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At the end of an unrelated article, Steven Levy responds to a question from one of his readers (not actually me despite the name coincidence)

Ask Me One Thing

Alan asks, “Why can’t we choose how to pay for online content?”

Thanks for the question, Alan. It’s one that baffles me, too. I do have little tolerance for those who complain when they come across articles that are behind a paywall. At one point, kiddies, everything was in print and you could read nothing for free unless you stood in the newstand and consumed it, hoping the proprietor wouldn’t snatch it away. Folks, it costs money to produce those gems. Admittedly, the news industry didn’t do itself any favors initially by giving its content away online, but now most, if not all, places have abandoned the idea that digital ads alone can fund excellent writing and reporting.

But you are complaining about the lack of choice in how we pay for it. I’m assuming you are unhappy that our current system is subscription or nothing. There’s generally no way to pay a small fee for a single article or even newsletter. How many times have you found a link to something in a newspaper in a town you never visited that might be of interest—and can’t get at it without giving up a credit card to be charged for complete access to news and archives you couldn’t care less about? Literally for decades I have been assuming that an easy-to-use micropayment system will get constructed and implemented. The technical challenges are minimal. Yet despite multiple attempts, none has caught on. One company, Blendle, once promised to “save journalism” with its micropayment system. Last year it announced that it was no longer in the pay-per-article business and was moving to an Apple News–style subscription service that gives access to multiple publications.

The micropayment solution seems dead. Still, when I hit a paywall and can’t access something I want to read, I would certainly hit a button that would move a few cents, or in some cases even a dollar or two, into the account of a publication. It seems so logical. But as all of us know too well, making sense is not a sufficient condition for something actually happening.

The last link there is to a Wired article from 5years ago in which the author expresses exactly the same concern that no micropayment solution has caught on but without any explanation of why that should be the case. The earlier link, though, to a Columbia Journalism Review article from a year later gives more analysis of why the idea may truly be dead. And that is what I want to question here.

The CJR article presents two main arguments for why micropayments are not accepted by publishers. One is the belief by publishers that, of potential readers who are interested in an item, the expected income from those who can be persuaded to buy an expensive subscription (despite preferring a one item payment) is greater than the loss of those who will just turn away. The other has to do with the costs of payment processing.

There is a lot of talk these days about encouraging creators of AI tools to tag the work they produce so people will know that it is fake; but the idea that this would prevent the spread of misinformation is preposterous, as there will always be other sources of tools which don’t advertise their fakery.

The correct solution is not to securely identify lies, but rather to identify what is reliable. This might be done by a system of signing whatever we distribute (and want others to actually believe) with something like a secure watermark(*) identifying the source. Then anyone who wants reliable info can just ignore anything that is not signed by a source they trust. Some will choose to trust unreliable sources; but I do believe that if some sources are truly scrupulous (much more so than the current mainstream media), then eventually they will come to be recognized as such (and in any case people will at least be sure of the source of whatever they are looking at).

(*) for example, if a message or file is encrypted so as to be unreadable without a widely distributed public key that is permanently associated with the sender, then no-one who does not possess the sender’s private key is capable of sending a message which is decodable to other than nonsense by use of that public key. (In a sense, what earns credibility here is not the sender per se, but rather the public key itself – which might eventually become known as unlocking only things that are true.)

Source: Google unveils invisible ‘watermark’ for AI-generated text

We are frequently asked these days to confirm that the state of Israel has a “right to exist”. Well, I’m afraid that I have to say NO! No state has the right to exist because states don’t have rights. People do. And while I agree that the current citizens (and other residents) of Israel (and whatever other territories it controls) have the right to live in states of their own choosing (to whatever extent there is sufficient local agreement that that is a practicable situation), I have to admit that the original creation of Israel was (worse than) a mistake. Now mistakes cannot always be reversed, and so I am not saying that the destruction of Israel would in any way be acceptable as a solution. But the fact remains that the actions which endorsed the state of Israel were not just wrong but were motivated in part by antisemitism (or at least by capitulation to antisemitism) on the part of the leadership of those countries (especially Canada!!) which should have opened their arms to welcome any Jews who felt threatened in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter).

Source: None Is Too Many | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Yes! AlphaFold does appear (at least to this non-expert) to actually advance Chemistry. But I have seen nothing that I would call evidence that Hinton’s work on the “Boltzmann machine” has contributed anything to understanding of the physical models that inspired it. I expect that this will be a controversial award!

Source: (15) Two Nobel Prizes for AI, and Two Paths Forward

See also this video  and this from a couple of other surprised physicists.

After reading this article twice, and yet again the paragraph where the author purports to show that “it’s wrong to think that Bergson’s idea of duration can be assimilated into the idea of psychological time”,

I am still unable to find any explanation of the difference between our internally experienced psychological time (which, by the way can not necessarily always be “aligned with external clock time”) and “the first-person experience of (Bergson’s unmeasurable) duration” (which they appear to identify as the “lived time” in terms of which “An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends”).

On the other hand Steven Savitt’s “solution” does not address the subjective nature of duration and appears to just identify it with the non-subjective proper time associated with a possible observer’s world line – which seems to be just giving up on the idea of any special “philosophical” time as this has always been the only kind of time that is ever discussed in relativistic physics.

Source: Who really won when Bergson and Einstein debated time? | Aeon Essays

It’s a shame when those who claim to be “Fact Checking” resort to willful misinterpretations, distortions, and exaggerations of their own.

For example this Fact Checker from The Washington Post starts with

• “We’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.” — Vance (False, the United States ranked 17th.)

But while Vance’s claim might be based on an unidentified and inappropriate measure of cleanness, it is certainly not appropriate to judge it as “False” without identifying what it actually claims to be saying, and it is even more ridiculous to assign a particular rank from some unidentified study as if it were gospel. In particular, the claim could be interpreted in terms of total emissions, emissions per capita, or emissions per $ of GDP (which might actually rank the US as cleanest – even if only since a huge proportion of the US GDP comes from clean financial and administrative work managing the exploitation of remote dirty work in other countries).

• “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.” — Vance (False, this is a ginned-up number that includes the Trump years.)

But the quote identified here as “False” is in fact a true statement about the current situation, and it would only be a claim that this was due to Biden/Harris that should be identified as false.

• “Less than 2 percent of that wall [on the border] got built.” —Walz (False, even counting only new barriers, as opposed to replacement barriers, adds up to 8.5 percent.)

Unfortunately it seems that the judgement here is correct – as is also the case for the one below.

• “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies” — Walz (False, it does not.)

The next is a value judgement that I agree with (about intent and what is “bipartisan”) but not to the extent of declaring Vance’s claim objectively false.

• “Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” —Vance (False, Trump acted to kill it repeatedly in a partisan way.)

And finally, the teaser subset concludes with

• “Remember he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.” — Vance (False, this is a whitewash of what happened.)

But both of the claims here are objectively true. The urge to protest peacefully may have been made with a wink and a nudge, but it was in fact made at least once; and of course the attempt to prevent the transition actually did fail.

Source: Fact Checker from The Washington Post

I don’t actually think that the prospective nuclear standoff is any more dangerous than the first one. There are currently five nations with the capacity to build unmanned nuclear powered submarine launch platforms which could crawl undetectably to within just a couple of hundred miles of any nation with a shoreline and thence deliver low flying hypersonic steerable drones against which there is no plausible defense. Once these are in place, any devastating attack against any of the nations that own them brings assured destruction on the perpetrator. It may be MAD but so long as all parties understand that it really exists it may actually deter direct aggression just as well as it did in the last century.

Source: The Race That Can’t Be Won | Portside

Both the citation of projected GDP increase as a justification for UBI and the use of carbon taxes to fund it strike me as wrongheaded.

GDP is a poorly defined quantity with only a loose relationship to the more relevant factor of median wellbeing; and, depending on how it is defined, it may either increase or decrease as a result of UBI. So I would be most reluctant to suggest that support for a UBI should be conditional on how it is perceived to affect GDP – especially as some alleged experimental trials have claimed to produce a negligible or even negative effect.

And with regard to revenue from a carbon “tax” I think it should be devoted entirely to the funding of prevention and mitigation of adverse effects from anthropogenic climate change.

The appropriate justification for providing an unconditional basic income is the fact that we all share ancestry with the initiators and creators of most current human wealth and of the intellectual and physical capital that enables the scale of its current rate of increase. And by the same rationale, its funding should come from a tax on the highest levels of wealth and income – including especially the unearned income that results from large gifts and inheritances.

Source: Basic income could solve global poverty and stop environmental destruction, study finds – Beyond

The recently published results of the Altman-funded study on a limited trial of UBI by direct payment have been getting a lot of attention. My own take is similar to (but less polite than) that of Scott Santens (at https://www.scottsantens.com/did-sam-altman-basic-income-experiment-succeed-or-fail-ubi/?ref=scott-santens-newsletter).

Some people suggest that the mechanism (of direct payment rather than as a ‘negative income tax’ or ‘earned income tax credit’)  makes a difference; but I don’t see that,

However it’s done I don’t see it as justifiable only on the basis of GDP enhancement but rather on moral grounds as per Gar Alperovitz (eg at https://medium.com/@GarAlperovitz/technological-inheritance-and-the-case-for-a-basic-income-ded373a69c8e ) – which is why I long ago suggested that it should be re-branded as a Universal Fair Inheritance.

Source: Did Sam Altman’s Basic Income Experiment Succeed or Fail?

What is touted these days as AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not that at all.

It’s actually AII (the Artificial Illusion of Intelligence) -something that is made painfully obvious by the ad being complained about in Shelly Palmer’s article below.

Source: Why Google’s “Dear Sydney” Ad Makes Me Want to Scream | Shelly Palmer

Roger Pielke Jr. has a long history of what some see as casting doubt on the need for prompt reduction of our CO2 emissions but which he categorizes just as exposing false and/or misleading claims (and sometimes even scientific malpractice) by advocates of climate action.

He does not deny either the reality of anthropogenic global warming or the need for prompt action to reduce our emissions, but many of his followers do and he seems to make little effort to discourage them. And some of his complaints strike me as exaggerated to the point of verging on dishonesty.

This raises a conundrum in my mind regarding my ongoing concern with how we should react to wrong arguments for things that are true.

It is important to reject false arguments for things that are true, but if the true facts are important then it is also necessary to always accompany the exposure of a false argument with a correct and convincing argument for the same conclusion.

Source: Why Climate Misinformation Persists – by Roger Pielke Jr.

 In what way does Schrodinger’s cat experiment represent morality?

Many people consider that an experiment which eventually kills half its subjects should not be performed on anything as cute as a ca

Some suggest that it is not the experimental setup but the act of looking which actually kills the cat so any truly moral experimenters should remain blindfolded for the rest of their lives, while others consider the state of being half alive to be more distressing than truly either alive or truly dead and so do not fault the experimenters for looking.

But the real moral problem occurs right at the start, since the process of putting even the small brain of a cat into a pure state by measuring every quantum number of every one of its atoms is to say the least quite tedious for the cat and may also be quite painful.

Fortunately, Wigner solved that problem by making the cat’s brain even bigger and hiring it as his assistant – with whom he reputedly became quite friendly.

Much as I hate to admit it(*), and despite ongoing concerns about the possible risks even when gas extraction is not the objective, I have to agree that there is significant promise in the idea of using fracking technology to increase the feasibility of true geothermal energy.

And perhaps not the least of its virtues is that this would provide an almost immediate re-employment of people and tools that are currently employed in the fossil fuel industry –  with far less worries about eventual supply exhaustion and possibly far greater potential geographic range of applicability.

(*) – my (irrational?) resistance being similar to that I feel at the use of medical techniques discovered through the use of (often quite horrifying) unethical experiments

Source: The Best Path Past Paralysis on Climate and Clean Energy is Starting Where There’s Agreement – as with Enhanced Geothermal

I side with those who feel they must agree with Elon Musk that Yann LeCun is full of shit when he claims that nothing that is not published counts as “science”.

Among the respondents to a Quora answer that I agree with, one defender of LeCun says “In the broad sense, science is a body of knowledge that relies on repeatability and acceptance, which is hard to accomplish if the work is not known. A better statement might be if it’s not published, it’s not adding to science.” But I don’t agree with that definition of science.

One problem here is with the word “acceptance” and the question of the required scale (and nature) of the accepting community. Few would deny that an alien civilization might have a practice that we would call science despite the lack of publications in Earthly journals, and by the same logic it is hard to deny the label of “science” to a similar practice restricted to an audience that is small enough for word of mouth to be the only necessary means of communication.

Another commenter suggests broadening the interpretation of “publish”, saying that scientific work may be “internally” published within a small group, but adding that “Nonetheless, your work would still be open for critical examination, which is the key”. But I’m afraid I don’t even agree with this, as I can imagine a person doing perfectly valid scientific work in complete secrecy. It’s not that the work has to be open for critical examination, but that if it were, then it would turn out to be accepted and would lead to teachable methods for making accurate predictions.

Of course anyone who wants to is free to use the word “science” only for the body of work that is globally accessible in some list of specific refereed journals, but (as with most words) there is no universal consensus as to what is the “correct” usage.

Source: (1001) Christopher VanLang’s answer to Does science need to be published? – Quora

Biden doesn’t need to drop out if Harris and her supporting team can be integrated into Biden’s core group in such a way that she can genuinely be seen as a co-leader ready to step in whenever Biden falters. (With appropriate forethought it should have been possible to withdraw him from the debate as soon as it became apparent that he was “under the weather” with the offer of Harris as a substitute player to be accepted or rejected at Trump’s peril.) She can then credibly continue to tout his intermittent wisdom as something she wants to continue learning from for as long as he lives – with everyone understanding that that might end within the next four years.

Source: Should Biden stay in the 2024 race? His arguments, parsed. – The Washington Post

This article seems to suggest that the author’s experience with academic philosophy has contributed nothing of value to his practice of doing philosophy in the real world. If so, I think it agrees with what the Harvard professor he quotes really meant. To me the linguistic turn is far from “played out”. It provides the only real insight that I ever gained from reading philosophers – namely that we can’t resolve conflicts about how to answer questions before agreeing on what those questions mean. And the meaning of “meaning” is a case in point.

Source: On breaking philosophy out of the seminar and back into the world | Aeon Essays

Robert Bryce likens his exposure of failure to make progress on the energy transition to the crowing of “Ball don’t lie!” by basketball player Rasheed Wallace when he sees failure of a free throw as justification of his claim to have ben unfairly penalized.

But the allusion to Wallace’s mediaeval idea of justice perhaps more apt than Bryce lets on. We should of course remember that just as the success of a free throw (or survival of a mediaeval dunking) does not actually undermine the justice of an accusation, so the failure of efforts to constrain our CO2 output in no way reflects on the validity of the claims by “climate activists” that we urgently need to do it.

Source: These 9 Charts Expose The Myth Of The Energy Transition

If I were looking for a way to convert excess nuclear power to a transportable fuel I think I’d look first at directly manufactured methane (via Sabatier process without going through the H2 intermediate step) since it is less prone to leak and we already have the built infrastructure for moving it around.

Source: Comments – The H Stands For Hype – Robert Bryce

Just testing