What is anti-democratic about trying to assemble a coalition to change lawmakers' minds and get them to vote differently? It is rather core to democracies that decisions aren't set in stone and if you disagree with the majority you can always try to renegotiate.
While most greens and progressives may be against this particular law, I rather doubt that if they introduced a progressive green law for a vote and failed to get a majority, they would immediately give up and never try to get such a law passed ever again.
And I think it's good that nobody has to give up on politics just because they lost once.
I get your point, but I think there are several issues:
- Chat Control gets pushed by lobbyists, who have far more/better access to politicians than citizens. It is true that there are also some non-profits lobbying in this case, but the surveillance economy companies that are pushing this behind the scene have very deep pockets and very deep access.
- Chat Control gets pushed over and over again by the EC, which is the least accountable/democratic between the Parliament, Council, and Commission.
If you look outside the EU, there are enough examples of governments that are democratically elected, but are in practice not accountable to citizens because they are in the pockets of large companies that funded their campaigns, etc.
Unfortunately, public institutions also lobby in favor of chat control, so it's not just private interests. Europol and friends will not run out of public money.
Depending on the target audience, public actors can even avoid disclosing their actions in existing transparency registries. Technically it is very elegant.
So you're buying expensive hardware as insurance for the case that your cloud provider turns against you and you have to switch to another of the twenty offering the same model https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2 or in the worst case buy the same hardware later? How does that make sense?
It’s rationalization for what people want to do anyway.
Like buying a new car today and taking on gas, parking, etc, expenses in case the bus route you’re using goes away at some point in the future. It’s not an economic decision, it’s a desire to have the new car dressed up in what-ifs.
Yes, it is understandable that people who are subject to being kicked off the bus at random times through no fault of their own, or who sometimes find that the bus slows to 8 miles per hour and makes them late for work, or who are tired of arguing with the bus driver who refuses to take them to the liquor store, the casino, or the titty bar, may aspire to own a car, even a crappy one.
Yes, if you have something like a classroom setting with a teacher who can just tell students to do things, that can serve as an external motivator for students who lack intrinsic motivation otherwise.
But when you just grab a pile of learning resources off the internet, the teacher doesn't come included. You need to be at least motivated enough to become your own teacher, or else find a way to have someone else supervise your self-study.
Like half of what Schmidhuber is always complaining about is that (except for LSTMs) people aren't standing on the shoulders of his research very much. They try to solve some of the same problems people have always wanted to solve, try some of the same approaches people always tend to try, and then tinker until it works. At no point do they consult Schmidhuber's decade-old papers where he tried something kind of similar but didn't get very impressive results, and hence they also do not think to cite him. Then he comes out of the woodwork to assert priority.
What you're describing is people who fail to follow the most basic principles of academic research. (Check existing academic literature, mention and give credit to prior work.) This would be fine if these people didn't claim to be doing scientific research, didn't boast their academic credentials, didn't publish their finding as original work and didn't demand credit for their work in academia. Of course, they do all of these things. They benefit from a system they're actively denigrating (and in some ways degrading).
To put it more simply, people with academic credentials should not demand acknowledgement of their current intellectual work while denigrating and ridiculing the importance of very similar work done in the past.
Shane Legg was in Schmidhuber's lab at IDSIA before being one of the founders of DeepMind, so he probably read the papers personally and knows what influenced him or not...
"if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them" -- this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it. If I'm using Transformers, I should cite the original Transformer paper, even if I haven't read it. If my work is a direct extension of method B, and method B is a direct extension of method A, I should cite the source of A, even if I haven't read it.
You can't claim independence from past work simply because you didn't look directly at it. The job of an academic researcher is to know the landscape of relevant ideas, where they come from, where they're going, and to hopefully contribute a few new good ones.
Citation chains should extend back from your work, along a reasonable line conceptual inheritance, back to a reasonable point of origin. Schmidhuber has different definitions for both of these reasonables than the bulk of the ML research community, to a point that makes him difficult to satisfy.
It's worth pointing out that sometimes, some papers just become part of the general context of things and are no longer explicitly cited. Or people cite textbooks or general survey papers instead.
You make it sound like all original ideas from academia must be cited all the time, even if that was not the source of someone’s inspiration.
If I’m in the private sector, and I rediscover something from first principles, it is not my responsibility to go search all academia to see if someone’s done it before so I can cite their work.
If I rely on a code library that doesn’t explicitly cite papers it was built on, it is also not my responsibility to go find all the papers that it might’ve been built from and cite those papers.
Your Paper C does not need to cite Paper A unless you are discussing some aspect of it that Paper B is not. Otherwise you inherit the A citation via B.
> this is wildly incorrect in an academic context. If I'm using ResNets, I should cite the original ResNet paper, even if I haven't read it.
Eh, I think the correct answer is: read it, then cite it.
You're not really supposed to cite something without reading it, as it might say something different than you think. But sure, citing it w/o reading it is better than not citing it at all.
> Of course, but if you haven't read them you also shouldn't cite them.
But if you build on them you should have read them. I don't know about the specifics and I don't know if Schmidhuber is out of line or not, and citations and impact factors are a terrible mess, but generally speaking, you are responsible for finding and reading and citing any related work that needs to be cited, and if you work on neural networks in an academic context you probably have been forced to read that particular one at some point. Citation obligations don't just disappear because you don't want to do the research.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
You can not “democratically” decide to abolish certain inalienable personal liberties and still pretend you are a democracy. That’s just mob rule or worse.
> totalitarian privacy dictatorship
That’s an illogical concept. What does that even mean?
Many Arabic-speaking countries already have very high literacy rates. Meanwhile Somali is a related language officially written in the Latin alphabet, but Somalia has a literacy rate around 50%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-ra...
So adopting Arabizi without increasing access to education can be expected to do roughly nothing for literacy, whereas with a good education system, people can learn to read and write in Arabic script just fine.
While most greens and progressives may be against this particular law, I rather doubt that if they introduced a progressive green law for a vote and failed to get a majority, they would immediately give up and never try to get such a law passed ever again.
And I think it's good that nobody has to give up on politics just because they lost once.
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