Jim Carrey leaving Twitter.
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Didnât know that he was still alive.
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Elon Musk just left a Twitter video of Appleâs HQ in Cupertino, thanking Tim Cook for the tour. It would appear the Apple/Twitter speech war was a bit overblown.
Jim Carrey had nearly 19 million followers. He is most certainly alive and still considered relevant by plenty of people. Doesnât seem believable that there was any doubt about that.
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Honestly I havenât heard anything about him in years
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You would certainly have heard if he had died, though.
19 million followers on Twitter is a big following for someone not so much in the public eye.
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Jim Carreyâs alive. Feel free to start a new thread to discuss his life and times. Otherwise, letâs move on.
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Wasnât Elon the one who announced that Apple was considering removing Twitter from their App Store? Seems like he was the one who created the whole controversy.
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Iâm pretty sure he did, Lol!
It will be interesting to see how he handles moderation in the future. At the moment he has not defined standards, but Twitter is still clearly suspending people.
Reportedly, Twitter has been banning accounts reported by Andy Ngo and his followers in a coordinated campaign. So, the question is the new standard the number of complaints about an account?
More concerning are the suspensions of accounts critical of China like @VickieDeTaiwan. China has decent financial leverage over Tesla, so will they use that leverage to silence opposition?
Whatâs clear is that Musk is not a free speech absolutist as he has claimed. He fires employees critical of him (not saying this wrong but itâs contrary to free speech absolutism), and Twitter continues to suspend accounts (a number of people critical of Musk or the proud boys have had their accounts suspended). So, what is the standard being used? What process is he following?
As I think I might have mentioned before, Iâm a process conservative. Setting up processes in a vacuum (ie, come up with the process first, not backing your way into a process) helps produce more rational outcomes with less bias (canât eliminate it, but you can incrementally get better). Like it or hate it, Twitter did have a process and standards that created some level or predictability, and allowed advertisers to feel safe associating their brand with the content on Twitter. That does not exist at the moment.
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Interesting observation:
Twitter pre-Musk: far right complains about suspended accounts and being silenced.
Twitter post-Musk: far left complains about suspended accounts and being silenced.
But most people, pre and post Musk, take everything with a grain or two of salt.
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Well, clearly accounts are still being suspended. So, the question is what standard is being applied?
The standard before was defined and the process published. What is it now?
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Thatâs somewhat reductive. Prior to Musk, itâs more accurate to say that people posting hateful, violent, racist content and lies harmful to public health complain about suspended accounts. You can associate that description with either far right or far left if you like.
Post Musk, there have been many cancellations of accounts critical of him. Again, you can ascribe that to either far right or far left if you like.
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So, prior to his takeover Musk said, "this isnât a way to make money. My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I donât care about the economics at all.â
This is a statement I agree with (sort ofâŠIâll get to that later) , but his actions after that do not seem to line up with his stated goals. To have a platform maximally trusted, it shouldnât be strongly associated with one person at all - Musk is a large personality, and he engages heavily in social media, being deliberately confrontational. So, now Twitter is heavily associated with Elon Musk the person, which heâs done deliberately, and heâs adopted a confrontational attitude that is predictably antagonistic to a large section of the population, that seems contrary to a goal of being âmaximally trustedâ.
In the past heâs talked about creating an open source moderation platform that would allow users to outsource their moderation to 3rd parties so that they only see legal speech that they approve of. Twitter will still have to conform with various countriesâ speech laws and moderate unlawful speech, but everything else will be moderated by the user or 3rd party moderation sites. This might satisfy advertisers who can dictate which type of moderation algorithms are acceptable to their brand and only advertise that way⊠And it could create a platform that is âmaximally trustedâ. However, I will disagree with the social utility of that kind of trust. This would reinforce information bubbles which are detrimental to a healthy society.
For example, if you curate your feed to only show certain âright wingâ sources, you might start to believe the best way to minimize COVID is to go with ivermectin post infection instead of vaccination. Or if you curate your feed to only certain âleft wingâ sources, you might believe that the risk of COVID in children is greater than the damage caused by long periods of isolation and remote learning. And youâd never be challenged on those ideas or learn that raw data does not support those conclusions.
Basically it goes against the âidealâ of a public discourse where ideas can be challenged and discussed.
Itâs a thorny issue, b/c it is challenging to come up with a process to effectively eliminate harmful ideas (ie how do you determine what is harmful and what types of speech promote that idea?). I donât think thatâs a reason not to try, but it would take an iterative process with some degree of openness about how it is determined.
Anyway, Musk hasnât asked for my opinion, so itâs just idle speculation.
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Musk announced yesterday that they plan to start conducting human trials for Neuralink in about 6 months. This news is all over twitter, of course.
All the actual neuroscientists: BAHAHAHHAHA LOL
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He who laughs lastâŠâŠ.
Fascinating stuff.
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Very interesting and promising stuff if works
It wonât workâit wonât do any more than make some possible incremental engineering improvements to the tech that other people have already invented.
Sure, some of the engineering is cool. Theyâve taken stuff other people have done (often decades ago) and made it smaller and a bit better. They havenât done anything really novel.
But the claims theyâre making are absolutely preposterous. Musk said âweâre confident it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cordâ. Uhhh, a brain implant canât do that DUH.
He also said âEven if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore visionâ. I donât expect anyone here to understand this, but that is impossible, for all intents and purposes. MAYBE some very crude edge detection and blob visualization would be possible, IF the implant was installed at a very young age, but thatâs not what people think of when they hear ârestore visionâ to the blind.
The list of conditions heâs claimed can be treated by this is silly. Heâs put an electrode array in the primary motor cortex and produced movement. That was done decades ago. The chasm between that and all the stuff heâs promising is just absolutely ridiculous and totally hand-wavey. Real neuroscientists know that heâs mostly full of BS.
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