Not to mention the problem of bad reviews for one product not getting transferred to a "new" product that is just the same product again with a different listing.
Just as relevant now as ever. This part strikes me particularly:
> Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.
I think that one of the great failures of our society and our government has been our willingness to allow large gaps to form between a law and its application. We constantly hear about laws that are "on the books but not enforced". We constantly pass laws to remedy perceived ills, but we don't fund or even specify enforcement mechanisms (or we make such mechanisms ineffective), so the laws just add to the pile of unpaid promissory notes that King refers to in another famous passage. (Ironically the civil rights legislation that King fought for is an example of this.)
I also wonder what King would say if we could ask him today about what he says here. In the situation he describes, is it really the ordinance itself that becomes unjust, or can it be that the ordinance itself remains just while it is the enforcement process itself that is unjust?
We seem too content to allow decisions about the provisions of a law to be separated from decisions about how those provisions are implemented; we allow innumerable people (e.g., police officers) discretion to make their own decisions about what the law means. This leaves space for those people to interpose their own personal biases and beliefs between the law and its operation. I think we need to fix that.
> Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
I'm on board with the general mindset of this, but in recent years and especially since 2020, I've become less and less convinced that it's actually true. We have seen people effectively rioting in opposition to social justice and progress. There are for instance people who sincerely believe that by being required to get a vaccine they are just as oppressed as a Black person in the 1960s, or even as oppressed as a slave.
They are incorrect. But they believe they are correct, and social justice and progress won't alleviate their misunderstanding nor their willingness to advocate on its behalf.
Well, given what you said, one obvious mechanism is to cap the sizes of these organizations so that any errors are less impactful. Break up every single company into little pieces.
That doesn't really help because the complexity isn't just internal to the companies, but also exists in the network between entities that make up the industry. I may well even make it worse because it is much harder to coordinate. e.g. If I run into a bug cause by another team at work, it's massively easier to get that fixed than if the bug is in vendor software.
In terms of health insurance, which is the industry where the CEO got shot, we can pretty definitively say that it's worse. More centralized systems in Europe tend to perform better. If you double the number of insurance companies, then you double the number of different systems every hospital has to integrate with.
We see this on the internet too. It's massively more centralized than 20 years ago, and when Cloudflare goes down it's major news. But from a user's perspective the internet is more reliable than ever. It's just that when 1% of users face an outage once a day it gets no attention, but when 100% of users face an outage once a year everyone hears about it even though it is more reliable than the former scenario.
> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.
That is quite untrue. It is true that people may be slightly slower or less accurate in distinguishing colors that are within a labeled category than those that cross a category boundary, but that's far from saying they can't perceive the difference at all. The latter would imply that, for instance, English speakers cannot distinguish shades of blue or green.
The point I was trying to make is that the way our brain works is deeply connected to language and words, including how fast and how accurate you perceive colors [0][1]. And interacting with an LLM could have unexpected side effects on it, because we were never before exposed to "statistically generated language" in such amounts.
This phenomenon of "sound symbolism" has received a lot of research attention in the last 10 years or so. For a long time it was considered a curiosity at best, and a total red herring at worst, but a lot of evidence is accumulating that sound symbolic effects are very real and may have profound implications for our understanding of sensorimotor cognition.
reply