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Aaron Swartz fought to "free" knowledge and information produced by (in many cases publicly funded) research that was and still is hoarded by the academic publishing industry so that they can profit of it.

What big AI companies have done is illegally hoovering up copyrighted creative output of individuals and creating a situation where the wages that normally would be paid to those individuals instead go to that one company (that stole their work) which now becomes disproportionally rich and powerful.

In both cases companies obtain money and power by hoarding information obtained through dubious means (in the former case most academics willingly participate while at the same tone they often don't really have a choice). Exactly what Swartz was fighting against.

> Or compare AI water usage to that of what it would take a human to do a comparable task (what does it take to keep a human alive for a few hours compared to running a 15 minute long task to write a report with AI?).

A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

I'm curious what history Jack Clark is referring to here.

If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.

That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.

> is it not reasonable to assume that the number of security flaws just reflects how insecure most public code is?

It sounds to me like that's not an inference that can easily be drawn. Copilot was trained on predicting code, it doesn't understand the code it produces syntactically. Security issues can be highly context dependent. For example, in most cases it's fine to log a variable, but when it happens to contain a password, it's a security issue. This is a flawed example as the algorithm may be able to learn that variables with names or contexts suggesting that they're secrets should not be logged, but I can imagine much more subtle issues can crop up.

There needn't even be a confounding variable, the direction of causation may simply be reversed: not personality traits -> superager, but superager -> personality traits.

Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.

Right, but a well trained ear is exactly what those who don't focus on reading music tend to have ("instead" I might add since someone focusing on reading music doesn't necessarily need to understand it, although understanding of course helps a great deal).

It's interesting that you talk about replicating pieces. This is a "peculiarly Western" way of treating musicianship (and even in the Western world it applies primarily to classical musicians). In most of the world, musicianship is first and foremost judged by ability to improvise and to perform an orally transmitted repertoire of music. Music tends to be made in an improvisatory manner, but within the rules and constraints of a particular style.

It really depends on what kind of musician you want to be. Do you want to play Western classical music, or professionally in recording studios then reading is probably essential. If you just want to make music, it might still be handy and practical but by no means required.

They carry incomparable levels of responsibility

Similar false friends in Dutch: Concurrentie

I really don't see how it matters. It is this specific comment that is going to "manipulate" you into donating? The disaster happened. Stories as told in this comment happened. The hospital exists, it was severely damaged. In that context, does it really matter whether this person is speaking the truth?

I assume you mean hands off approach?

Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?

While peer review has its problems, I have the feeling that the problems that we're talking about here are not primarily caused by peer review per se, but by a set of perverse incentives that surround academia these days. I'm talking about the "publish or perish" culture that is results from the (sometimes) automated metrics based on which promotions are decided, grants are handed out and academic staff is assessed. Isn't it these incentives that can create attitudes like "Who cares? It's one more publication!" (as quoted by another commenter in this thread). And isn't an overwhelming amount of mediocre journal submissions that result from this one of the reasons peer review is under pressure, qualified reviewers are rare and politics are so common?

But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence since we obviously can't change the past.

> Slavery was enforced (and subsidized) by many governments; it wasn't exactly a creature of the free market.

Chicken or egg. You can make this argument either way. The fact is that slavery has been around for a lot longer than the governments that "enforced" it and it eventually took governments to abolish it completely.

> As we saw with toilet paper (and hand sanitizer), the average person will hoard anything they are afraid will not be available tomorrow. Companies have shown more restraint in this crisis and others.

Luckily in a well functioning democracy it would not be the toilet paper hoarders that'd be charged with coming up with ethical legislation.

It's not either or. Legislation doesn't solve everything, but neither does a completely free market (which doesn't and couldn't exist anyway).