need that.

A fourth is maintainability. The number of active Wikipedia editors is modest. Some sorts of content attract new editors. But quite a lot won't. I think it's often better for Wikipedia to have no article than a bad article that isn't going to get better soon.

And that points toward a fifth thing: the value of the Wikipedia brand. Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality. It is enormously valuable for the world to have a single, high-quality factual resource. The brand should be maintained. People can (and certainly do) disagree on where to draw the line between crap and not-crap. But almost nobody disagrees that there is quite a lot of non-encyclopedic material (e.g., [2], [3]), and that the Internet is plenty big enough to host that somewhere other than Wikipedia.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not)

<comment><USER14> I think you're absolutely right on impact and self-promotion, but I don't think Wikipedia's brand is about quality. Or at least, not primarily about quality.

>Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality.

Weren't convenience and quantity important factors and more important ones? To me the value of Wikipedia is that virtually any topic is discussed reasonably consistently with reasonable quality. If I specifically need quality, I'll look to the article's sources or find my own.

<comment><USER8> When you think about "quality" on Wikipedia, don't just think about any given article in isolation, but instead step back and look at the bigger picture: for instance, how every Wikipedia article about a movie has a similar structure, or how easy it is to hop from one species in _Hymenoptera_ to the next. You also have to look at the things that _aren 't_ there to appreciate the degree of work that goes into making the project coherent.

Another instructive place to start reading about WP quality is the Featured Article process; in particular, try clicking into some of the discussions about individual FA candidates.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pride comes before the fall. Wikipedia is in terminal decline because the software and design sucks, the number of editors is declining, and the core structure of how information is treated is unreliable. For those interested, check my series on the site's problems: [http://newslines.org/blog/](http://newslines.org/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER15> No idea who this commenter is, on the OPs page, but he says it very well:

"I don't think that Wikipedia can be as comprehensive as you say unless and until the significance requirement is lowered. There are lots of interesting and relevant articles that are killed by exacting admins who think that Wikipedia's scope shouldn't be quite as, well, encyclopedic, as others. Wikipedia can be the place for well researched obscure knowledge as much as it can be an accessible place to find the famous stuff.

Indeed, the more obscure information it supports, the more useful it will be in the long term as an accretive force for knowledge. Once someone has created a certain page for something obscure, over time others will add to that knowledge and make it more valuable."

Inclusionism is something wikipedia needs to work toward. Deletionism is an admission of failure - an inability to reasonably deal with information. I hope they can find a way to fix this problem.

<comment><USER8> Here is the AfD page for April 20, 2014 --- I went back a random ways so that we could see an AfD log where most (all?) of the discussions had been closed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2014_April_20)

So, what I'd be interested in is a discussion that drills into specifics. Which of the deleted articles --- the ones headlined in red --- are "admissions of failure, an inability to reasonably deal with information"?

<comment><USER16> I spent some time reading through that list and it just depressed me even more about the current direction of Wikipedia.

Other than the reasonable deletion of two promotional articles for books ( 'Formation of Postcolonial Englishes: Theories' and 'Secret Fantasies' ) that list consists of people arguing about 'notability'.

That is begging the question, since notability is what Wikipedia defines and which is the core problem. What the outside World is saying is: remove the notability test. It has become so abused by the administators that they should forfeit it; they are not responsible enought to be trusted with it.

~~

Here's an example of one that was deleted for 'non-notability':

 _Former minor league baseball announcer. Has not received any well-known award or honor nor has he made any widely recognized contribution to broadcasting._

Which just illustrates how amorphous this 'notability' concept has become; it can be redefined at will to sataisfy any argument. So that individual was notable, but not notable enough on a global scale? Might as well rename 'notability' to 'is as famous as Tom Cruise' in that case.

~~

Here's another one, this individual had references in media but subjectively someone felt that wasn't good enough:

 _The Plymouth article goes a bit deeper but its more of the "local boy living the dream" variety which isnt enough to satisfy GNG._

There should be no opportunity for subjectivity. Was the individual referenced by independent media articles? Yes? Good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quoted from the last comment on the article:

Wikipedia editing should be done within a set of work processes, which can be semi-automated (a "requested article" collects citations, then becomes a draft article, then is promoted to regular article status, with the software preventing duplicate efforts, for example).

<comment><USER18> There's sort-of a process like that, but the in-progress articles are still articles, vs. being explicitly marked as drafts or not-yet-articles or something of that sort. The progression is something like this (from needs- most-work upwards):

1\. Articles explicitly tagged with a warning at the top (needs references, might be biased, reads like an advertisement, doesn't represent a worldwide view of the subject, is out of date, etc.). Here the reader is warned that the article needs work and should be taken with a large grain of salt.

2\. Default "regular" articles. These are supposed to be at least passable, free of the obvious problems in the previous category. Though sometimes they just haven't been properly marked. The reader should treat them with appropriate caution, looking for references for claims (especially any surprising claims), corroborating with other sources, and assuming that the article may be incomplete.

3\. Articles marked as "good articles" [1]. These have been reviewed by one or more editors, and are considered to be well-referenced and reasonably complete. They're marked by a little green plus in the upper-right. A conservative use of Wikipedia could be to treat anything at a lower level than this one as a draft article, in various stages of draftiness.

4\. Articles marked as "featured articles" [2]. These are supposed to be checked by multiple editors, including at least one expert in the field, and considered to be excellent examples of a Wikipedia article, with no obvious deficiencies. They're marked by a gold star in the upper-right.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles)

<comment><USER19> Anyone can add a {{good article}}. I just did without even logging in. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox)

EDIT: permalink [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&oldid=610077870)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Encarta gave up arms, and Britannica is struggling. Wikipedia is more accurate and rapid than a random search, but it definitely should not be the last word on any matter but rather be a starting point to familiarize with terms and what to search for, and that is the best way any encyclopedia can be anyway, a starting point.

I also love that there are at least 2 solutions for offline use:

[http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/in...](http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index)

[http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment><comment><USER21> "This gives a conceptual model to work to: Wikimedia as the sum of all university libraries."

I can't imagine a concise concept designed to cause greater offense amongst the deletionists. That must be why I like it so much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikimedia != Wikipedia.

<comment><USER22> It will be funny if (not long in the future) Wikibooks had a more wide coverage of topics than Wikipedia.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be a DAMN FINE THING!

Commons is _amazing_. Its main problem in replacing Getty Images is that the search isn't so good. is that (This is something WMF is seriously working on, but I couldn't say the problem's cracked yet. There's also a cultural bias against treating categories as tags rather than a ridiculously-specifically- detailed twig of a category tree.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > In fact, it's the first in history that everyone actually reads, rather than > just having fond high school memories of.

What an odd way of framing wikipedia. As a source of just information (the articles themselves) -- wikipedia is entirely unremarkable[1].

The fact that it is the first encyclopedia everyone can look into the editorial process of (history and talk facets), and _contribute to_ (edit) -- is what makes it interesting.

Sadly, I have the impression wikipedia has been largely unsuccessful in challenging people to be more critical of what they read, and more confident in what they observe -- than it by rights should have been. Everyone that has a passing interest in encyclopedia knows that even Britannica contains errors and that it, like any other text, is shaped by sometimes ulterior motives in its editing process -- it's just that unless you go crazy with glue and scissors, you'll have a really hard time "fixing" an error in Britannica. And if you did, it'll be hard for readers to compare "your" version with earlier versions.

Consider the fact that Britannica has been in print since 1768 -- imagine how much many of the articles will have evolved since then -- and why. Now imagine wikipedia around the year 2200. You could go back an have a look at how the articles for "terrorism" and "surveillance" evolved from 2000 to 2050 for example.

[1] Entirely unremarkable might be a bit strong, it certainly is very vast -- but so is the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER24> If Wikipedia becomes/is the source. How do you get around the 3rd party primary source requirement?

<comment><AUTHOR> The model does presume that primary and secondary sources will continue to be created.

These days, what actually happens is that people create third-party sources specifically to get things into Wikipedia. sigh.

<comment><USER22> Because of its format, Wikipedia is not a good original research repository.

Creating a source just to cite it in Wikipedia is a good thing, not a bad one, I think they are quite right on having that rule.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes it's good, more usually it's companies getting PR stories placed in news outlets as evidence they warrant an article.

(This, by the way, is something that can sometimes not work out so well.)

<comment><USER25> If only we had non-profit organizations getting fact-checking stories placed in news outlets as evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wikidata, a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike: [http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page](http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)</comment>


Show HN: Linguistic – NLP-powered language exchange - <AUTHOR> https://www.golinguistic.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what language exchange is.</comment>


A Cold War Fought by Women - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html

<comment><USER2> What a hateful article. It twists mundane, reasonable daily interactions to make women seem downright evil.

Just one example:

 _Sex is coveted by men. Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous._

What a ridiculous thing to say. Women limit access as a way of maintaining some power advantage? Really? There isn't a simpler, less sinister explanation for why a woman might decline sex with anyone and everyone who asks?

The main example of the article doesn't hold any water either. I mean, the test subject's outfit is downright grotesque, especially in a classroom setting. She is wearing a skirt so short that she could not possibly sit down without showing her underwear, not to mention the rest of her outfit - her top is cut so low that I can see her bra sticking out. No wonder another student commented, "What the eff is that". That's not "hostility" and "cold war", that's a completely normal reaction. If a male student showed up in class wearing lycra short-shorts exposing his package and a neon shirt cut down to his mid-section, you don't think male students would react the same way?

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there corporate implications to this article? I'd be interested in how someone might extrapolate the lesson. (Asking from interest, not to be a smartass)</comment>


MPAA CEO Chris Dodd: Blackouts Turn Users Into "Corporate Pawns" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/17/mpaa-ceo-chris-dodd-blackouts-turn-users-into-corporate-pawns/

<comment><USER2> Wow, that's really weird. I think you're projecting, Dodd.

On the other hand, sometimes I wish I had the presence of mind to falsely accuse others by saying they are doing what I'm actually doing. Of course this requires a lot of gall to carry off. Don't know that I've got that, either.</comment>


Fast interprocess messaging (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/405346/ <comment><USER2> This article is painfully old...

cross memory attach landed in 3.2 [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.2#head-a5e26c6275e85a5c9c41...](http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.2#head-a5e26c6275e85a5c9c41873fbab96bd38d934b72)

kdbus is coming, but its an entirely different implementation by gkh and systemd folks, its not using AF_DBUS sockets, its bypassing the net stack and using a char device.

a more relevant article on the current kdbus is [https://lwn.net/Articles/580194/](https://lwn.net/Articles/580194/)

<comment><USER3> This article is from 2010 so it is well before kernel 3.2. This same author has since wrote about kdbus here: [http://lwn.net/Articles/580194/](http://lwn.net/Articles/580194/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The eventual code commit has a useful description of the feature:

[http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fcf634098c00dd9cd247447368495f0b79be12d1)

</comment><comment><USER5> Aren't there any security implications of directly accessing another process's memory?

<comment><USER6> > Either both processes must have the same ownership or the copying process > must have the CAP_SYS_PTRACE capability; otherwise the copy will not be > allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone fill me in on why IPC is important? I would have thought that most parallelism was either within a process, or across machines.

<comment><USER8> Sure. My Rails app is talking to Postgres--why should I have to go through the TCP stack for local communication? Why should my window manager have to use that to send clipboard events?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well kdbus is arriving, but the copy to other process memory does not seem to have.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I think kdbus does allow you to transfer ownership of some piece of memory to another process.

<comment><USER9> Does it? I haven't seen that. It has single copy transfer, but I didnt see a memory ownership transfer/sharing.

<comment><USER11> There is a zero-copy mode, but it only makes sense for pretty large messages (>512k IIRC).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to tame the tech titans - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21735021-dominance-google-facebook-and-amazon-bad-consumers-and-competition-how-tame <comment><USER3> FTA:

> The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling > innovation.

This suggests a profound lack of understanding of the power imbalance between the Tech Giants(TM) and the rest of the world. The fact that these big companies operate what amounts to mini-surveillance states and face little to no scrutiny about it, and this is not even mentioned in the article, is proof this person has not thought deeply about this problem. The additional fact that these huge Titans dominate vast monocultures puts us all at risk of catastrophic failure or the vulnerability of cyber attack and should scare the bejesus out of policymakers, militaries, and agencies tasked with securing national infrastructure.

People need to think harder about how bad it would be if, e.g. Apple or Google actually _were_ evil, or were co-opted into evil overnight. Or what if they were just evil _to you_.

Some of these companies essentially possess "kill switches" over vast parts of the computing landscape. Laptops are a bad software update from being bricks; the cloud is divided up into huge chunks that could go dark; one provider holds more than a third of the world's email; 90% of the world's search traffic.

These entities don't need to be somehow (gently) "restrained", but as a civilization we need to rethink the power we've ceded to them at a very fundamental level, or we risk growing ever weaker and more dependent on them.

<comment><USER4> Am I mistaken in my impression that the bulk of innovation actually happens outside of titans, which the titans then buy? So even hamstringing them wouldn't actually stifle innovation?

<comment><USER5> It would seem like it. In terms of innovative research, it doesn't seem like, say, Google Research is so much more productive than your average prestigious research university (albeit possessing perhaps a different set of focus areas). Similarly, when it comes to improvements on technical infrastructure, it seems Google plays a large role, but not an exceptionally large one, which makes sense by virtue of their massive deployments and having the capital to hire good engineers. Still, this doesn't seem so outsized—Meltdown/Spectre weren't discovered solely by Google, for example.

On the other hand, when it comes to product innovation, it definitely seems like the bulk of it happens, as you said, outside titans. Again picking on Google (sorry), V8, Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, and Android were all acquisitions! And though Google acquiring them might certainly have given them large amounts of resources to expand (e.g. subsidizing YouTube), there is definitely the question of stifling innovation and competition. Consider TinEye, who first published reverse image search; later Google just poured engineers onto their own reverse image search platform and copied it.

I think you can see the same dynamic with Facebook copying Snapchat features. It doesn't seem like a healthy market.

EDIT: V8 might be better characterized as the product of an acquihire, actually. It might not fit with the rest of the list, which were all literally acquisitions of products developed outside Google.

<comment><USER6> > Consider TinEye, who first published reverse image search; later Google just > poured engineers onto their own reverse image search platform and copied it

If Google's product was better, wouldn't that mean it increased competition and innovation?

<comment><USER5> I think it's a comparable situation to dumping[1]. Google can attract users from TinEye by virtue of their brand alone and subsidize their own product even if it is unprofitable. The result is that in the long term TinEye is unable to compete and disappears, after which point Google has no incentive to improve their service. The only entities left that can compete are other titans.

It also is a distortion in that it discourages investment into technical innovation if you are trying to make money as a non-titan—-why even bother if Google will just come along and copy your product then give it away for free (to drive traffic to Google search)?

There is still the potential of innovation in this case from academic researchers, who might not care about commercialization. But such a situation where individuals cannot hope to compete and where research just feeds into titans would be pretty awful.

1: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am surprised there has not been an antitrust case against Google and Facebook. Google is definitely abusing the monopoly position it has in search. The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridiculous.

The remedy that the original article suggest is right on point. The way search systems work these days is by learning from how users interact with them. Google's market share ensures that it will always have access to more tail queries and user's intent while asking them. Building a better search engines than Google is no longer about hiring engineers or investing in data centers, it is about having access to the data that Google has on searches. Just like the DOJ forced Microsoft to document and provide API's that were being used by IE and Office to all software companies, a case today that forces Google to share all the data that it collects on searches would help break its monopoly.

<comment><USER8> _a case today that forces Google to share all the data that it collects on searches would help break its monopoly._

The only thing worse than Google having everyone's search history is forcing them to reveal everyone's search history. The data should be destroyed and new data not gathered.

"You googled X on date D therefore we have concluded Y is a preexisting condition and your claim is denied"

<comment><USER9> Two responses.

1\. Although I see your point that search queries could be dangerous, Google would never allow such use of search queries. Using search queries from a given person to market them products is one thing, but using it against them is a different beast that would horribly hurt the Google brand. And although one could imagine a court order being used to get a user's history, establishing a pre-existing condition is not enough of a benefit to go through the trouble of getting a court order for search history (and would likely not be granted, given the circumstantial nature of the evidence).

2\. There are a hundred reasons to search any given query. If an insurer is using such an insubstantial basis to establish a pre-existing condition, the actual problem is that the insurer has too much market power and can be (for lack of a better word) an asshole without losing customers.

<comment><USER10> You appear to be replying to a comment without having read or understood any of the context?

The thread is discussing a case in which Google would be forced to release all of this data via court order, so your first bullet doesn't make sense as Google would have no choice in this theoretical scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data > available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory > licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to > firms' size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These > mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress > competition, into something users share, to foster innovation._

This is a _terrible_ idea, and would be massively destructive of user privacy. "Anonymized" data can very often be de-anonymized.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I actually trust a fair amount Google with my less sensitive data. Google is secretive, and a bit paranoid, and they don't like to share. Data goes in, but historically, not much has come out.

I do not, however, trust Facebook with my data. And that's the point: Just because I've looked at the tradeoffs and decided to share certain data with Google, I don't want the government ordering Google to share it with _other_ companies. Ditto for LinkedIn: I'm happy to give them a resume, but I don't necessary want to share that with scrapers who are repurposing the data.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not convinced there's a problem here that needs to be solved.

"The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really??

\- Amazon provides good products and services at good prices and that's why they're successful. Some things are cheaper locally, some things aren't. I buy loads of stuff from Amazon and don't want that to change.

\- Google, privacy is a concern, but their search engine is extremely useful, and gmail, and chrome, etc. I rely on Chrome, and the search engine, as long as they're the best at what they do I'm happy to continue using them.

\- Facebook, is still the most widely used (and that makes it the best) social network. I think Facebook is going to die a natural death - especially when people realize how difficult it is to actually delete their content. It's still the easiest way to run a group, as most people are already on Facebook. I run a local residents group on Facebook and am happy to continue using Facebook for that. I don't use it for personal stuff anymore because everyone's too political, the risk isn't worth the reward. My actual friends use a WhatsApp group to chat with each other, that's a good service I want to keep using. Facebook doesn't belong in the same list as Amazon and Google - because tbh Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't affect very much at all.

<comment><USER13> _" The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really??_

Yes, really.

The existence of monopoly or significantly market-dominating providers is _definitionally_ a failure of competition.

I suppose you could argue about whether or not a competitive market is good, but I'm pretty sure it is.

<comment><USER12> I reacted more to the word 'consumers' than 'competition' as the competition argument comes back around to what's best for consumers anyway.

So I put my consumer hat on and pondered what would I rather have: \- The current situation \- Intervention

And I concluded I quite like the current situation, these companies provide meaningful benefits to me.

If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, you may be happy with Amazon, but there's loads of examples of where this is going wrong for consumers. From issues with counterfit products (see the post recently about the guy who unknowingly was "charged" with import fraud and denied privileged flight status due to an Amazon order), to them taking advantage of the fact that people assume they're the cheapest price (they aren't always), to "prime shipping" becoming more and more of a thing you can't depend on (late shipments ... all the time).

Maybe you live in an area that Amazon gives higher priority to, maybe you live closer to a shipping center than I do, maybe the things you tend to order tend to be highly stocked in their warehouses ... I don't know, but the more time passes, the more Amazon frustrates me personally as a consumer, and others as well based on articles being written and social media chatter; which is frustrating, because the average national retail store is terrible (and they already killed all the mom n pop stores), and having to maintain accounts on lots of smaller online retailers is a pain (not to mention lax security can lead to stolen credit cards, etc). So obviously, in some ways, I agree with you because Amazon does provide benefits ... they just need to not be the only viable player in the online space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Google Search is going to eventually become a regulated public utility, and we can look to the telecom industry for an example of how that will go down.

The thing that comes to mind is the fact that Google refuses to allow API access to searching. They used to, with results limited to just five bad results, but quietly removed even that when they released a new tool and discontinued the old one.

It struck me at the time that I learned this, as I figured that Google was so large, that search would become like a free public utility that they ran. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that they don't, but other similar adventures got me to conclude that the API revolution is still in it's barest infancy.

But Google instead goes to _enormous_ lengths to protect Search. I might make it a weekend project some day to figure out just what the current state of Google scraping is, that cat and mouse game probably has a fascinating history.

This will probably become a point of debate 20 years down the road when antitrust cases on tech giants finally become politically feasible.

<comment><USER16> Do you actually want it to be a free public utility? In terms of reliability, Google search currently has a lot more 9s than any utility I know of (roads, power, water, internet service). Utility companies are not really known for innovation as much as stagnation, unless you count innovative new ways to extract rent.

To me the reason Google dominates search is not that it's loads better than the competition but because it's a little bit better, and there's minimal cost of switching (from Bing to Google, say).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A gentle contradiction in the article: "a full-scale break-up would cripple the platforms' economies of scale"

but later:

"Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat"

There also seems to be plenty of middle ground there. Like forcing a sell-off of Waze and Instagram without breaking up the whole parent company.

</comment><comment><USER18> We CAN break them up. Facebook can be broken up into a federated network. Split Google into YouTube, Hangouts, Cloud, and The Rest. Force any integrations between these to be done with open protocols anyone can implement.

<comment><USER19> Search and ads are the big ones. And you can't really split any part of the company off from ads because that's revenue.

So if you're going to split Google, the only way I can see it working is a bilateral (or multilateral) split, like the AT&T breakup into the Baby Bells. Each part would get search and ads and maybe the existing YouTube corpus, ???

Discussion question: How did the AT&T breakup work out in the long run? (Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.)

<comment><USER20> In the long run, tech changed the landscape so much that the breakup was ultimately a success. I'm skeptical that cell phones would be as ubiquitous and cheap as they are if it didn't. Long distance calling (a big deal back then) was killed by tech and competition at the same time.

<comment><USER18> Other things like answering machines probably would not have happened, too. I wasn't around back then but as I understand it you were only allowed to connect Ma Bell's telephones to your telephone line and Bell's goons would break in and rip out unapproved telephone equipment.

<comment><USER20> Third party devices were "legalized" by the Carterfone decision in the 1950s, long before the breakup.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-ye...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-years/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apple is a bit of a herring here.

Apple had a very unusual strategy of (a) not pursuing market share and (b) not building moats. This was part of their quirkiness as a tech giant. The truth is that they are far more exposed to competitive pressures, and their own future performance than others.

IE, the ipod had little or no moat. OSX never had 10% market share. iOS has tsomewhat of a platform moat, but they left the high volume segment of the market to Google. They have some network-effect-moats like facetime built in, but it doesn't add up to a persistent dominance. Facetime still needs to be better than whatsapp and skype on _iphones_ to maintain popularity.

In all their major product lines, the current competition could really hurt them if Apple underperform for one or two generations. iOS, OSX, itunes...

Few other companies think like this. IE maintained dominance (despite antitrust) for a long time.It wasn't untill Firefox & Chrome broke their monopoly that browsers/www started advancing again.

They survived bad operating systems, that no one wanted (Vista), extending XP by 5+ years past its use by date.

Amazon dominate online selling. They had a _patent_ on remembering your CC number, a mf _patent!_ ...just to turn past market share into future market share. The infrastructure services are platforms, with lock in.

Google is all about 100% market share, all about lock in. All about accumulating data so that they have

FB has all the people and all the sites (FB tracking pixel). They have the best ad-targetting platorm for this reason. All the people regsitered. Detailed data on their FB dataset. Vast off-platform collected from advertiser sites (all the advertisers).

I agree that part of the FB problem is that they aren't treated like news media, and are exempt from journalistic norms. But, this is also a red herring. Their monopoly is a problem regardless.

Many of their acquisitions are defensive, buying potential competition.

Antitrust needs a total re-build from the ground up. It's not about price fixing anymore. It's about taking up all the space so that no one else can play.

I don't think that the standards of antitrust are any good right now. You have to prve price fixing, unfair competition or some other hard to prove and potentially irelevant activities. I think antitrust has to be preventive.

It needs to make sure there is ample room in a market for innovation, and/or regulate _all_ the giants by default. Got a dataset that includes all the people in a country? Maybe that should be a public dataset.

<comment><USER22> Apple would only be a red herring if the article in question was talking in any way about Apple! It's not, it's subtitle specifies it's referring to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

In fact, Apple is mentioned only once in the article, in a sentence saying "Apple is to be admired for making things people want to buy".

Pedantry about RTFA aside, I generally agree with your points, Apple has chosen a business model that makes it relatively unlikely to receive serious anti-trust scrutiny!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over.

But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic.

Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook / Twitter. If a real time RSS system existed then both of those companies don't really need to exist. In fact, I think you could mock up a service just using SMTP that would work exactly as both those companies do today.

<comment><USER25> The problem is you're trying to solve a problem that most Facebook users don't care about. The hurdles to replacing Facebook or Twitter aren't technical, they are social. The killer feature of any social network is people using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ben Thompson has some awesome writing on tech titans, and their role in the economy. Here's some definitions: [https://stratechery.com/2017/defining- aggregators/](https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/) and here's an some writing on why they are not necessarily bad monopolies: [https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation- theory/](https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/).

</comment><comment><USER27> We're all gonna look back at this in 15 years with a good laugh at our naivety. New paradigms will emerge, and with them new competitors we can't even imagine today. Google and Facebook are one technical/cultural shift away from irrelevancy. Amazon is much closer to a traditional monopolist and will perhaps require regulatory intervention.

I literally had this same conversation about Microsoft and Yahoo in 2000. Remember when we all thought that George W Bush was the worst possible president imaginable? Yeah, those were good times . . .

</comment><comment><USER28> I am surprised my esteemed colleagues haven't jumped on

> Immunity to content liability must go, too.

This would be quite a hurdle to quite a few sites if it applied across the board. To begin with, this site. Reddit. Etc.

<comment><USER29> On the one hand, definitely worrisome when taking into account the alternative sites. On the other, it's in a paragraph about legal exceptions, so I'm wondering if the article's saying that Facebook and such get more people looking the other way, and that any smaller competitors would get jumped on disproportionally; just looking at music, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering too greatly from everyone uploading recordings, while I can easily see a small upstart getting sued into oblivion for a fraction of the infringement. Maybe some of that is that they can point to their algorithms as mitigation, but, A, that gets into proprietary secrets that would be key to even existing clashing with anti-trust laws, and B, there's still plenty of eight-year-old music videos that they somehow haven't gotten around to checking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If people are interested in tech monopolies, innovation, and government, here are some great books:

\- _The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation_ , by John Gertner: A running theme is how AT&T was motivated to "give back" to the country to avoid anti-monopoly action by the government. I take today's talk about Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon to be a negotiating tactic to motivate them to act similarly, although I wouldn't be surprised to see real government involvement either.

\- _The Chip_ by T. R. Reid: the invention of the integrated circuit near- simultaneously by two different people/companies.

\- _Where Wizards Stay up Late_ by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon: the origins of ARPANET at BBN.

Two other closely-related themes in these books are:

\- Patents (a limited monopoly), and how the patents for both transistors and integrated circuits were licensed very freely, allowing much faster innovation.

\- Government spending, e.g. how the space race and arms buildup paid for the early years of IC development before they were commercially competitive with just wiring up lots of components.

. . .

OT, I found all these books more interesting than _The Soul of a New Machine_ by Tracy Kidder. Although it won a Pulitzer, it never felt like any of it "mattered" in the same way. (I had never heard of the Data General Eclipse.) It just seemed like another story of engineers killing themselves with overwork.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Apple is to be admired as the world's most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition."

Really? Apple gets a clean chit for everything?

I live in the Linux world, can the BSD (including all the variants) contributors / maintainers enlighten if Apple is contributing anything back?

(NB: I am aware of what the BSD license _allows_. I'm mostly interested about Apple's behaviour from the "being a good citizen" POV.)

</comment><comment><USER32> I posted a few minutes ago about how chaotic privacy-related public policy is around the world. [http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap- theory/](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/) This article is another wrinkle yet.

</comment><comment><USER33> I like Amazon because it proves that coordinated economy can work pretty well nowadays. We need to nationalize it. :)

<comment><USER34> Give Bezos a second. He'll become a lunatic in due time, they all do.

<comment><USER33> To be fair, he is already a lunatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> monopoly analysis feels outdated.

most government policies are rightly evaluated on how they impact society overall, not a single issue group (SIG). for instance, it benefits society overall to tax cigarettes even though it harms employees and companies related to the tobacco industry.

why not view monopolies with the same societal lens?

for argument's sake, assume google does have a monopoly position in search and abuses it. the resulting cash flows enabled self-driving cars, free worldwide communication, and cheaper smartphones.

so google hurt search but helped other industries, increasing competition in automobiles, communication, and smartphones -- all of which are larger industries. is this better or worse for society?

understanding how tech should help society is a complex and critical issue, but the pursuit of truth requires a balanced, dispassionate analysis from the perspective of society, not one SIG.

</comment><comment><USER36> If they are smart, they will do some self regulation to preempt the government from coming in. Giving more transparency and empowerment to the users, and explaining a little more what they are doing, and why they are doing it, would go a long way.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Apple is to be admired as the world's most valuable listed company for the > simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing > fierce competition.

Not sure if I completely agree that Apple's an angel in this case.

</comment><comment><USER38> Part of their motivation to maximize costs is to minimize tax exposure.

Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B.

(Source: [http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol- sec](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec))

Amazon is taking NYC's lunch money - New York City has the power to stop Amazon and to restore middle-class equilibrium.

(Source: [http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon- nyc/](http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/))

Jean-Claude Juncker and Luxembourg's exclusive relationship granted Amazon illegal tax evasion.

(source: [http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-17-3701_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-17-3701_en.htm))

Only 13 percent of Amazon's profits went to federal, state, local and foreign taxes from 2007 through 2015, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

For the sake of comparison, that's about half the average amount S&P 500 companies paid over same period.

Amazon paid just a 9.3 percent effective federal income tax between 2008 and 2012.

Source: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2017/jul/26/donald-trump/amazon-no-tax-monopoly-donald-trump- said/)

Amazon will unemploy millions of people.

Source: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill- mo...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-more- american-jobs-than-china-did-2017-01-19)

"Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B. This is despite the fact that, in the last 24 months, Amazon has added the value of Walmart to its market cap. The most uncomfortable question in business, in my view, is how do we pay our soldiers, firefighters, and teachers if a firm can ascend to $460B in value (#5 in the world) without paying any meaningful corporate taxes." \- Professor Scott Galloway

Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why- wal-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-mart- pays-a-lot-more-in-taxes-than-amazon)

<comment><USER39> Comparing tax paid to market cap is disingenuous at best - I was surprised Bloomberg would print that, but they then go on to explain it in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can't, the US is too dysfunctional and corrupt. Current administration has realised this and instead of aiming high opts to go low.

The EU struggles in vain to get their tech sector off the ground and China is doing their own thing.

</comment><comment><USER41> Easy: cut their government - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER42> Ugh, The Economist.

> However, the barriers to entry are rising.

Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. It exists to protect you from unfair practices resulting in market dominance (typically monopolies). There's a difference.

> If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry > becomes less vibrant

Not every surface is a slipper slope.

More to the point, we're now talking about what _might_ happen rather than what _is_ happening?

> Less money will go into startups

Absolutely no evidence of that yet. In fact I'd argue there's still too much sloshing around the tech industry. But that's fine. If "sophisticatd" investors want to lose their collective shirts on pets.com or whatever, go for it.

> The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its > mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up.

I've never understood the complaints about Android for two reasons:

1\. Consumers have other options (mainly iOS); and

2\. Apple isn't held to the same standard. The only reason Google seems to be is that they let third-party manufacturers use their stuff at all. Apple doesn't. So Google gets raked over the anti-competitive coals? WTF?

It's also worth nothing that Android consists of two principal parts:

1\. The open source part, which anyone can do anything with (license permitting); and

2\. The Google apps and Android trademark, which come with constraints.

Amazon has gone the route of using (1) for their Fire line. Samsung is in camp (2). The point here is you don't have to use (2). People are capable of writing their own apps. Well, let me clarify. They _should_ be but they aren't. Samsung apps in particular are terrible.

That's not Google's fault. That's Samsung's.

> Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away

Isn't this a sign that their alleged market dominance is fragile?

Honestly, this whole piece seems like a giant FUD exercise in "What if..."

<comment><USER43> "Consumers have other options (mainly iOS)"

Two or three competitors in a space does not a robust market make. For one thing, it is very easy to create side-channels of collusion between the competitors. Just as one example closer to everyday life, think about how easy it is for two people to share information in bridge or spades (the card games) without overt communication. I guarantee that side-channel collusion is happening between executives any time the number of players has gotten small enough.

How many times have regulatory agencies used the existence of only two networking/telecom providers in an area as a basis for deciding that a market has sufficient competition to allow another merger to go through? We can see the adverse effects of the lack of competition in the terrible customer service and product quality in that industry.

Why can't we see it in our own?

<comment><USER44> There used to be a blog titled "Oligopoly Watch" (looks like it's dead now) where they talked about two or more groups of companies dominating various market segments. So yeah, you can have way more than two companies indirectly colluding to fix prices and competition.

I don't know if this is the greatest link, but here's a list of some current oligopolies: [https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are- som...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current- examples-oligopolies.asp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> For Google you could separate the search index from the rest of the company, start regulating it as a public utility and force them to open up its APIs to startups.

At this point it's a little hard to argue that a plucky young startup can come along and build a competing index at the same scale. The amount of power alone needed to maintain it is staggering.

<comment><USER46> Regulating would only diminish its QoS, methinks. Algorithms improve at such fast scale that no one person has complete knowledge about it. Regulating it may drive the regulators mad.

<comment><USER45> Are you arguing that setting up QoS metrics for a search engine index is intrinsically hard in the way that monitoring the safe running of a nuclear power plant or an air traffic control system is not?

I think maintaining a search index is intrinsically hard - much like maintaining a nuclear power plant. I don't think monitoring a search index is though.

I'm also skeptical of the notion that the engineering of the search index has changed fundamentally in the last 5 years. Realistically Google is not under much competitive pressure any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So, we get a prescription article from the industry that tech has struck the hardest: print journalism. And their prescription? _Regulation_!

Not much better than placebo if you ask me. US government is so venal. Only reason Europe is on the war path is that the offenders aren't European companies. With the amount of cash the big 4/5/6 have on hand, they'll eventually neuter and/or bypass the European regulators as well.

I don't know about Amazon, but with the amount of compute power lying around today, a lot of what Google and Facebook do could probably done just as well-- if not better--through a distributed model. Sometimes I wonder if NAT and all of the extraneous junk in IPv6 were just the incumbents' way of salting the ground?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there an equivalent of LLVM for databases? - <AUTHOR> Being very impressed with what LLVM did for compiler generation, I wondered if there is something similar for databases?
What I mean is a low-level system that would allow me to make use of some primitive facilities that databases are based on (indexes, heaps, storage engines, ...) and use them to build my own database/data processing systems. Is there such a thing?
I think this could be very interesting as I often find myself in a situation where I have a good idea of how to access data using a given set of indexes, but am not able to do this reliably because the query planner does give a different, less efficient plan. And please don't tell me that the query planner always knows better, as often it does not even provide a way to specify which goal I'm optimizing for (e.g. predictable performance / throughput vs. better but unpredictable performance).
Having access to such an open, optimized platform for database generation would make it much easier building systems that are highly optimized for a given use case instead of being designed for general-purpose data storage. <comment><USER2> My 10,000 foot high understanding is that the kind of performance you're seeking is achieved by the dark arts of database tuning. At a certain level of abstraction one might think about the query planner's default mode as context free and your goal as adding context sensitivity to it.

At the other end of the abstraction tree, it might be that a relational database is the wrong tool or that a row-based relational database is less right than a column based database. If you can see how the data ought to be organized for performance, then it might make sense to build project specific data structures. Or use an in-memory database. There are lots of options besides relational databases.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I agree with what you say, sometimes it's just inconvenient to manipulate a query planner using a high-level language instead of using a more direct approach. Also, while many databases provide a way to work with underlying representations of their data, it is still quite difficult or impossible to build something entirely new (I.e. a new application) with them.

<comment><USER2> Because I don't have details below the level of database and query, I had to imagine them up to write an answer. It seems like your use case is a bit unique.</comment></comment></comment>


Superdeterminism: The path we didn't take - <AUTHOR> http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-path-we-didnt-take.html <comment><USER3> A nice and compelling argument in that paper: _" The classical Liouville equation is linear in the probability density due to conservation of probability. But this linearity says nothing whatsoever about whether the dynamics of the underlying system from which the probability density derives is also linear. Hence, for example, chaotic dynamical systems, despite their nonlinear dynamics, obey the same linear equation for probability density. To us, this close formal similarity between the two equations strongly suggests that quantum physics, too, is only the linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic system."_

But, similarities in equations surely can be misleading ;)

<comment><USER4> > linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic > system.

The math is way over my head, but this sub-statement resonates with me deeply and has been my crude but overarching view of the physical world and our interpretations of it for a long time - except applied more broadly - as a description of the interaction between multiple layers of abstractions of reality (whether the _things_ behind those designated abstractions are natural or human made, e.g transistors for digital logic, a "deterministic" quantized layer created atop a non-deterministic one).

It is layered because each deterministic one is only _effectively_ deterministic by being predictable " _enough_ " in a highly uniform way. The next layer then often becomes viewed from a probabilistic perspective again due to chaotic interactions of the previous one (often computationally irreducible). The lack of access to massive initial state and in-feasibility to compute prediction based on the underlying mechanisms are the only reason we switch back to the probabilistic view at these non-fundamental levels of abstraction.

Now I understand quantum physics is not supposed to be such a layer, because we didn't start out with an existing working concept of what's underneath it in the way we know whats underneath equations for some statistical mechanics for example - but from the perspective of a complete amateur the idea of superdeterminism seems quite natural! - yet at the same time I can't help wonder if there is yet another probabilistic layer underneath :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this Quora answer convincingly reflects my thinking as to why Superdeterminism can't possibly be correct given Bell's theorem[1]

Skimming the actual paper[2] I'm not really seeing a convincing explanation, this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor:

 _The belief that such tests tell us something about (the implausibility of) Superdeterminism goes back, once again, to the idea that a state which is intuitively "close" to the one realized in nature (eg, the wavelength of the light from the distant quasar was a little different, all else equal) is allowed by the laws of nature and likely to happen. However, in a superdeterministic theory what seems intuitively like a small change will generically result in an extremely unlikely state; that's the whole point. For example, in a superdeterministic theory, a physically possible counterfactual state in which the wave-length of the photon was slightly different may also require changes elsewhere on the past hypersurface, thereby resulting in the experimenter's decision to not use the quasar's light to begin with._

"Reality is a giant deterministic conspiracy" is more plausible than abandoning local realism? They do (kinda?) propose an experiment at least?

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go- aft...](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-after-super- deterministic-theories-when-Bells-theorem-has-proved-that-local-realism-is- false) [2] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if everything being deterministic is an abhorrent, invalid option, but I also don't see why reality has to be local. I mean, the limitation of light speed is something that exists to make a consistent theory, not something that somehow has value in itself...?

My problem is probably not just a lack of math, but a lack of taste.

<comment><USER7> > I mean, the limitation of light speed is something that exists to make a > consistent theory, not something that somehow has value in itself...?

The limitation of causation to a constant speed is well proven in experiments, and seems to be a fundamental aspect of the universe at large scales. If this same limitation doesn't hold at small scales then either:

1\. There must be some cutoff between large scale and small scale, and small scale events can't influence large scale events. 2\. Instantaneous action at a distance exists at large scales as well, and so our theories are wrong (we need a new theory to explain the observations of the speed of light etc.).

This is all not to mention that we have not noticed any particle moving past the speed of light, and that we have measured the same constant speed of light at quantum levels as well (a photon measured from a moving detector has the same speed as one measured from a static detector).

So that way lies nothing good. On the other hand, rejecting local realism doesn't mean that QM rejects the speed of light being constant - <USER2> entanglement can't carry information, so it can't produce actions at a distance.

Also, note that the most common interpretation of QM is neither local nor 'real' \- that is, it implies both that particles have no definite state until they are measured, and that QE propagates at infinitite speed. That is, when you fire two entangled photons, neither of the photons has any value for polarization until they are measured; however, when one is measured, it acquires a particular spin, and the other one also acquires the corresponding spin instantaneously, possibly on the other side of the galaxy.

Now, one problem with all this is that it is extremely non-intuitive, and does not apply to the large-scale world (an apple is red whether I look at it or not). Related to the second issue, there is the problem of measurement: in a theory which rejects realism, the act of measurement has a fundamental physical effect, but there is no explanation for this mechanism, it is simply postulated. Note that a photon interacting with another photon is not measurment, they will each retain a superposition of states until a measurement happens.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the explanation. It really is non-intuitive and hard to get especially just from informal texts.

What I don't get at all is the bit about quantum entanglement not carrying any information. Apparently, that has to do something with the fact that the collapse of the wave function is a random process? But, if you have probability then you have information, yes? What's the explanation?

<comment><USER7> I don't know the full maths behind it, but the most important aspect is that you can only perform one measurement on the superposition state - after your first measurement, the particle acquires a definite state, and any subsequent measurements are guaranteed to show that same state. If you are the first one to measure the state of any of the pair of entangled particles, your measurement will cause both particles to take on a definite state.

But even if you are the second one to do the measurement, and the particle has already acquired the definite state because of the other measurement, you can't tell that your measurement result was already guaranteed, since you can't perform another one on the same state to compute the distribution.

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always been mystified at why people take superdeterminism as a good explanation for anything, when it actually acts as a stopsign for thought.

For example, suppose I am betting with you on the outcomes of a coin toss. You call heads, the coin comes up tails, you give me some money. You call tails, the coin comes up heads, you give me some more money. This repeats a number of times.

The common sense response is to start suspecting that I am rigging the game, i.e. that the simple model of the coin flips being independent and random is wrong. The superdeterminist response is to say, "no, your guesses have been superdetermined to be all wrong by the initial conditions of the universe -- keep on playing!"

You can use superdeterminism to explain literally anything (not merely a lot, but actually, _literally_ everything) while gaining precisely zero insight into what is actually going on, and precluding any future insight. Sure, it fixes a few philosophical problems, but so does saying you're a brain in a vat; in both cases you throw out all of science as a side effect. While their paper does address some philosophical objections, it doesn't even mention this scientific objection, which seems far more severe to me.

<comment><USER10> I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facile way doesn't really suggest anything about the theory itself.

When choosing Superdeterminism as an ontology it suggests different paths for doing research, paths that are unexplored and potentially full of insight. That's what is exciting about it to me.

<comment><USER11> Superdeterminism boils down to "the universe has baked in all results for all these quantum interactions"

In a dumb "the universe in a computer" metaphor, it's saying that instead of having `do_quantum_thing` be a function taking various physically interesting parameters and then resolving to something interesting (and thus making QM be _about finding that_), we just have a huge array like `result_of_all_quantum_things_ever_to_exist` filled with random garbage.

It's a theory that precludes any notion of predictivity in effects. It's nihilism for physicists.

<comment><USER12> I think this is a misinterpretation — superdeterminism says that there is no true randomness in the function, not that the function is of any other particular form. The excitement is from the possibility that the function may be very simple (in Kolmogorov complexity terms), yet yield only one possible result for the state of the universe at each point in time. (Much like the process for calculating pi is simple and there is only one value for pi, but without knowing the process, there appears to be a lot of complexity or randomness.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement.

There _are_ explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the _Copenhagen Interpretation_ of QM that has a measurement problem.

Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it seems intuitively obvious to me, but then I'm sure superdeterminism seems intuitively obvious to those who believe in it as well), which makes superdeterminism unnecessary.

<comment><USER14> I'm also a Many-Worldser, but I don't quite know how to answer the question "How does the Born Rule work?"

That is, if "worlds" branch off with some amplitudes, and there's a "me" on this branch and another on that branch, how does it make sense to talk about the probability of "me me" being this one or that one?

Empirically we know how to calculate it from the amplitude, but why is that more reasonable than any other answer (if any answer is reasonable)?

<comment><USER13> Well, yeah, there is that... I suppose one could argue that lacking an a-priori explanation for the way probability is allocated over state-space is equivalent to lacking an explanation for measurement, but that seems to me like claiming that we have no answer to how thermal emission of light works because we can't explain the measurement rule in QM, which I expect most physicists would balk at.

Yea, there is still work to be done at a lower level, _and_ there are other competing explanations at this level, but that doesn't mean that we don't have an explanation at this level. "How does the Born Rule work?" is a lower-level question than "how does measurement work?"

<comment><USER14> The "measurement problem" is really a Copenhagen-specific thing -- "measurement" is the fundamental and identifying mechanism of the interpretation, and it's problematic. And In the Copenhagen interpretation the Born Rule is inextricably tied to measurement outcomes.

I guess you could say that MWI removes the wishy-nastiness around what constitutes measurement, when it happens etc, and that could constitute "solving the problem", but I think

\- Some of "the problem" has just been moved outside those borders. (And fine -- the MWI doesn't need to solve _every problem to be an improvement. And I do think it 's an improvement.)

\- The Born Rule is _weirder* in the MWI. In Copenhagen it's axiomatic: We explicitly roll the dice, a nondeterministic outcome happens, that's the mechanism. In MWI it's an afterthought: The wavefunction evolves deterministically, and oh-by-the-way you should weight the likelihood of finding yourself here or there by the squared amplitude.

Maybe that's unfair though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since we are looking at an alternative interpretation:

Max Planck's Loader Model - the simplest interpretation that is never looked at.

In the Loader Model atoms have a hidden and random energy state, and a detectable state. The energy of light is spread evenly as waves. And when the energy reaches a threshold the detectable state changes. Photons do not exist. What we see are just detectable jumps of the energy states.

I never heard of it, until I found an experimenter that claimed to find evidence for it. With higher levels of energy than normal light, he found that (more often) two or more atoms can reach a next state, when one quantum of energy is emitted. Other experimenters classify these double-quanta as "noise".

Occham's razor?

Because it is the simplest interpretation, I would like to see more research into this. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe it can reveal some hidden variables in the detectors.

See: www.threshodmodel.com

Note: the experimenter is not a very good communicator and it took me some time to understand what he was explaining.

<comment><USER16> The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness.

It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.

<comment><USER17> This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.

<comment><USER18> > As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon > does not disappear when we're not looking at it.

That's a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren't looking at it?

<comment><USER19> Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case.

But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct link to the paper this post sets up: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462)

Always been a fan of Superdeterminism, happy to see actual physicists working on it.

<comment><USER20> If you've always been a fan then maybe you have some more recommended reading for me? Title of the paper seems to be a bit over the top, it just seems to counter some straw man arguments against Superdeterminism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tim Palmer (the other author of the paper) has a talk[1] on youtube titled "What Physics Needs is Not So Much a Quantum Theory of Gravity As a Gravitational Theory of the Quantum" in which he discusses Superdeterminism.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY)

</comment><comment><USER22> > doesn't exactly make me feel optimistic about my prospects of getting > someone to listen to me

Show, don't tell. I don't know how things work in physics (maybe they need a grant) but in mathematics, if you make a ruckus without any actual mathematics, then people ignore you. If you have a proof or text that does something substantial, then people do ignore you at first but in the long run the best mathematical base of knowledge takes preference.

</comment><comment><USER23> > But Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an > interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be > remarkably persistent. He wasn't remotely deterred by my evident lack of > interest. Indeed, I later noticed he had sent me an email already two years > earlier. Just that I dumped it unceremoniously in my crackpot folder. Worse, > I seem to vaguely recall telling my husband that even the climate people now > have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics, hahaha.

> Cough.

My favourite crackpot sent her his theory about gravity because she published a bimetric model of gravity a decade earlier. She accused him of plagiarism. Full story (french, bad subtitles): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s)

Also she made a few music-videos (the music is her own it seems):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's my understanding from reading some of Gerard t'hooft's work on superdeterminism that a superdeterministic theory underlying quantum mechanics would mean that quantum computers would be predicted to not have any advantage over classical computers (given equivalent clock-speed, etc) but Google's demonstration of quantum supremacy seems to disconfirm this prediction.

</comment><comment><USER25> Superdeterminism looks like metaphysics to me. It seems an attempt to postulate a fundamental truth about the world, but without empirical foundation. Which experiment would falsify the superdeterminism hypothesis?

<comment><USER13> The one proposed in the paper: looking for time-dependent correlations in the measurements of quantum states that are prepared to be as identical as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "There are only three people in the world who understand Superdeterminism" ... thinking people would agree with you if they only understood better what you were saying is a pretty classic rhetorical problem.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability.

1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist.

2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture.

3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge to any triangulable manifold.

<comment><USER28> I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.

<comment><USER27> The evolution of a manifold under Ricci flow is deterministic as mentioned, and it is also irreversible, ie many manifolds are smoothed to the same manifold. It's also a diffeomorphism, meaning that it preserves all of the topological information of the manifold that it acts on. Furthermore it can act on manifolds which have no normal form, in at least some sense. Because smooth manifolds with no triangulation do indeed exist.

The manifold cannot, in whole, as a result of this, get "simpler" or even maintain the same amount of simplicity, it must somehow get more complex, which would require information to be generated. The primary problem with deterministic models, at least as I understand it, is that there's no obvious way for deterministic processes to get more complex.

<comment><USER29> Aren't diffeomorphisms invertible by definition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's humbling to me that there are 7 billion people on this planet. Many of them are highly educated. And we are running up against problems we can't understand. The fundamental nature of the universe.

<comment><USER31> I think the problem is anthropocentrism. It's much like the IMO preposterous and archaic idea that a deity has to resemble us.

People who study the fundamentals of quantum mechanics complain that philosophy is seen as useless. From my understanding this stems from how in detail the Copenhagen 'interpretation' took hold in particulary U.S. institutions; and it is entirely non-scientific. Copenhagen is an engineering discipline, and not a scientific theory. In natural philosophy we have to account for our position compared to the object we study. We are not separate from nature.

Philosophy has many ideas which help us deal with our physical reality and they need to be taken seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am just going to put it here. This wikipedia article is about an ancient Indian school of thought which believed that everything is composed of atoms, but the aggregation and nature of these atoms was predetermined by cosmic forces. They also believed in absense of "Free Will". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure what exactly the problem is with measurement (Sounds like it is that physically we don't know what it means?) but current quantum categorical logic research usually does have a working definition of what they call measurement.

<comment><USER33> In most interpretations measurement is interaction, it's difficult to retain the rest of Copenhagen interpretation with the definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> But where all the information came from then?

</comment><comment><USER35> "Should we discover that quantum theory is not fundamentally random"

This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.

<comment><USER36> > This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.

Why is that? I believe the universe is fully deterministic (i.e., no such thing as "true" randomness), yet I also don't think that rules out free will. Free will and determinism aren't necessarily incompatible.

<comment><USER37> > Free will and determinism aren't necessarily incompatible.

How?

<comment><USER33> If you don't require free will to be supernatural.

<comment><USER38> Right, will is a natural, deterministic feature

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I believe strongly that everything is deterministic. As a programmer, that means all is purely functional.

<comment><USER28> What does it matter what you believe? The universe is evidently somewhat probabilistic, what's left is explaining the details.

<comment><USER39> No its deterministic, but it appears to be probabilistic to you. Which it can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I _just_ finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine!

Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.

<comment><USER31> I'm super curious about people who make this claim. Are you not conscious? The idea that there are people walking around who look and act like everybody else but behind the eyes there is _nothing_ is terrifying and exhilarating to me. I'm open to the idea that when you observe yourself there is nothing looking back at you, but that doesn't generalize the necessarily subjective experience.

<comment><USER12> I think "subjective experience" in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called "me", how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context.

Unlearning that — understanding that this model is _one_ interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn't call my experience "not conscious", but it can be a _very_ different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.

<comment><USER31> The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this conscious 'eye' which observes one's experiences remains unchanged. It is not the _idea_ of the self described by "I am I", but the self which only asserts its own existence as "I am".

<comment><USER12> In my mind, once you strip down "I am" to "There appears to exist a repeating neural process that is creating a compressed embedding and record of sensory inputs", it's just not very mysterious or worthy of much further philosophical analysis.

So these other humans in the world are probably just deterministic robots just like me, that may or may not feel like they have magic conscious aliveness.

But my personal experience tells me that I can turn the "sense" of magic conscious aliveness on or off, and so it too is likely just a neural process that is not particularly interesting.

I observe that the vast majority of other humans do not seem to be able to disable this sense at will, which does not to me imply that they are somehow more magically conscious, just that they have not experienced that particular switch flipping.

Add in the historic social knowledge of "consciousness", the historical record of neuroscience knowledge, and the rates at which scientific knowledge is processed and absorbed by the public at large, and it really seems like an obvious non-problem.

<comment><USER31> That's an absolutely fascinating thing to claim... Your description sounds like what I have very recently read about research into artificial neural networks, which would have vast implications for the future of the field.

I have not ever seriously considered the ability to turn consciousness on and off at will. In my experience consciousness is absolute and once deep in reverie when I happened upon a mental switch to turn seemingly _everything_ off I instead experienced a brief 'no-mind' blank state and a moment later my mind basically 'rebooted'. During no-mind, "I am" was definitely there but there was no thought to reflect this fact. There was an observer with nothing to observe. Normally, the only interruption to consciousness that I experience is for the time between wakefulness and dream and for this period I have no recollection.

Is this no-mind state what you mean by turning off consciousness?

<comment><USER12> I mean turning off the sense of intention or agency (i.e. "conscious" decision-making), as well as the sense of self (i.e. self-"consciousness"). There is still awareness of sensory inputs and memory of events, but there is no sense of making deliberate choices, personal identification with the sensory data or events, or emotional response. So there is, for linguistic convenience, "a body" doing things, but it doesn't feel like it's "mine" or that "I can control it". Overall it feels lightly dissociative, and I can carry on normal everyday interactions in this state; it feels like everything is on auto-pilot and the body knows what to do, probably mostly by habit.

I mention this particular state because it seems to reveal that the feeling of being an agentic self is a specific construction of mind, and that it can be intentionally deconstructed while maintaining other brain functions.

There are lots of related directions one can go with this; the "no-mind" state you mention and the techniques to achieve it are excellent to practice with.

<comment><USER31> I understand. However self-consciousness is not what I mean by consciousness. If you observe 'your' actions there is still something there along for the ride. It is this which I surmise is common for all humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Argh. Reading the announced paper on arxiv [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462) In the _introduction_ :

" _Most importantly_ , we will discuss how it may be possible to _test this hypothesis_ in an (almost) model independent way."

Most. Importantly.

Then in the paper, under "Experimental Test":

"This means concretely that one should make measurements on states prepared as identically as possible with devices as small and cool as possible in time- increments as small as possible.

This consideration does not change much if one believes the hidden variables are properties of the particle after all. In this case, however, the problem is that preparing almost identical initial states is impossible since we do not know how to reproduce the particle's hidden variables. One can then try to make repeated measurements of non-commuting observables on the same states, as previously laid out in [36]."

And finally:

"[36] S. Hossenfelder, "Testing super-deterministic hidden variables theories," Found. Phys. 41, 1521 (2011) [arXiv:1105.4326 [quant-ph]]."

So after the "most" qualified introduction, eventually just a reference to her 2011 paper. "Most importantly" "good" ... joke?</comment>


Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Feynman - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/who-do-you-think-you-are-kidding-mr-feynman/ <comment><USER2> If you want some good Feynman quotes, read "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" or watch the videos of his lectures. You're really not going to "get" Feynman in 140 characters anyway (and yes, I know it's doubled now).</comment>