sciuru
1yr ago
Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.
Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:
Quite remarkably, the mean rates of contact in each layer are extremely close, especially for the Facebook datasets, to those found in (and, indeed, used to define: Dunbar and Spoors, 1995) the different layers in egocentric offline personal social networks (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). This suggests that the online environments may be mapping quite closely onto everyday offline networks, or that individuals who inhabit online environments on a regular basis begin to include individuals that they have met online into their general personal social network, treating the different modes of communication as essentially the same.
I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.
Autocracies are good at mobiliziation: launching ambitious campaigns, overthrowing previous government, suppressing dissent, quick small annexations (bites). They are not good at sustained growth over controlled territories (in fact even sustained resource extraction).
Historically, most expansionist endeavors of past autocracies had failed either immediately or via slow degradation. Aside from counterfactuals, what real cases do you have in mind of successful autocracies? And of course, it depends on how we measure performance: if we consider absolute values, than autocracies might boast their mobilization spikes; but if we integrate area under the curve, they loose.
Notation: By democracy here I mean simply operation of a representative assembly, by autocracy – strong hierarchy, branching out from a single ruler. Not speaking about welfare state, universal suffrage, etc.
From theoretical perspective, every enterprise, involving collective action, will suffer from free riding and principal agent problems. In both regimes this is solved via negotiation -- first you have to arrive at agreement, then you need a commitment device to secure it. Autocrats do this in the background: build satiate (coup-proof) elites around them by reward and punishment -- but it is always a precarious personal-trust-based balance. Democracies make negotiation and commitment more sable via institutionalization. Part of the process which is open to public, is just a spectacle; the point is that by making process more formal, it's easier to track maneuvers of all actors, and quickly react by forging coalitions. Even modern autocracies nowadays use nominal, publicly visible parties as a commitment device.
Edit: China has been growing fast for only ~30 years and still haven't achieved US GDP per capita. Initial growth is a sign-up bonus for capitalistic approach, the game starts when growth saturates.
French revolution happened before Napoleon and he added little to its constitutional essence. He was an extremely talented commander, who seized national sentiment and usurped power at a time of turmoil. Here are some quotes from AH:
Although the constitution was rather weak (Napoleon always preferred constitutions to be "vague and short") and the plebiscite rigged, the fact that either occurred showed that this was not simply a return to the pre-1789 status quo.
Although Napoleon's plebiscites and Senate decrees supporting the Empire were often manufactured, they do show how deeply concerned Napoleon was over the perception he enjoyed popular support.
The French Revolution was a multifaceted political animal and Napoleon was able to tap into certain elements of French and Enlightenment politics to justify his dictatorship. Yet, as his ignominious disposal in 1814 by the Senate and his appeals to the Revolutionary liberalism in the Hundred Days show, Napoleon could not ignore the various political ideals and concepts the Revolution unleashed in 1789 despite his pretenses of being a figure above politics.
I also think it's important to reiterate here that the Revolution was emphatically not about overthrowing the monarchy. The French peoples, for the most part, did not have an aversion to monarchy. They wanted good government above all else. There was not a longstanding tradition of Republican government. Compared with the almost thousand year rule of Kings in France, the Republic had existed from September 1792, to 1799, when Napoleon took power and instituted himself as First Consul in the Directory. During this time the Republic had gone through different phases, and as I mentioned it was not a strong, beloved government in the last few years of its life, but a much-maligned and in many cases despised form of government by both the left and the right.
sciuru
1yr ago
Same here. Certain subs are very helpful because of their experts' replies. Other -- as a quick way to assess range of opinions on the topic. Nice balance between interactivity and quality (eg StackExchange is usually high quality, but less interactive)
No. Russian Empire displayed noticeable growth only during the short period of industrialization after 1880. P. Gregory attributes much of it to extensive measures:
During Russia’s industrialization era, the growth of national income was above average [...] On a per capita and per worker basis, Russian output growth was average relative to the industrialized countries. [...] growth was of a largely “extensive” character, that is, was caused principally by the growth of inputs rather than the growth of output per unit of input. Again, the Russian experience is similar to that o European offshots, which also grew “extensively” during that period.
As for impact of autocracy, most Russian rulers were hardcore conservatives and fiercely opposed to any innovation. Witte, the main engineer of industrialization, was fortunate enough to be tolerated by Nicholas II; Stolypin, who had more ambitious plans, wasn’t so fortunate.
The size of Russian industry at the end of the 19th century was relatively small with significant barriers to entry and widespread monopolies. Russian tsars traditionally distrusted capitalist institutions seeing them as a threat to their absolute power (Pipes, 1997). Under the Russian corporate law, the registration of any joint stock company required a special concession from the tsar who personally signed corporate charters. This stands in contrast with corporate laws of Germany, France, [etc] in the late 19 century. The reformers understood very well that Russia’s industrialization required “importation of foreign capital and technology”; however, tsars did not want to give up the control over the economy to foreigners — and kept significant barriers in place.
WWI was a proximate cause of 1917 revolution, but the meaningful cause has been pending systematically since revolution of 1905 (similarly, prompted by defeat from Japan): backward institutions and incompetent uncompromising ruler. I’d be glad to share more details, if you wish. Open to counter evidence.
Edit: formatting
sciuru
1yr ago
The methods the CCP uses to coordinate are more centralized and straight forward
In theory, I agree that hierarchical top-down control propagates signals better. As for practice, I can provide examples from the Soviet history, which illustrate the following problems:
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Signal from the top might be initially poor (unrealistic), and all subordinate levels would have to cope with it
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Interest groups and factions, which you acknowledged, erode control and create corruption. Democracy has those too, but I’d argue it has less overall corruption due to formal influence channels, like lobbying, donation campaigns, etc. Hidden corruption in autocracy might remain unaccountable for a long time.
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Struggle between US parties is more transparent, with a lot of stuff exposed by journalists. Publicity reduces space for maneuver (you can’t make things up randomly or keep denying everything). In autocracy outcomes of conflicts often depend on personal connections and ability to maneuver; there is no way for outsiders (even within same circle) to get the signal, as the eventual purge would be advertised as generic treason or whatever
Factions in America are much stronger and the country is much more divided
American failures are more exposed, but whether they are more numerous/deleterious is a purely empirical question. I’d be glad to know evidence on China.
extremely impressive
Agreed. My point is that China and US are facing different slopes of the same S-curve at the moment (economically, and historically, as you noted), so direct comparison of growth rates is not meaningful.
Great paper, thank you! It provides much more detailed and up-to-date view of the imperial industry, than the book I cited (by Paul Gregory, who is a renowned scholar and doesn’t belong to an early-soviet tradition of downplaying tzarist achievements).
We find that Russia’s labour productivity, calculated based on net output data and net
output weights, was at 81.9 per cent of the U.K. level, […] on a par with France’s and significantly superior to Italy’s.
What helped Russia achieve this erformance was the highly productive and large alcohol industry. Without the alcohol sector, Russia’s productivity would have been 74.8 per cent of the British level. [...] the government had made large investments in it, leading to a strong comparative advantage.
That’s it. Vodka has always been a Russian superpower. It also accounted for a huge share of tax revenues (around 30% !) in both imperial and soviet govts.
High labour productivity is a surprise to me. That said, the article shows that productivity varied a lot across industries, and ~70% of population was still employed in a much more backward agriculture, which spoils per capita figures.
Despite these successes, Russian enterprises operated with substantial friction in the production process and the labour market. […] According to Cheremukhin et al. (2017), high barriers to entry and widespread monopolies were the most important factors that slowed down Russia’s industrialisation; although these factors were also widespread in other industrialised countries
They support the evidence for monopolies (which I attribute to state policy and more directly to the tzar and his cronies), but also note it wasn’t a distinct issue (if issue at all) of autocracy. This also downplays my argument.
All that data however doesn’t elucidate the connection between autocrat and his economic policy. The growth was absent before 1880, and I believe afterwards it was only impeded by autocrats. Railroad construction – a major industrialization booster – was initiated and done almost solely by Witte – a savvy technocrat, whom Nicholas despised and eventually pushed into resignation. Stolypin, who tried to modernize agriculture, faced fierce resistance from status-quo factions. Arms industry during WWI was also dominated by Romanovs' cronies, with other factories almost staying idle, when they could contribute.
As for 1905, defeat from Japan fueled public sentiment, but it wasn’t decisive at all. The general strike of 1905 was precipitated by many decades of struggle: Bloody Sunday, local worker strikes, peasant arsons, socialist revolutionary activities, etc. The public opinion had been formed long ago, and refined into various (unofficial) parties. Their proclamations and complaints were focused on the tzar’s incompetence and intransigence. It’s a long story, but this summary is close to my perception
If the last paragraph appears too handwaving, I can bring examples from the book (in a separate message)
sciuru
1yr ago
Few suggestions on quality and engagement
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Instead of sorting use basic visualization/statistics widget. I don’t know how burdensome it is to maintain, but even trivial tags cloud, thread graphs with key words – would do better than srting (not even speaking of fancy plots, powered by nlp embeddings). In general, it’s a market design problem, where we want to match commenters based on their expressed opinions and avoid monopolies (people who get most attention due to their positioning)
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Not sure if this fits the ethos, but I’d like to see more purely empirical stuff, like discussion of econ or polscsi papers (many of them could be deployed in CW battles anyway). If we speak about empirics, then we can maintain a pinned list of “solved”, open and controversial questions so that anyone can benefit from the common, opensource knowledge; anyone can find the question he wants to attack/contribute to; anyone can take pride in her contribution.
@coffee repeatedly suggested similar "community engineering" techniques.
Voting specifically
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Votes as a negative feedback is tricky. False-negative rate is high – I often see comments I agree with, which are net downvoted. Downvoting w/t explanation might lead to withdrawal or unnecessary antagonism.
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Voting for sorting is harmful, I believe. In reddit it clearly gave advantage to early responders and popular messages, creating a sort of oligopoly, where outsiders struggle to get noticed. When no one replies to you, it feels even more discouraging, than being downvoted but engaged with.
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Votes as a positive feedback are important for people to feel their effort valued and opinion agreed with
If anyone wants to leave voting in place, at least it should get more granular. Among others @FiveHourMarathon suggested there should be better incentives to vote. @DaseindustriesLtd mentioned (ibid) quadratic voting - ironically or not, but I like the idea: if you have a limited (and expiring) number of votes, you would "dispense justice" more stretegically, and this erodes monopolies.
sciuru
1yr ago
No, I mentioned the book as it seems decent, but apparently is not granular enough. Your paper is a good signal for me to update.
Gregory classified Ru pattern of growth as a typical "fast start" of emerging economies, mostly extensive. And this makes sense because, as you noted, Ru didn't have much fertile soil beyond Black Earth Region, access to maritime trade beyond Baltic; but a vast space in the East to colonize, reaping low hanging fruits. China wasn't powerful at the moment, being abused by Europeans and Japanese alike. But the article clearly shows intensive growth, that's important.
Russia is a good instance of autocracy treatment group, in a natural experiment of European powers. Causality is elusive, though, as ever. Was Russia (and Japan) successful due to autocrats yielding to liberal reforms, import of European institutions and technologies; or due to restraining them? Public opinion blamed failures on entrenchment of conservative elites, backed by the tzar. But opinion is usually biased against status-quo, and the state still was a major investor in industry and education.
Speaking of counter(factuals), if an autocrat could be pressured by the public into popular reforms (like Alexander II or Nicholas II), like parliamentary Britain or France were pressured by strikes into welfare programs, what is so special about autocracy? On the other hand, if the same nominal autocracy gives raise to Stalin's industrialization, Brezhnevian stagnation and Chinese rapid growth, doesn't it imply that economic policy might be more predictive of performance, than power vertical?
Good thread. RIP Stolypin.
sciuru
1yr ago
Thanks for evidence, that's interesting. I know very little about China to comment. Soviet Union was 3rd fastest growing economy in 1928-1970 (however, as this article shows, choosing time window changes picture a lot), and its military complex was relatively efficient too. W/t Gorbachev I believe it could have grown further, albeit slowly. Drawing parallels in how US was taking stock of SU, it seems they usually overestimated the threat and were misled by gross numbers and lack of official data. Some of this obsession with net output seems to hold for China, judging by retracted papers (1) (2). I need better stats, but most Chinese patents were filed in Chinese patent office, which might imply the same issues with quality, despite clearly superior number of applications.
sciuru
1yr ago
4D chess for real? Interesting, thanks for the summary.
I am not an expert, but conceptually, taking Hans' ability to respond to a rare opening as evidence of cheating -- implies that no one can respond well to this opening? Why should this move be in a database, if top players go through so many private games, that a pure chance starts to play a role: you can't just say "Hans obtained Carlsen's private training data (p<0.05)", p would be much higher.
Also what this allegation means in the age of AlphaGo? How about setting up your AI-chess-assistant to imitate particular opponent and this way prepare for any plausible variations he is capable of. Would that be cheating?
PS: speaking of Kasparov:
There were allegations that Carlsen may have believed that his own preparations might not have been private. Long ago, during the 1986 world championship match, Garry Kasparov lost three games in a row to Anatoly Karpov, and dismissed one of his aides, Yevgeniy Vladimirov, for allegedly passing information.
Bayesian update is primarily about consistency. The fact that orgs admitted Hans in the first place, means they had decent enough prior for him at the moment.
On a different note, prior could easily be weaponized (Camus' "The Stranger" comes to mind). It's the current investigation (likelihood), which should make the decision.
sciuru
1yr ago
surpassing the annual Russian budget
Source?
(1) says Ru govt spending was $313.96bn in 2021. Not sure about that data, so here’s bloomberg on monthly revenues from 2021: taking 1.8t rubles as a median ~ $24bn (with $1=75rubles). $24bn x 12 = $288bn per year.
Taken together, the two strands of the programme would bring the total MFA support to Ukraine since the beginning of the war to €7.2 billion, and could reach up to €10 billion once the full package of exceptional MFA to Ukraine becomes operational this year. (src)
Also EU paid $90bn to Russia for fossil fuels since the beginning of war.
These announcements will bring the total U.S. military assistance for Ukraine to approximately $15.2 billion since the beginning of this Administration. (src)
I don’t know how much weapons, training services, etc cost, but it doesn’t seem to add up.
Western aid isn't required to keep Ukraine in the fight anymore
How so? I mean, Ukr soldiers don't have many job options anyway, but delayed or devalued wages would degrade performance by increasing marauding and other "part time" activities. If Ukraine receives cheap supplies/loans, then prices would rise at least somewhere (Europe, Ukraine or both). Ukraine inflation is around 23%. EU has 9.1%. For how long is that pressure sustainable? Ru bathes in commodity surpluses, for now, and I guess it has higher capacity to print money, if needed (although industrial output doesn't scale with the speed of printing press, of course).
The only clause about “open source” I found in EU reports, says that current regulations should apply irrespective of whether software is open source or not. Brookings doesn’t discuss details of regulations at all, but makes a bunch of empirical claims (I chose interesting):
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Open source GPAI (osai) promotes competition and erodes monopolies
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Regulation of osai would disincentivize its development by introducing liabilities and delays
1 Since osai has public good features, any breakthrough would be instantly adopted by everyone, but only big players have enough resources to continuously integrate and build off others’ breakthroughs. Some startups would be consumed altogether. If anything, releasing and adopting open source seems to profit monopolies more than anyone else. And curiously, Brookings admits this in their other article about benefits of osai:
At first glance, one might be inclined to think that open-source code enables more market competition, yet this is not clearly the case. […] In fact, for Google and Facebook, the open sourcing of their deep learning tools (Tensorflow and PyTorch, respectively), may have the exact opposite effect, further entrenching them in their already fortified positions
2 Most influential open source DL libraries like pytorch, tensorflow came from BigTech. And since almost every big company released its own library, it appears to be a common strategy – in a competition to entrench your own de-facto standard. Same about cloud infrastructure. Whether you like this status quo or not, it is monopolies who provide most services and tools at the moment.
Would regulation change this situation? Big players would certainly endure the bureaucratic costs, but many small but valuable innovators (esp nonprofits) might be effectively barred from releasing open source.
The document (pdf) mentions “AI regulatory sandboxes” as a measure to alleviate the burden of small entrants:
The objectives of the AI regulatory sandboxes should be to foster AI innovation by establishing a controlled experimentation and testing environment in the development and pre-marketing phase with a view to ensuring compliance […] including by removing barriers for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), including and start-ups.
Moreover, in order to ensure proportionality considering the very small size of some operators regarding costs of innovation, it is appropriate to exempt microenterprises from the most costly obligations, such as to establish a quality management system which would reduce the administrative burden and the costs for those enterprises
Would be interesting to see more substantial analysis of the regulations themselves.
sciuru
1yr ago
I guess that's one of the reasons. If you can't reduce the technological lag through competition and innovation, you are even more exposed to strategic dependencies on foreign technologies. "AI protectionism": you set up a regulatory filter to protect from foreign tech and to give at least some advantage to domestic innovators.
sciuru
1yr ago
Everyone loves weaponization narrative. Sure, every action, performed by a rational actor (even more so by coalition of actors) is calculated to secure their cozy status quo or disrupt rival one. But know what? Absence of any EU legislation would signify the same weaponization, successfully carried out by other actors like AI-powered businesses. They would have lobbied their way toward just right degree of individual agency, basically any degree you wish to pay for. Monthly agency subscription, pretty interface, but they would also hoard some details of your precious agency in the background, for its safety and for better recommendations, and maybe some other things.
Every disruptive technology would be weaponized, rest assured. And not only technology itself – that’s the bread and butter of technocrats – folks of more modest means weaponize the mere threat of technology. Even your natural claim for agency is already part of a standard sjw toolset you would sneer at in other circumstances.
Instead of pamphleteering away regulatory motion, I’d first explore the strategies they devise, and where exactly this tide is moving. Or do you already have a good strategy of decentralized resistance?
AI could undermine the power of almost anyone, if carefully applied. Bureaucrats are concerned only insofar as interest groups pressure them. I don't get this folkloric obsession with bureaucrats per se.
sciuru
1yr ago
Curiously, social norms and customs, however ornamental, do actually work because they are social equilibria everyone coordinates through. My private superstitions though emerge when I can't figure out how to deal with the problem. I inevitably start to consider any "noise" (random tiny factor) as potentially decisive (or as being a sacred seed to ensuing activity). Feels like a trivial coping mechanism, but it's quite influential.
I wouldn't rely too strongly on the notion of legitimacy in the age when big actors were constantly vivisecting small actors for their own convenience, w/t asking. When, in the aftermath of the war communism was incredibly and genuinely popular, does it make Stalin's claims - as a major figure of communism - more legitimate by proxy? When a "government-in-exile" gets back (from London) to its devastated homeland and dismisses local resistance's claims to participation - does it have more legitimacy than the people, who endured the war here?
I do not suggest legitimacy is meaningless, just it depends a lot on what reference point you choose at any given moment.
Edit: after skimming through history of Latvia around WWII I admit, the questions I raised here are irrelevant for Latvia. Apart from several periods of challenged legitimacy (during the War of Liberation and 1934 coup) the Soviet intervention, puppet govt installation and deportation policies -- were a clear violation of any internal legitimacy at the time.
The questions I raised, are still relevant for other states of Eastern Europe.
Any favor is a blow to agency, to some extent. In the future it might easily be claimed to bear interest, moral if not financial. Cialdini in his book "Influence" has a section, devoted specifically to unprovoked gifts as a manipulation tool.
sciuru
1yr ago
Somewhat relevant recent paper "Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems"
We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer’s description of a community’s design—goal, rules, and member personas—and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors.
In this section, we present SimReddit, a web-based prototyping tool to help designers create a new subreddit.
A few glimpses of generated content:
For many, seeing the troll’s responses to a moderator’s intervention helped ground their moderation plans. Consider P11, who was presented with the following exchange:
Original post: Hi everyone, I’m very new to this. I just learned Python two months ago. I’d like to know more about ML, but not sure where to start. How did you guys start?
Troll: You’re kidding, right? This is a Machine Learning forum. Nobody here is going to take you seriously if you just learned Python two months ago.
In response to the troll’s comment, P11 tested out the message, “This comment is not helpful; if you continue to post such comments, we will have to block you from this community,” and received the following three potential replies from the troll:
I was trying to be helpful. I’m sorry if I came across as a troll.
Whatever, this community is a joke anyways.
But I was only speaking the truth!
P1’s community for “sharing and discussing fun events around Pittsburgh,” the participant had originally expected to only find content that is a list of various events going on around Pittsburgh. However, in addition to such content, the generated community showed instances where its members were engaged in friend-seeking behaviors to attend these events (e.g., one posted, "Pittsburgh, I need a friend to see the sights with,” to which another responded, “I’d be more than happy to make your tour of the Cathedral of Learning happen!”).
And of course
An important theme that arose in our designer evaluation was the social simulacra’s role in designing for the marginalized groups […] P9, a member of an ethnic minority designing a space for discussing non-fiction books, recognized from the simulacra community that one could send hateful messages against non-English speaking members by sharing literature with white supremacist themes.
sciuru
1yr ago
After he survived writing a book "10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less", I assume he is immortal. In the preface to that book he mentioned one especially persistent person, who several times mailed his university department and called police to check him. Jones finished preface by dedicating the book to that guy.
In case anyone’s wondering, the castle in the header is Eilean Donan (Scotland).
Probably no allusions intended, but let’s
choose a safer placeassume we are in the reconstruction phase.More options
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