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[silverspawn]

It's a faraway land in the year 1234 AD. There is a particular substance that's popular among the people. Many who take it claim to be in contact with the spirit world. They report seeing ghosts, sometimes those of their dead relatives, sometimes unknown ones. Many say those ghosts are powerful and wise, and they seem to have many strange properties and abilities.

Mary has never taken the substance herself, but she has the mind of a brilliant scientist, and she's made it her task to study the phenomenon. Despite its popularity, it is known that the substance is poisonous if taken too often, so no one has much experience. Perhaps they've taken it once or twice; perhaps they have an anecdote from a friend.

How could you ever understand a phenomenon with so little data? Well, you couldn't. This is why Mary will do better. She will not rely on spare reports; she will gather testimony from everyone she meets. She will travel the country and talk to hundreds if not thousands of people who have the substance, and she will collect information systematically, using a fixed and comprehensive set of questions.

Mary is confident that with enough reports, she will succeed in mapping out the state space of ghosts. She will determine its dimensionality -- among how many axes do the ghosts differ? -- and the probability distribution that describes how likely each point in this space (i.e., each possible ghost) is to be observed. Moreover, she will uncover the mathematical relationships that determine a ghost's properties as a function of its placement on each axis. Everyone knows that some ghosts can go through walls and others can't, but what decides this? Is it their size? Their transparency? Their shape? If several axes play a role, what is the combined relationship? Mary suspects a simple linear model will suffice, but only the data will tell.


If the above really happened, we'd all expect Mary to fail. Why? Because ghosts won't behave lawfully. The description of a ghost doesn't have to correlate with whether it can go through walls; not only is a linear term not going to predict this, no term at all will predict it. There is no state space of ghosts; it doesn't have structure; the entire approach is doomed to failure.

Of course, calling the ghosts' behavior arbitrary or random is not entirely true. Ingesting a hallucinatory drug will not produce random effects; it will deterministically have exactly one effect based on how the brain reacts to the substance. This behavior is in-principle predictable since the brain is just a (very complex) deterministic system and the drug just a chemical. So it is possible to predict what people will hallucinate, and all the way down, the system will have an elegant structure; it's just not at the level of the hallucinated ghosts because they are an emergent phenomenon. It probably wouldn't be restricted to ghosts at all; sooner or later, someone will hallucinate a giant spider, and that will be it for the model.

If, instead of hallucinated ghosts, Mary had set out to study the phenomenon of fire, we'd expect that she would find regularities and structure. Given a few variables like the amount of each material and the surface area, there would be laws determining how long the fire will burn, how large it the flame will be, what temperature it will reach, and so on. Most of those laws would probably be linear, too. That's because fire is a pretty low-level phenomenon, so it's governed by a fixed set of rules that can be discovered.

Conversely, suppose the original Mary approaches you and declares that her task was successful. Remember that this is the thirteenth century; you don't know whether ghosts are real or not. "This is the state-space," says Mary, "it's only three-dimensional, and these are the relationships. They are all very simple; all of them are linear, and most depend on only a single variable. It turns out that ghosts can go through walls if and only if they're at most one foot tall; transparency and shape don't matter."

You are skeptical at first, but you have a few friends who have never taken the substance and are willing to be test subjects. So you gather their reports to check whether the description of the ghosts aligns with their reported abilities. Sure enough, the model predicts everything perfectly. Every ghost smaller than one foot can go through walls; every other relationship is also true. After seeing this, will you still claim that ghosts aren't real? They're a figment of people's imaginations... and people imagine a regular 3d space with a perfect Gaussian probability distribution... and simple linear formulas predicting every property of the ghosts...? Formulas that hold universally even though every person is different? If the model really worked, would it not be time to admit that ghosts are real, that the state space of ghosts is an existing structure that your brain tapped into?

[silverspawn]

I was going to have this summary thing of my research for post #5000 but it didn't pan out, so this is the best I can do.

Obviously this is all an extended metaphor for qualia, and if and how you could figure out whether it's a real thing. The reason I like this approach is that you can initially set it up as a way to settle where qualia exists, but it goes much deeper than that. Functionalism will have a very hard time explaining how existing structure is compatible with the brain essentially being a giant circuit.

The character is called Mary because it's a reference to Mary's room. Mary's room is a very popular thought experiment, but I think this one is genuinely a lot more insightful. Don't yet know what to call it though, and you'd have to make it a bit shorter.

[silverspawn]

Watching Take Shelter, also from a YourMovieSucks recommendation.

He and I definitely don't have the same aesthetic or even similar ones, but he has a broad taste and these movies so much more thoughtful and competent than random movies on Netflix. I don't think I'm gonna go back to trying out random stuff. And movies are arguably a healthier form of entertainment than games because the length is restricted.

The only real downside is that they're usually not on Netflix and streaming stuff is a pain. Netflix really needs to get on with taking over the world already

[Awaclus]

The only real downside is that they're usually not on Netflix and streaming stuff is a pain. Netflix really needs to get on with taking over the world already

Fortunately torrenting stuff is convenient and the quality is also generally superior to streaming.

[silverspawn]

I don't have a VPN anymore, so it's too risky

[Awaclus]

I don't have a VPN anymore, so it's too risky

You could afford a VPN if you cancelled Netflix.

[silverspawn]

I don't have a VPN anymore, so it's too risky

You could afford a VPN if you cancelled Netflix.

yeah that's true. Maybe I should. I've actually questioned the value of my Netflix subscription lately -- although just Wednesday definitely justifies it. Then again torrenting is not as convenient as Netflix

btw I'm sort of surprised that you're so lax about this. I've always considered Netflix to be the good guys who are championing the business model that we want to have, which is both non-toxic and good for artists. Isn't torrenting unethical? Or is it just that the film industry is so much less about individuals that it doesn't matter?

(Tbc I don't really care about personal impacts myself so I'm just asking out of curiosity.)

[silverspawn]

oh btw Take Shelter was good, I give it a 7/10

[Awaclus]

btw I'm sort of surprised that you're so lax about this. I've always considered Netflix to be the good guys who are championing the business model that we want to have, which is both non-toxic and good for artists. Isn't torrenting unethical? Or is it just that the film industry is so much less about individuals that it doesn't matter?

(Tbc I don't really care about personal impacts myself so I'm just asking out of curiosity.)

The business model that we want to have is:

• environment friendly
• culture preservation friendly
• derivative work friendly
• lets users have control over things they've paid for
• good for the people who create culture (which notably includes a ShiTton of people who don't do it for a living or even get paid at all, and does not substantially include copyright megacorporations)

Streaming, which potentially boots up a server machine somewhere every time you watch a video even if it's the same video the server has already sent you before, is less environment friendly than direct downloads where that only happens once per video, and those in turn are worse than torrents, where generally the machines that send you the video are people's personal computers that would have been powered on anyway.

As for culture preservation, streaming, where videos are lower quality in the first place and disappear when it's no longer profitable for the company to keep them up or when the company itself goes bankrupt and the whole service is shut down, is super worse than direct downloads where you get to keep the high quality video forever, which again is worse than torrents where not only do you keep the video forever yourself, but you're also making it available for other people too.

As for derivative work friendliness, streaming is again worse than direct downloads, because you can't edit or remix the video while you only have access to it through your browser, but if you have it on your hard drive, you can. Torrents perform the same as direct downloads in this regard.

Letting users have control over their own stuff is basically the same argument as culture preservation, except it's not relevant that you're sending it to other people so it makes torrents and direct downloads equally good compared to each other, but still way better than streaming.

And for the final point, it's not the technical difference between streaming and torrenting that matters, but the difference between copyright laws being respected and piracy. As it turns out, the effect that piracy has on sales is a lot more complicated than is commonly believed, doesn't work the same way for all forms of art, and is kind of minor in general.

And these mildly and complicatedly affected sales are the sales that affect how much copyright megacorporations get paid; in a lot of cases, most of the creators have already gotten paid as much as they ever will and buying the film does jackShiT to support them, maybe it convinces some studio to hire the same people again, but that's a ridiculously subtle effect. Typically some of the most visible creators like the actors, director, writer, composer etc. of a film might earn royalties which makes the link more direct, but it probably doesn't apply to the vast majority of the people involved in a production, and even the people who do get paid royalties get an absurdly tiny share of the money. By adding Netflix into the equation, we now have yet another megacorporation taking their share of the money before any of it even goes to the copyright holders, let alone the creators.

To illustrate the point, JK Rowling is obviously not struggling with poverty or anything, but she's barely a billionaire even though she has sold several hundreds of millions of books, tons of popular movies and games have been made based on them, tons of merchandise has been sold. The amount of money fans have collectively spent on Harry Potter is beyond obscene, probably in the hundreds of billions, and even then the original creator is only barely a billionaire, and obviously none of the makeup artists or the set designers or the session musicians or the recording engineers or the VFX artists or any of the other countless people who have done these kinds of less flashy jobs for the movies are anywhere near billionaires. So, if you spend about a hundred dollars consuming Harry Potter legally, maybe a dollar goes to JK and like a tiny fraction of a cent goes to the guy who played the celesta in Hedwig's theme (or more likely to the production company to help cover the cost of having had to pay that guy, which they already did, so actually nothing goes to that guy). In fact, that guy has done a ton of ridiculously impressive ShiT for movies and pop stars and he's not even notably wealthy.

Birds of Necama makes about $10 per year from Spotify. It costs $20 per year to have our music up on Spotify, so in fact we would save money if everyone torrented our music instead of listening to it on Spotify, but because Spotify is a super popular platform, we would lose potential fans if it wasn't there. And we have like 20-30 monthly listeners on Spotify, which isn't a lot compared to popular artists, but it's also far from nothing, we probably wouldn't even consistently have had one monthly listener when we first started out and for a long time after that. As an indie filmmaker with no connections, getting your movie on Netflix will similarly probably also cost you money and not be guaranteed to make a profit at all.

So, clearly the current system is not actually all that amazing for the people who create the culture, whether we are talking about the mainstreamest work ever or an underground band. When we're talking about fan works, which are an important part of culture as a whole, the system actively prevents those from being published even when the creators don't particularly care about making money, and so they very often have to be published as pirate releases (which the copyright holders may or may not know about, and may or may not do anything about if they do know, but a pirate release that is only implicitly allowed to exist is still a pirate release).

Now, buying music, films, etc directly from indie creators, or through a site like Bandcamp that takes a reasonably small cut, is actually fairly effective at supporting them, and you could argue that torrenting instead of doing that causes them to not have that support from you. But I argue that this is still a bad reason to avoid torrents, because if you do actually want to support the creator, you can probably torrent the work and then support the creator, and if you don't want to support the creator anyway, then you have no reason to care that the creator isn't getting support from you. Also I'm fairly convinced that it's just a good business decision for smaller creators to use a free/pay-what-you-want pricing and make money from merch etc because you desperately need a ton of fans to be commercially successful, paywalls are one pretty effective way of repelling people who are not yet your fans, and a lot of your actual fans will support you voluntarily.

There's a lot more points I didn't cover yet but I feel like this post is getting long enough, so maybe I can elaborate on those some other time, but basically I believe torrenting to be actively ethically superior to streaming service subscriptions.

[silverspawn]

me: I'm gonna write a response to this, hold on...

brain: nope, I'm not working without food

doing a 1 day fast after watching a David Sinclair talk about aging

[Awaclus]

I guess I can actually summarize the main remaining point pretty effectively. Basically I think that even if a copyright reform legalizing torrents alongside a cultural shift that made torrenting the default way of consuming media led to fewer of these super high budget films like the HP series getting made, or even put an end to movie projects of that scale for good, that would be a bummer to lose those works of art but it would come with the upside of giving more visibility to smaller creators, effectively making culture less centralized and more democratic, which would make it absolutely worth it. There are tons of small budget indie films which are deeply touching, thought-provoking and entertaining, and by and large nobody's watching them because they're watching whatever cookie cutter Marvel film or Star Wars episode 2398472398 instead. So I would go as far as to say that causing financial damage to copyright megacorporations is inherently a valuable and ethical thing to do.

[silverspawn]

So, most of your post seems really convincing, but the last part doesn't seem quite right wrt Netflix.

As an indie filmmaker with no connections, getting your movie on Netflix will similarly probably also cost you money and not be guaranteed to make a profit at all.

I can't really imagine this being true. I mean maybe it's true for very small films with say <0.5 million dollar budget, but the rest? Like, the cost of hosting something can't be *that* high, otherwise ad-based platforms would have no chance of funding anything ever. I know a it's difficult to be profitable, but it's clearly not impossible, and the revenue from ads is so vastly lower than those from Netflix subscriptions.

So if hosting isn't expensive, and if lots of creators would actually prefer to have their stuff on Netflix, why don't they just host everything? If they did, this would make their service vastly better. By far the biggest consumer downside of Netflix is that most stuff isn't on there. Also, why fund so many original movies, which is way more expensive?

And if Netflix mostly replaces streaming services, then there isn't "another megacorporation taking their share of the money before any of it even goes to the copyright holders" because without netflix there isn't a share at all. Like, sites who host stuff illegally (or by going to obscure countries to avoid copyright law of whatnot) don't pay creators anything.

And the original movies are another thing; if Netflix just outright funds movies, then how does that enter the equation? A relevant example here is that Charlie Kaufman went to Netflix to produce i'm thinking of ending things because he thought it would be difficult to get funding otherwise, and that worked out.

[silverspawn]

Though I still haven't eaten so maybe this reply is really stupid and I didn't get something 

[Awaclus]

So, most of your post seems really convincing, but the last part doesn't seem quite right wrt Netflix.

As an indie filmmaker with no connections, getting your movie on Netflix will similarly probably also cost you money and not be guaranteed to make a profit at all.

I can't really imagine this being true. I mean maybe it's true for very small films with say <0.5 million dollar budget, but the rest? Like, the cost of hosting something can't be *that* high, otherwise ad-based platforms would have no chance of funding anything ever. I know a it's difficult to be profitable, but it's clearly not impossible, and the revenue from ads is so vastly lower than those from Netflix subscriptions.

So if hosting isn't expensive, and if lots of creators would actually prefer to have their stuff on Netflix, why don't they just host everything? If they did, this would make their service vastly better. By far the biggest consumer downside of Netflix is that most stuff isn't on there. Also, why fund so many original movies, which is way more expensive?

As for why, you'd have to ask Netflix (and they wouldn't respond, because they'd think you're an indie filmmaker and they don't respond to indie filmmakers who contact them about getting their movies there). But that's how it is. If you don't have connections, you'll have to pay a company who does, also known as an aggregator, which is the same way it works for Spotify, except Spotify automatically accepts everything their aggregators send them regardless of the quality as long as it complies with the rules, whereas I'm under the impression that Netflix can still turn your film down after you've paid the aggregator to pitch it to them. Alternatively, you can release your film elsewhere and hope that Netflix finds it and likes it so much they'll be the ones to approach you about licensing it, but that's about as likely to work out as it sounds.

In Spotify's case, I think they mainly do it that way so that they get to outsource content moderation to the aggregators, and so that they get to deal with people they've built relationships with instead of dealing with random idiots. In addition to those, Netflix might also care about curating a selection of movies to avoid completely wasting their subscribers' time with some unwatchable garbage. Even the cost of hosting might really be a substantial factor; after all, a YouTube user watches ads every time they watch a video, so encouraging users to watch more content by hosting more content is reasonable for Google (especially because Google also really likes to have access to as much data as it can possibly get its hands on, so the hard drive space the videos take is easily justified for them, which isn't the case for companies whose business models aren't primarily based on owning a ShiTton of data) but the only way Netflix benefits from you watching more movies there is that you'll hopefully be somewhat more satisfied with the service.

Netflix originals are a convenient way to get content to appear exclusively on Netflix, which is nice to have when all of your competitors also have exclusive content too.

And if Netflix mostly replaces streaming services, then there isn't "another megacorporation taking their share of the money before any of it even goes to the copyright holders" because without netflix there isn't a share at all. Like, sites who host stuff illegally (or by going to obscure countries to avoid copyright law of whatnot) don't pay creators anything.

And the original movies are another thing; if Netflix just outright funds movies, then how does that enter the equation? A relevant example here is that Charlie Kaufman went to Netflix to produce i'm thinking of ending things because he thought it would be difficult to get funding otherwise, and that worked out.

The point is not that Netflix is financially worse for creators than piracy (although in the case of creators who have to pay to get their stuff on Netflix, it can be), the point is that Netflix is a super inefficient way to monetarily support creators because almost all of the money is going elsewhere. That's already the case with non-indie media that you buy (e.g. DVDs/BDs), and Netflix adds another layer of your money going elsewhere instead of supporting the creators compared to that.

Netflix funding movies directly is different in degree because it removes a lot of the middlemen, but in kind, it's the same as any other megacorporation funding movies.

[silverspawn]

Alright, so I'm mostly willing to buy all this because it's not that unusual that these kinds of things don't make sense from the outside, and I wouldn't even be that surprised if Netflix was leaving lots of money on the table.

The point is not that Netflix is financially worse for creators than piracy (although in the case of creators who have to pay to get their stuff on Netflix, it can be), the point is that Netflix is a super inefficient way to monetarily support creators because almost all of the money is going elsewhere. That's already the case with non-indie media that you buy (e.g. DVDs/BDs), and Netflix adds another layer of your money going elsewhere instead of supporting the creators compared to that.

Yeah that's for sure. I was never under the illusion that you meaningfully support anyone with a subscription. I was more looking at the question of whether Netflix as a whole is a net positive for the world. Because like in my own consequentialist world view, your net impact on anything where you're no different from any other consumer is just too small to worry about.

But as for torrents, yeah maybe I will get back the VPN and make that my default way to watch.

[silverspawn]

There's definitely also an aesthetic reason why I want to like Netflix, which is that I feel like their content is ultimately benign, whereas twitter, youtube, and many other platforms actively create a vector toward stupidity

[silverspawn]

Like forget about how artists are paid, just think of the consumer experience. This doesn't really bear on the discussion other than it maybe being a bias though

[Awaclus]

There's definitely also an aesthetic reason why I want to like Netflix, which is that I feel like their content is ultimately benign, whereas twitter, youtube, and many other platforms actively create a vector toward stupidity

Well, that is only possible because they gatekeep who gets to have their movies uploaded.

Like forget about how artists are paid, just think of the consumer experience. This doesn't really bear on the discussion other than it maybe being a bias though

The consumer experience of torrents is FUCKING GREAT! This is what consumers need!

[silverspawn]

yeah sure, torrents are probably better. But there's no company behind them. I think there's value to having a megacorporation whose business model doesn't incentivize algorithms that actively make their audience stupid.

[Awaclus]

yeah sure, torrents are probably better. But there's no company behind them. I think there's value to having a megacorporation whose business model doesn't incentivize algorithms that actively make their audience stupid.

Why does there have to be a megacorporation? It's not like torrents have a business model that incentivizes algorithms that actively make their audience stupid. A lot of businesses benefit from torrents in various ways, and none of the torrent trackers I know of have anything remotely like YouTube's algorithm, they basically just return all the results sorted by date and you can sort them by a different variable of your choosing if you want to.

[silverspawn]

You're still thinking about the direct effects on consumers, but I'm thinking about the symbolic value. I don't think it's good if every social media platform is effectively evil. It makes it look like there's no alternative. What's the course for reforming facebook or twitter or youtube or tiktok if we have no example of a platform that works differently?

You can't measure how much of an effect this has, so maybe it's negligible, but I'm not at all convinced that it is.

[silverspawn]

I know this won't come as a surprise, but I'm listening to WaitButWhy's book and I think it is fantastic. Very thoughful, well thought out, and lovingly illustrated, e.g.



Even the font is painstakingly self-made, every letter hand-drawn until it looks just right

[silverspawn]

I realize I just said "thoughtful, well thought out" but in my mind those are different things. Well thought out means the entire project/thesis is strong at a macro level; thoughtful is more  about writing style and epistemic rigor

[silverspawn]

Here I am, over two years into the project, working on how to define consciousness as a concept.

The thing is, I thought I had a fine definition at the start, then i revisited it and again thought now it was unambiguous. The problem is that any definition works for a subset of people; those people who think about the problem in one of the ways that you understand. So talking to people can only prove the presence of a problem, not the absence. And if 90% of people have positions for which it works, then even talking to a bunch of people won't reveal the problem. Yet now I again realize that there are still others for whom the concept remains ambiguous.

But there is a way to escape the circle, which is to anchor the definition to non-philosophical stuff. Instead of "consciousness exists and is an ontological primitive", say "consciousness exists and it's possible to construct a mathematical object isomorphic to a moment of experience". (Or some less mathy equivalent of this.)

[Awaclus]

You're still thinking about the direct effects on consumers, but I'm thinking about the symbolic value. I don't think it's good if every social media platform is effectively evil. It makes it look like there's no alternative. What's the course for reforming facebook or twitter or youtube or tiktok if we have no example of a platform that works differently?

But we do have examples of platforms that work differently, like Mastodon and ActivityPub in general. On a smaller scale, there are tons of image boards and bulletin boards.