win311fwg

Perhaps there is a limit, sure, but I suppose that's where you lead with a concrete example to explain where that line is.

As we're only imagining anyway, let's ignore the genie for a moment. If we did lose our sense of basic arithmetic all of a sudden what would life at its core even be like? If there were two apples on a table you wouldn't be able to comprehend what happens if you took one. Would we even be able to function like that?

Under a free market one voluntarily buys protection, negotiates with relevant parties how arbitration is to be conducted, and so on. These are all part of the market just the same. A "free market" that isn't free continues, despite your insistence, to be nonsensical.

When was the last time you made an offer to your police force? Under your free market definition it is necessary for you to express your demand position, else supply and demand cannot be determined. Yet, I suspect your answer is never. There isn't a free market for you to express that in. It is not something you have to think about as the single desk has already sorted it for you.

What you are thinking of, again, is a mixed economy, where the government has taken control and regulates some submarkets. That is how our world functions. A market having unconstrained submarkets that see prices determined by supply and demand isn't the same as a free market. What to call the submarkets within a mixed economy that are based on supply and demand isn't generally accepted as there isn't usually much reason to need to talk about it, but I posit "unregulated market" remains the leading contender for what shows up most often when one is trying to single it out. "free market" is a non-starter as it already means something else in the same context, as seen in the very definition you gave us.

You are, of course, revealing one of the reasons why we've never seen a free market. The concept is full of unresolved problems that make the whole thing untenable in practice. I think we can agree it is almost certain that people wouldn't be able to handle themselves if there wasn't a government automatically providing those things for them. But that's the nature of a thought experiment—It doesn't have to be realistic.

A "free market" where the market isn't free doesn't make sense linguistically or within what "free market" is defined as. Of course a situation where some submarkets are unconstrained and others restricted can exist — not only can, that's how we already live — but when that occurs we call it a mixed economy. Our current world exists under a mixed economy.

I suspect your confusion stems from trying to apply the ideas of free market, which refers to a broad market economy, onto only the submarkets that are unconstrained. If you could magically ignore all the restricted markets then your logic would be reasonable, but in the real world we cannot ignore the rest of the world around us. It exists whether you like it or not. Unfortunately there is no generally accepted term for this, which is no doubt why you've wanted to use "free market" to fill the void, despite it already having a different meaning, but "unregulated market" is the one I have seen used most often in that context. You might consider using that going forward. I expect most will understand what you are trying to say without confusing them into thinking you are talking about free market in the proper sense and will allow you to converse with those who already made it clear that they were talking about free market in the proper sense.

The larger context is a completely different discussion, and one that isn't particularly interesting to have, at least on my side. It wasn't narrowed arbitrarily. I can appreciate that you might find that other topic interesting, but there are plenty of other parallel discussions taking place about that. You don't need to shit up this one with more of the same in order to engage with it. Let's leave the bad faith at the door.

The original comment asserted: "Using AI to fake posting activity is bad." So, yes, I agree that "bad" is ill-defined, but our discussion, aside from your ridiculous diversions, has been about trying to break down what that really means. If it was already well understood there wouldn't be a discussion to have here.

Now, we don't know what you think it means since you don't seem to want to participate in good faith, but what it doesn't mean is some idea of 'taking over accounts', as the comment in question goes on to talk about that later as a separate idea.

> Then you kept doubling down on there being nothing wrong with passing off AI activity as human activity.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Not only does it not seem to have any relevance to the discussion, we currently lack the technology to make AI look human, so, while that may become a future problem, there is currently not a concern. Currently we only ever see AI in places where one is able to see, without ambiguity, that they are looking at the product of software.

Whether or not that hypothetical future needs to see passing AI activity off as being human as being "wrong" is really for the future to decide. We cannot realistically imagine what other conditions might exist in that time to consider the full picture. AI being able to appear human, if we ever get there, will not be the only evolution in technology and society to take place. It won't be today's world with one variable tweaked. Looking at it through today's lens is foolish at best.

It is not what you said, but it is the context that defines what we're talking about. I reiterated it to remind you of what the original reply isolated from a bunch of other ideas that were also thrown around as it was starting to look like you had forgotten what we were discussing, perhaps confused by parallel discussions that branched off in different directions. This seems to confirm that you had forgotten, although perhaps that is a misinterpretation on my part. So that we're clear, are you implying here that you've been trying to change the subject in bad faith?

Uh, what? That's like saying there is a continuum between cold and far. Your comparison points are not in the same realm. Consider a free market where all actors decide to form cooperatives. That, however unlikely in practice, would result in both free markets and socialism at the same time. A free market does not care about how the people decide to divvy up capital. The people deciding to share ownership in the capital is perfectly valid within a free market. If "free market" was prescriptive about how people must trade then it would be completely contradictory.

> Also, a free market requires a government. The role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property.

Absolutely not. In a free market, one negotiates with private vendors to offer these services. A government is the antithesis of a free market, being a monopolistic vendor that you don't get to opt out of. A voluntary organization could emerge in a free market to provide those services to those who wish to join without having to individually negotiate, which would closely resemble the governments we know, but key is that it membership is optional. What makes a government more than an association is that you don't get to choose. The market cannot be free if you cannot choose who to buy from.

You could more reasonably say that there is a continuum between free markets and planned economies. It is still flawed as none of this is one-dimensional, but for the sake of simplification we can run with it. The space between is referred to as mixed economy, not free market.

However, what we do know is that a free market requires management people today aren't accustomed to. Suddenly you are fully responsible to negotiate protection, transit, etc. That is a burden many would find off-putting and, in many cases, something beyond their capabilities.

If we were magically dropped into a free market tomorrow it is likely we would quickly attach ourselves to whomever is willing to give us those things without needing extra thought, just like the monopoly does today, and – tada – we're right back to the way things are right now.

If we were born into a free market and didn't know anything else then monopolies might be harder to pull off. That said, while the initial conditions were a bit different, we've been in a similar situation before and the monopoly won in the end.

How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.

This is where things break down for me. You want to take humans out of the equation by making any humans that may exist in the process anonymous, to disassociate their involvement, but then worry that the anonymous computer avatars may not be human?

I could at least have a bit more appreciation if you were talking about Facebook Groups, where there is greater effort to make those computer avatars appear human (real names, photos, etc.), but PhysicsForum, HN, and the like chose, seemingly on purpose, to not go in that direction.

If you really want to have discussions with humans, which is valid, why not go outside and meet them where they are found?

> but also the slogan is "science by humans"

If an automotive forum's slogan was "All About Cars" you would disavow any human who uses it? Science by humans can be discussed by non-humans, no? Something and the discussion of something are logically not the same thing.

> Why would anybody make an account on an "expert discussion" site to be misrepresented?

What do you believe is being misrepresented when AI content is posted on a forum? There is no promise of human activity on the typical online forum. To return us to the top, since maybe you've lost sight of what we were talking about, "Using AI to fake posting activity is bad." — but it remains unclear to me why it is bad. I can see how it might end up being low quality "slop", but that is for the users to decide. There is the possibility that users don't find it to be of poor quality and actually enjoy it.

The question was: Where is anything on PhysicsForum presented as human activity? Because I don't see it. It is modelled like most other online message forums, including HN, which explicitly remove any suggestion that there could be humans involved behind the scenes. Which is the whole point! Online forums are for when you want something other than the human experience. When one wants the human experience they go where humans are found.

> If this is a clever pivot than I could use some help understanding the intended direction.

Allegedly the site was effectively dead and this was the operator's attempt to resurrect it. Was it clever? Probably not, but if the operator was clever it wouldn't have reached the point of near death in the first place. What are we expecting here? A miracle worker to come along and give the operator supernatural powers to abate his natural limitations? Not everyone is going to be as smart or capable as you are.

Where? I admittedly hadn't heard of PhysicsForum before this, so I don't know what it looked liked before, but at time of writing it seems to be structured a lot like HN or most other online forums where there is no semblance of human activity, just computer avatars. Last time I checked human activity comes with humans. Anthropomorphizing software does not make it human.

> Are you excited to generate an account and communicate with experts such as the ones in the article today?

If it is interesting and enjoyable, why not? I don't care about how the software works. I know HN accounts tend to get caught up in comments expressing things like nobody will use software unless it is written in Rust and stuff like that, but interested parties of a product don't think like that. They evaluate a product for what it is, not how it works beneath the sheets.

If you are asking if PhysicsForum in particular is a good product, I cannot meaningfully answer. It is not something that would have floated my boat at any point. From my point of view it never was, but it is apparent that sentiment hasn't been shared, although apparently there has been a meaningful decline in interest so it seems it hasn't held up as a product over time. Key here is that whatever controversial changes were made were made because interest in the product had declined so much already.

What's curious is that nobody was complaining about how bad it had become amid that long decline. They just walked away when it wasn't good anymore. Yet here we are, where you can still walk away all the same, but somehow that's the end of the world?