I feel the same. The UI to me since plasma has seemed large and awkward whenever I tried it. The default theme is a bit outdated as well. Something with gnome or cinnamon just really does it for me, cinnamon especially.
Not at all. The science is very clear and has been for quite some time - being overweight is bad for your health and increases all cause mortality.
I could link meta analyses about how strong the link between increased weight and CVD is as one example, but I don't think you're really looking to change your mind.
Instead I'll just make it as simple as possible. Increased weight = increased metabolic demand = more stress on the heart and other organs.
> I could link meta analyses about how strong the link between increased weight and CVD is as one example, but I don't think you're really looking to change your mind.
You could not say that you could do something if you don't plan to do it, and you could avoid blaming the person you're arguing with for your failure to produce evidence that supports your point instead. Try making it complicated.
your advice makes your own comment pretty ironic, don't you think?
but no. I really don't have to provide evidence that the sun is hot, that Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States, or that being fat is bad for you. I understand HN is for a technical audience, but in the nutritional and health field, this is an accepted fact.
I also had these terminals at my public library much into the later 90s and early 2000s. Now that library and the terminals are long gone. Getting old is weird!
My old hometown's public library is still there. In the front lobby is a display of some of their old card catalog cabinets and drawers. Drawers I used to find books with the Dewey Decimal System. Now displayed like relics from a forgotten civilization.
I tried this out for a little bit. Looks very clean.
I had these issues and suggestions:
- Set min to dark mode, but it made no difference. Restarted to no avail.
- Set all ads to be blocked, still saw a lot of ads on reddit, youtube, others.
- Design wise, I think the app should default to having borders between tabs.
- There should be more white space at the top to drag the window around. The app opened maximized and when I went to drag it on windows I could only click the the URL bar because there is only a little bit of padding inbetween it and the top of the window.
- I have a large monitor and the when you click on the url bar when you have multiple tabs open, it expands to the full window width so the text you were looking at moves all the way to the left, very nitpicky I know, but I think this is not a great design choice and maybe the text should stay where it is when changing sites.
on the contrary, I think facebook and google have a huge incentive to work with different governing bodies to define what data is ok to collect and build identifiers around, and what is not. There is no way facebook would just throw up it's hands and say "we have no incentive to find a way to advertise to a population of 750 million people."
> There is no way facebook would just throw up it's hands and say "we have no incentive to find a way to advertise to a population of 750 million people."
And yet, this is exactly what they do repeatedly [1] [2] [3].
I would suggest reading some of the sources of those stories instead of just the headlines ^^
(Spoilers: the reality of the “threatens to leave Europe” headline is a much less click-baity “lists ‘leaving Europe’ as one of many possible paths to take, but one they would prefer to avoid”)
> one of many possible paths to take, but one they would prefer to avoid
This seem to be exactly the sentence one would use to respectfully threaten someone else (try it with a different theme, it might be clearer: "we are exploring all possible solutions to the conflict, going nuclear is just one of the way but one we would prefer to avoid")
Yes - especially if they can do this in a way that still makes them money but is expensive and burdensome to comply with. That would keep them in the game but seal the market off to potential competitors.
There's no problem with advertising, the issue is with companies misusing people's data. If a company wants to use targetted advertising then they just have to openly ask for consent to do so, but tying it up with the terms and conditions to use the site is hardly asking for consent.
I didn't say it was. However, defining what is tracking and what is not is also an issue.
Let's say facebook runs an ad on its platform to my website with a url of site.com/fbad. Then I can see how many people clicked on the ad on facebook and how many people converted on that webpage. There are people on this site who will tell you, and FULLY believe that that is TOO much tracking and is morally wrong.
Incrementing a counter is not tracking. I don’t know where you’d find someone saying otherwise. However, keeping records associating the fact that something was clicked with personal identifying information, such as an IP address or a unique identifier, is tracking, and you need to ask for consent. What is and is not acceptable use of data related to a person is defined in the regulation.
> If the EU just wants to fully outright ban advertising
Come on, don’t be obtuse. The problem is not advertising, the problem is tracking and using user data without consent. The fact that they do that for advertising is irrelevant. They would have the same issue if they were doing it for any other reason.
> set a standard and stick to it
That’s what they did. It’s called the GDPR. One can argue that enforcement was insufficient, but the standard has not changed.
I've never looked at Krita because it's always been referenced to me as a painting application primarily and not an image editing / photo manipulation tool. I understand there may be some cross over in functionality, but aren't they essentially built for different purposes?
I don't know; a lot of people say something like that but they never seem to give a concrete example of what the different things they need are. Krita has always been able to do all the photo editing I ever wanted to.
I think people just feel that the software is not for them. Krita always markets itself as a painting tool for artists, never mentioning image editing. For example, take the first paragraph that you can come across their website:
"Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
- concept art
- texture and matte painters
- illustrations and comics"
I'm not in the business of either, so why would I get the idea of installing it?
Looking into it, Krita does seem very capable. I don't think we should really be mad at healthy competition existing in these spaces though, they should lead to better tools for end users.
Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive.
I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc).
Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to be good.
This makes successful Open Source software like Blender or Firefox or Linux all the more impressive.
This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular.
There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that they became largely adopted: the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, X.org, etc. But for many others, too many wars have really caused the whole Linux-on-the-desktop dream to not be achieved to the level people hoped. GIMP is one of them, but the Gnome/KDE debacle is probably the biggest.
It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.
You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected, I'm not likely to invest hobby / recreational development time in any other aspect of that project. (That's not meant as a criticism of the hypothetical project leads - merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living, the bar is raised massively in terms of how much a developer needs to "believe" in the project and the direction it's taking.)
>It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.
There's nothing "ironic" about it at all. For many, many years, X.org was the only real display server that anyone used, after they all abandoned XFree86 for good reason. Wayland didn't come about until later, and even then, *it was made by the same people*. It was never a competing project.
>if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected
This is understandable, but frequently not the case. The KDE/Gnome fiasco, for instance, all started because of an argument about a license.
>merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living
Here again, it's frequently not the case. In the KDE/Gnome fiasco, many of the devs there were employed full-time by companies like RedHat to work on it. So it was really political.
You say that as if people would be working on the same project otherwise. Guaranteed if they aren't able to work on their competing project in the name of "solidarity", they probably wouldn't work on the other project instead. There are too many social and cultural barriers to being able to enact change in existing projects, which is why competing projects exist. People have different priorities, values, preferences, etc. You're never going to be able to unify all of that to the satisfaction of everybody involved and it would just lead to way too much strife and politics. Way less would get done.
I hate Gnome, but I know people like it. I'm happy that both KDE and Gnome exist, because it also means the people who made the decisions about Gnome's direction won't be making those same decisions about KDE.
There were no social or cultural barriers when the KDE/Gnome war started. It was entirely over a licensing issue. Other than that, the two projects were largely very similar, except that Gnome insisted on using C instead of C++ (and then replicating all of C++'s features in C). It wasn't until later that the two really diverged, with KDE having the "make it as configurable as possible" philosophy and Gnome having the "we're UI experts and know what's best for you little users" philosophy, borrowed from Apple but without the well-funded team of real UI researchers.
Anyway, even with the different philosophy towards users, that could have been done in a single project (i.e., Gnome3 can be a KDE skin), or two closely-related projects (i.e., Gnome3 is a fork of Plasma but otherwise shares the same libraries), reducing a lot of duplicated effort. Instead, we now have 6 or more different desktop environments for Linux and potential new users look at the mess and ask, "WTF?". Or they try one and hate it, and when they ask how to switch to a different one to try it out, the answer is "reformat your hard drive and install this other distro that actually cares about that DE", or "follow this list of command-line instructions and hope it doesn't break because your distro doesn't care about supporting that DE".
Only if better tools are actually getting into users' hands though. I don't know what exactly has gone wrong, but somehow it's the Gimp that keeps getting recommended to those end users.
Yeah, I think this is a good point. GIMP has been a default app on so many distros for so many years (to say nothing of existing on virtually every copy pasta “best FOSS/Linux/Free apps list” that lazy SEO bloggers (and now YouTubers) have been making for decades), it’s become just one of those defacto apps that gets all the attention/is the go-to suggestion, even though it isn’t the best option for a lot of people.
And that would be fine if there was a robust community around the project, but there isn’t? Like, I’m not blaming the few maintainers and I’m not blaming the dwindling third party community at all. But I am going to be critical of the distros that continue to install it by default (Ubuntu dropped it as a default many years back IIRC, but Debian and Fedora still include it) and the people that just parrot it as what new users should use, even tho the most fervent defenders admit it is not at all competitive with what you need in an image editing tool in 2022.
Edit: turns out Ubuntu dropped GIMP as a default app in 2009 and someone that seems like yesterday. Changed that sentence accordingly.
Krita was initially release as a painting program rather than a photo editing program and that was where most of the initial 'advertising' was focused. Also looking at their home page the first thing you see is a screen shot of a digital painting and the words
"Krita is the full-featured digital art studio.
It is perfect for sketching and painting, and presents an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters."
So it is not at all clear to most people that it is a tool that can also be used for photo editing.
All of these are well known carcinogens but it is crazy the lengths people will go to defend alcohol especially in this regard. Alcohol, in any amount, is a poison and is treated as so by the body. It breaks down into acetaldehyde and damages DNA.
I'm all for people making informed decisions on what they want to put into their bodies but informed is the operative word. There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.
I'm sorry to say that you are just plain wrong. Alcohol "in any amount" is not at all a poison, any more than formaldehyde (present in, for example, apples) is. At normal amounts (such as social drinking, and an occasional drink at home, or a regular glass of wine at dinner) it has never been strongly associated with increased cancer risk - in fact some studies show the the opposite. The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer, and if one is abusing alcohol they are often doing other things in their life that are unhealthy and may lead to other cancers. It is simply an easy flag to tease out of health data - more a signpost than anything else.
Here is a study suggesting the opposite to your claim:
Light alcohol drinking and cancer: a meta-analysis
Abstract
Background: There is convincing evidence that alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx. Most of the data derive from studies that focused on the effect of moderate/high alcohol intakes, while little is known about light alcohol drinking (up to 1 drink/day).
Patients and methods: We evaluated the association between light drinking and cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx, through a meta-analytic approach. We searched epidemiological studies using PubMed, ISI Web of Science and EMBASE, published before December 2010.
Results: We included 222 articles comprising ∼92 000 light drinkers and 60 000 non-drinkers with cancer. Light drinking was associated with the risk of oropharyngeal cancer [relative risk, RR = 1.17; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-1.29], esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (RR = 1.30; 95% CI 1.09-1.56) and female breast cancer (RR = 1.05; 95% CI 1.02-1.08). We estimated that ∼5000 deaths from oropharyngeal cancer, 24 000 from esophageal SCC and 5000 from breast cancer were attributable to light drinking in 2004 worldwide. No association was found for colorectum, liver and larynx tumors.
Conclusions: Light drinking increases the risk of cancer of oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus and female breast.
The reply to this study from S-K Myung points out its flaws: https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)35822....
Further, as with all epidemiological studies on diet, there are plenty of studies showing the exact opposite (a protective effect of alcohol):
Not sure where your animosity and disregard for science is coming from, but it doesn't seem like you're interested in having a discussion, having made up your mind to simply ignore any evidence that doesn't suit you.
How about I drink anyway, still have a partner and kids, still drive (while I'm not drinking), live and visit in whatever country I have legal authorization to live, and I shitcan your opinion. Cheers!
So a significant amount, but most people would say that's an acceptable risk to continue their lifestyle. For comparison, living in an urban environment has a RR of 1.20 to 1.40 for lung cancer.
That data is looking over a 1985-1990 / 1950-1990 time period. I wonder what the numbers are now with modern emissions improvements 30 years later, which are pretty big now!
And with electric car & electric heat pump transitions, how much better will it get on top of that going forward?
Also urban people tend to be wealthier, and also live longer.
I noted that it simply defines "light drinker" as <= 1 drink per day. It's not clear to me from reading the study how someone who drinks once every two or three days, or once a week, would be classified. The authors note some of the studies they incorporated in their results considered occasional drinking as "non-drinker" while others did not, so it seems that it was not consistent. However, it seems that in some cases the "non-drinker" category means people who completely abstain from alcohol.
Presumably you're right, they would be less likely to smoke, and I would imagine also possibly more health conscious in other ways. The authors mention that a different analysis of 15 studies of alcohol use among never-smokers was similar to their own findings, but also caution that tobacco could indeed be having an influence on their results (or even a possible synergistic effect with alcohol).
There is no safe level of alcohol, the dose dependent risk is clear in studies sibling to this comment and as flagged by WHO, but I drink it anyway well informed of the very real risk to my health.
I'm surprised by that. I would expect low enough exposure to cause abnormally low bone density and other calcium-related problems via "vitamin"[1] D deficiency.
[1] It's not really a vitamin, because we do produce it internally (as opposed to having to ingest it in diet).
On the contrary, alcohol consumption is associated with lower rates of many types of cancers, as noted in my other reply, and light/social drinking has never been associated with a reduction in overall mortality (what people actually care about).
If you can get out of bed and have a social drink,you're probably pretty healthy to begin with.
My understanding is that more modern research has unambiguously debunked the "light drinking" assertions.
But this is not something I'd expect you to be convinced of, because I don't have hard evidence on hand. We will have to leave it there, and I will go refresh my understanding some other time, if you will too :)
Nutrition Facts dot Org just published a youtube video on this subject today. The studies that associated light drinking with benefits were found to have systematic errors in more recent analysis, and after correcting for those errors researchers found that there is a linear relationship between drinking alcohol and increased cancer risk. That is, there is no drop in risks with light drinking. Any amount increases risks of cancer.
I doubt very much that alcohol consumption in any quantity can cause a lower rate of any cancer and I have not heard of any study providing any kind of evidence for this.
When some studies show a lower cancer rate correlated with moderate consumption of certain alcoholic beverages, e.g. wine or beer, it is much more likely that those studies show a beneficial effect of some other substances contained in those beverages.
In that case, it is likely that drinking the non-fermented precursors of those beverages might have the same effects, even in the absence of alcohol, e.g. drinking fresh grape juice instead of wine, or even better, eating red or black grapes instead of drinking juice.
Alcohol in small enough quantities may have negligible bad effects, because humans and their relatives are adapted to tolerate the ingestion of fermented fruits, but there is no reason to expect any good effects.
Slippery slope is a fallacy, but I think it's worth being aware of in the case of addictive substances and behaviors. I cringe when a health-care professional advocates for "light drinking," when the chances of it getting its hooks in anyone far outweighs whatever nebulous, tenuous health advantages it might provide. Alcohol consumption is certainly associated with alcoholism, and alcoholics certainly have lower life expectancy than non-alcoholics.
> Alcohol consumption is certainly associated with alcoholism
Breathing is, too, but the important question is what proportion of light drinkers become alcoholics. According the the first legitimate looking hit, 56% of people have had a drink in the last month, 5.6% of people have an "alcohol use disorder."
So, ignoring details, 90% of light drinkers are fine.
I can remember a HN post not so long ago, linking a study, in which the result was alcohol in any amount being unhealthy. Now I don't know, if that includes carcinogenic, but you might want to look that up, before caps locking that "never". People associate all kinds of things with all kinds of other things. It seems highly unlikely, that "normal" (what is normal?) amounts have never been even associated with cancer risk.
This is just wrong. 0.5 liters of beer is already detrimental to health. Drinking a glass of wine daily does not have, on balance, a health benefit. Alcohol is not as bad as smoking, but it is a vice at any amount consumed. You do not need to defend an industry of billions for free.
I am writing this after having a couple of beers every evening for the past two weeks, and a wine tasting trip too.
I wear a fitness tracker every day, and it is extremely clear on which days I've consumed alcohol because my resting heart rate spikes by at least 5% the day afterwards. And I'm a one-beer drinker. It actually took tracking my entire food intake for about two months to figure out what was causing it.
Last time I mentioned this on HN, people here have claimed that the effect was psychosomatic.
I think people grossly underestimate the negative health effects of alcohol, and I doubt any amount of research will really change peoples minds.
Yes, I've noticed that I sleep longer and harder after having one glass of wine with dinner. It's a pretty solid correlation because I don't drink that often.
You called alcohol a "vice". Definition of vice from Merriam-Webster is "moral depravity or corruption; wickedness; a moral fault or failing." You are specifically asserting that people who drink alcohol are bad people. How is that not being preachy?
I do apologize then, as this was not my intention when I chose to use this word. Instead, I meant to convey that alcohol is a net negative healthwise, not unlike smoking cigarettes or consuming large amounts of bad food.
There are many shades of meaning to "vice"; it broadly indicates a weakness of character, not necessarily to the extent of making someone a bad person. If you know that alcohol is bad for you (and the people around you) and should not be drunk, and yet you drink it anyway simply because it feels good, is this not a failure of self control?
There's no evidence of the contrary from your side - drinking alcohol is like any abusing any other organic solvent, I can't imagine why anyone would presume it'd be any healthier.
Sorry but the study you linked doesn't support any of the specific claims from your initial post, and my other reply earlier in the thread lists plenty of evidence for a protective effect of alcohol consumption for certain cancers.
However, light to moderate drinking might reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and these might be enough to outweigh the extra risks from cancer. (This is still an active subject of research.)
> The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer,
It also very much causes esophageal cancer. I've known serious alcoholics who have died from both. It makes intuitive sense that constantly irritating your throat might cause cancer.
> alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer
...and even then, in the vast majority of primary liver cancer cases, cirrhosis is already present, and typically precedes the cancer. So yes, it's very likely that the generally unhealthy lifestyle of the alcoholic is the primary contributor, here.
i think most people know drinking isn’t good for you. people aren’t defending alcohol they’re defending the social value they receive from drinking; and it brings a lot. most people don’t drink that much anyway because it’s not great for you. alcohol usage is highly concentrated on alcoholics who drink like 90% of all alcohol produced
id say of these 3 the one people go to crazy lengths to avoid doing anything about is BMI. everyone knows it’s one of the biggest if they not biggest co-morbidities identified yet a good portion of the world has high BMI and does nothing about it
not only does a good portion of the world have high BMI and does nothing about it, we as a country have now gone so far as to say it's 'OK' to have a high BMI. I know in advance this comment will be misinterpreted, but it's genuinely sad that our advertisements, education, and social media all parrot the same message that it's okay to be overweight.
I think the intended message of these campaigns isn’t that high BMI is considered healthy; rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
I think that’s a good message. I certainly feel badly for obese people because, however they got there, they’re going to have a hell of a time getting back to a healthy body size.
I do agree that many people lose that key part of the message when they pass it on.
> rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight. It might be bad for your mental health and it could do absolutely nothing for some people but the vast majority of people who keep their weight in check and/or are motivated to lose weight do so more for social reasons than they do for health reasons.
Compared to something like alcoholism, being overweight (which can be similarly deadly) is treated much differently. For alcoholism, the attitude has been changing from "alcoholics are degenerates with weak wills" to "alcoholism is a disease and these people need help" where the attitude toward obesity is going from "fat people are disgusting people who have no self control" to "big is beautiful".
The difference is with alcoholism the message goes from disdain to support but he solution remains the same, a great deal of personal work to solve the problem. With obesity, the message goes from disdain to acceptance and the solution is to just not bring it up.
> Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight.
Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it. For that feeling to result in meaningful action a bunch of conditions have to be met, e.g. the absence of eating disorders (including things like stress eating etc.), a concept of self-efficacy (the idea that one actually is able to change out of one's own will), impulse control, knowledge about food and dieting, the time and money to eat healthier and so on. Often people are perfectly aware that their behaviour is unhealthy, but they lack one or more of those conditions. It therefore is better to focus on providing people the actual means to change (knowledge, methods, better food in school and at work, a supportive environment, taxation to make unhealthy food/drugs more expensive (a thing in the EU)).
Note that I'm fully in support of emphasizing the unhealthy aspects of obesity, though. Providing the facts often just isn't enough.
> Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it.
Are you just asking overweight people or are you asking all people? The people who are overweight today are obviously the group of people for which social pressure is ineffective. I'm talking about all people including the people who are successfully at a healthy weight.
Wait, why would we study people at a healthy weight whether or not shame is an effective strategy to lose weight? I am genuinely confused why someone at a healthy weight would be the person to ask, because for all we know they never had weight to lose.
Because if you stop the social pressure to be a healthy weight (ie, big is beautiful), people who used to maintain a healthy weight due to social pressure may no longer feel the need to do so.
Do we have evidence that people who maintain a healthy weight do so primarily because of social pressure? I'm genuinely asking because I don't actually know that that's true. Most of the people I know of a healthy weight actually don't have a lot of shame about their bodies. In fact the most internal shamed people I know are either fat people or unhealthily thin people??
How do you know that "healthy people would feel shame if they got obese" -> "healthy people use shame as a motivator to maintain weight"? Doesn't that rely on the assumption that shame works?... but that's precisely the thing I'm questioning. I don't actually know shame works because I don't see evidence that healthy weighted people have more shame, are more sensitive to shame, or are shamed more often than fat people. If anything fat people have the most shame, are the most sensitive to being shamed, and are publicly shamed more often... and they're still fat.
30 years ago you would have gotten shamed if you gained a few pounds, that early signal makes people think about eating habits earlier and makes many people never go into unhealthy weight in the first place.
So even though shame might not work to get fat people to lose weight, it could still work to keep people from ever getting fat. Getting shamed for a few pounds means that you can fix the source of shame by dieting for a few weeks, very doable for average people.
Where is the evidence that shame has a causational relationship with people getting fat? You're still only pointing to correlation and saying that because shaming was more common in the past, shaming is effective now. This implies that healthy weight people respond to shame more strongly than fat people or something, but that's just not true in my experience.
This comment made me remember all of the anti-gay-marriage politicians saying that if we legalized gay marriage, men would just start leaving their wives and marrying men. As if the only thing keeping me from being fat or gay is some brave gatekeeper, rather than a lack of a desire (or makeup) to be fat or gay.
They also gave us insight into the mind of the gay anti-gay politician.
The difference is that the obesity doomsday predictions has already came true, and things are still getting worse every year. Today the median American is close to obese, and in some years will be obese unless something drastically changes. That would have been unthinkable 30 years ago when obesity was a tiny minority.
I had overweight people in mind. For both cases I'd argue that emphasizing the benefits of healty weight and the means of getting to/staying at that weight is the more effective approach, though.
I've definitely have zero science on this and these are anecdotes so keep that in mind but I know a ton of people who maintain healthy weight so they look good in a bathing suit. I also know overweight people who are _only_ motivated to lose weight due to health concerns (and still really struggle but I've seen more movement from that angle), they also feel the social pressure but it's not effective.
I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge for nearly everyone and undermine what is currently working for those who are not overweight.
Furthermore, I think obesity has somehow found it's way to be more in line with the LGBT style movements of acceptance/tolerance instead of the changing view of addictions as disease instead of character flaws when it clearly should be much more like the latter.
My point was more that feeling bad, by itself, actually is a demotivator. I'm all for motivating! But that would mean emphasizing e.g. the health benefits, or positive reinforcement of actual lifestyle changes.
Sure, but if you overdo your campaign to prevent shaming (and I can say what happens now in US is definitely in that territory for quite some time), than even a slightest hint that obesity is something bad and should be actually worked on to get rid of becomes shamed too.
Then it becomes (well, became) the next taboo that nobody wants to touch with a 10 feet pole since its playing with a PR suicide.
And so we have the world we have, and we reached it step by step by exactly this logic. Simple thing is, fat people need help from society just like drug addicts, yet everybody desperately tries to avoid this framing, and thus help is often not deemed necessary/worth the risk of offending. Thus people die needlessly just that somebody doesn't have hurt feelings.
I don’t think we’re past — or even approaching — some sort of threshold where we’ve overdone compassion in America. In fact, studies have shown that the more compassion shown to fat people, the more likely they are to seek help [1].
I deal with chronic pain and I’m at the hospital or clinic frequently, often multiple times per week. As someone who is in that environment quite a bit, I can assure you that the dangers of obesity are very clearly and openly discussed; frankly, you can’t walk two steps in a hospital without seeing some sort of PSA about the dangers of obesity.
Your mental model just doesn’t track with what I’ve seen again and again in reality.
There's absolutely no necessity to shame anyone for being fat. You can be concerned about it with your friends and loved ones, and express that concern if the relationship you have is of a character where you're busybodies about each others' health. There are very few people in your life who would appreciate or desire that criticism from you.
The people being told to shut up about it are usually abusing strangers or enemies, and feel very abused and targeted for being criticized for targeting and abusing people. If you were talking about being fat with someone you obviously care about and cares about you, they'd take it in that spirit. If you shamed them for it, they'd hopefully end that fucked up abusive relationship. The only thing I would ever shame a loved one for is their abuse of other people. Otherwise, I want to lift them up, not tear them down.
They are unfortunately mixing up the messages there. It's one thing to fight the shame associated with body appearance (this should be the real fight), and another thing to claim BMI has no significance on health risks (which is what often the argument boils down). There are people comfortable with smoking, there are people comfortable with their weight too, I just hope both know the increased risks to which they are exposed. However shaming the one or the other is just disgusting, especially when it appeals to a "tradition".
I have started to wonder if there won't be a war at some point where Survival of the Fittest becomes a very literal factor in who wins. We seem to be rapidly circling back to the military superiority of the Hoplite.
Depending on location some sunlight exposure is certainly beneficial at least part of the year. Though that doesn't mean tanning or such activities are not harmful. Comes down to the reality that some times dose really matters.
True in women according to that study. Also they didn't ask specifically about sun exposure avoidance, they asked things like "Do you go abroad on holiday to swim and sunbathe". People on dialysis don't go abroad and people who can't swim secondary to poor health don't go swimming abroad. A poorly designed study with too many confounders imo.
The point is that for individual lifestyle decisions you can't take a reductionist approach and look at individual factors in isolation. Maybe moderate sunlight exposure causes DNA damage, but so what? Does it actually reduce lifespan (or healthspan)? Probably not, or at least we don't have any reliable evidence that it does.
They controlled for all the big health and lifestyle confounds, as described in the abstract, it was a huge study (1/5 of the female population of southern Sweden), they tracked the subjects for 20 years. Man if that's not good enough for you I don't think anything will be.
My issue with the study wasn't study size or duration, it was the questionarre. People who go to holiday in the mountains or go swimming are probably healthier. They could have just asked about sun exposure "how many days in the past month have you spent more than 2 hours in the sun". Also, why just study women? Did their analysis not pan out when they used men?
They asked four questions that all pertain to sun exposure and weighted them into a single metric. Seemed pretty reasonable to me. You may find interesting a recent article on how academia's stance on the benefits/dangers of sun exposure has changed in the past few decades, including that study specifically, how it was received, and what criticisms and accolades it's received.
"Outside online" does not seem like an unbiased source on this issue. Asking four questions that pertain to something does not make a good measure of that something. Agree to disagree on this one.
This is coming from someone who spends a lot of time in the sun. Melanoma was never going to have much of an impact on mortality at the population level, the incidence of high grade melanoma is far too low.
> This is coming from someone who spends a lot of time in the sun.
Is it coming from someone with a lot of experience evaluating the protocols of epidemiological studies? Sunlight (whether too much or too little) affects us in all sorts of poorly-understood ways; that's why it's useful to do a big correlation study instead of just examining melanomas.
"Is it coming from someone with a lot of experience evaluating the protocols of epidemiological studies?"
It is, but I prefer to not involve my own credentials as a boring appeal to authority and focus on the argument at hand. I mentioned spending time in the sun to show I have no horse in the race. I only bring up melanoma because the cohort is “Melanoma In Southern Sweden”, but I think your point is fair regarding likely multifactorial causes.
“Sunlight (whether too much or too little) affects us in all sorts of poorly-understood ways; that's why it's useful to do a big correlation study instead of just examining melanomas”
Still, if I were designing a study to measure the impact of exercise on all cause mortality, I would not have a question like “Do you frequently jog to the farmers market to pick up vegetables?”. Half of the questions ask about going on vacation, maybe we are seeing that people who have enough time to “go abroad” twice a year live longer, I would believe that. I hope this is obvious and that even someone who doesn’t have “a lot of experience evaluating” these studies can see the flaw.
The study didn’t include any men!!! A study of women only might not generalize to the whole population, especially when it comes to all cause mortality. One obvious example: men have 1.5x higher risk of dying from melanoma than women. The study excluded individuals with a history of malignant melanoma.
The no-exposure group exercised less and had lower education, and there is a large risk for residual confounding that could have likely been accounted for by using categorical variables with more than 3 options.
Further criticisms include the “no exposure group” having much more women aged 55-64 (with likely much more comorbidities). They used length to follow up time to account for this which has no place in an observational study. The study excluded women who had a history of cancer.
I appreciate the work the authors did, but remain unconvinced that it is sunlight that caused lower mortality in their study.
> Half of the questions ask about going on vacation, maybe we are seeing that people who have enough time to “go abroad” twice a year live longer, I would believe that.
First of all, they explicitly mention controlling for income disparity. Second, the questions seemed reasonable to me. One for sunbathing in summer, one for sunbathing in winter which mentions travel, one for tanning beds, and one for specifically about vacationing in sunny places.
Keep in mind the context. This study was not designed to answer "is sunlight good for you" or "do people who sunbathe a lot live longer". AFAICT it was designed to answer "is avoiding sunlight bad for you." Those questions seem reasonable to suss out how much someone seeks/avoids sun exposure. There might be better ones, but it seems hubristic to just assume so, so casually.
> The study didn’t include any men!!!
I don't know why they limited the study to women. I assumed it was to make it easier to control for confounds, but they could've had some other reason. Maybe sunscreen ads are mostly targeted towards women in Sweden, and they thought a larger number of women would turn out to be sun-avoiders. In any event, this isn't a problem with the study, this is just complaining that they studied something different than what you're interested in knowing.
> [differences between the most-sun and least-sun in education, exercise, age, etc]
Of course there were differences, those things correlate with pretty much everything worth studying. Are you saying that the authors didn't control for them (then why collect data on them and include it?), or that they did so badly (why do you think that), or something else?
> I appreciate the work the authors did, but remain unconvinced that it is sunlight that caused lower mortality in their study.
I don't think epidemiological studies ever prove that anything causes anything, we're talking about correlations here. The conclusion was that avoiding sun is associated with higher all-cause mortality among women. I'll believe that until there's a reason not to.
Re studying only women: it's a problem when you are making a claim about all cause mortality but failing to mention that it's all cause mortality "in women", you can't generalize.
"Are you saying that the authors didn't control for them (then why collect data on them and include it?), or that they did so badly (why do you think that), or something else"
Yes, I addressed this above, see my comment on residual confounding, amongst my many other criticisms.
Also drinking too much alcohol makes you feel like shit the next day, so it's somewhat self limiting (granted, some people have less self-control while drinking than others).
Even with a functioning ozone layer, and magnetosphere.
The thing with UV light though is that it also kills surface bacteria and is involved in vitamin D production. It's very like minerals in that way. Not enough kills you, but it's easy to go from too little to way too much.
> There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.
To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.
See. You've actually fallen for it. The whole 80% of people with lung cancer are smokers means that if you smoke, you will get lung cancer.
Truth is, you will likely not get lung cancer if you smoke.
Only 6% of smokers will get lung cancer. You have a slightly worse than 19 in 20 chance of going through your whole life smoking and not getting lung cancer.
Now, in your statement itself, you move the goalpost. You start with cancer and end with "a deadly disease". Because, yeah, smoking is also linked to several other bad outcomes, not just cancer.
And it is fair to compare those other diseases when talking about why we demonize smoking way more than other things. But we can't do that by focusing on cancer. That's disingenuous.
And it is fair to say that the correct number of cigarettes to smoke is 0. The correct amount of alcohol to consume is none. And the correct BMI to be at is between 18 to 24.
As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients.
They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking.
What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on.
But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group.
The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.
I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol.
They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.
This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer
Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer.
Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;)
Cannabis as well. Is it a kneejerk reaction from the days of Prohibition? Confirmation bias on the part of drinkers? The ways alcohol is woven into social gatherings that smoking tobacco is not?
Eh, maybe. Lots of "poisons" have hormetic effects. Intuition isn't always a great guide here, and studies seem significantly conflicted in the "modest intake" range.
Appreciate the discussion with lots of study references, with evidence on both sides of the alcohol issue- healthy in small amounts, unhealthy in any amount, etc- with usual issues of fuzziness around categories of consumption and accuracy of surveys and variations in age and background and so forth.
Will just add that since acquiring a rather sensitive personal wearable that continuously captures various quantitative measures about my body- heart rate, temperature, heart rate variability, spo2, and others- that even with the uncertainty that stems from having a single data source- it is VERY clear quantitatively to me how much even small amounts of alcohol affect MY body.
I had a semi serious sickness earlier this year that had me entirely out of commission for a day and at reduced capability for several days. Looking just at the data, a minimal amount of alcohol (for my definition of minimal) is roughly 1/10th the negative impact of that illness. It doesn't feel that way to me, but that's what the data says. That's amazing and terrifying to me.
I am not going to make a specific wearable endorsement but do highly recommend those who have opinions on this matter to collect their own data about their own bodies. Cheers.
Agreed, I didn't even know it was a carcinogen until this year. I'm really old. Growing up it was always about it causing brain damage, no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree. Can we make the "may cause health problems" warning made a bit more specific perhaps?
The education on alcohol could be a lot better and it shouldn't be hard. Obesity is a much harder problem to solve and I suspect we don't know all the reasons it is on the rise yet.
> no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree
That's because it doesn't. For the kind of light social/dinner drinking most people do, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it increases your cancer risk (on the contrary, there is some evidence of protective benefits, but epidemiological studies on diet are always full of confounders, so who knows). The reason it appears on lists like these is that alcohol abuse is quite common and leads to liver cancer, among other things, and is associated with other unhealthy choices.
Not according to emerging research. Long term abuse is linked to liver cancer, but even light and moderate alcohol use generally increases the risks of other types of cancers (and diseases) too.
That's a big of a stretch. The DNA is "damaged", or better said changed, by everything. And not all alcohol beverages are equivalent. I'm all up for raising awareness at alcoholism especially due to experience in my family in the past, but this is a piss-poor job of doing so. Being alarmist about things has often the opposite effect, especially today.
people who do not drink alcohol die too and usually not at older age.
5 millions deaths worldwide is a drop in the bucket, considering things that could be prevented and are not related to people behavior (10 million people die every year of hunger, many are kids) and, most of all, even if we can correlate alcohol to those deaths (it's mostly smocking and BMI) that doesn't imply that if they did not drink they would have lived longer.
People who abuse of substances find a way to abuse of anything legal or illegal.
Car accidents cause around 1.4 million deaths and 50 million non fatal injuries (difference with alcohol being it doesn't need people to abuse of it).
Pollution is responsible for 9 million deaths/year.
Personally, I quit heavy boozing about five years ago and totally quit about two years ago. And personally, I can feel the difference in my mood, my behaviour, my thinking, and the effects on other around me. This applied to very light drinking, like half a pint, as well as heavy drinking - maybe six or seven pints plus extras. I tracked these things in an app so I can look back and correlate moods and drinking. Low sample size, but hey, you work with what you’ve got.
I also still spend a lot of time around heavy boozers and see how a variety of drunk people behave. So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues.
I’m not concerned with how alcohol causes death, I am concerned with how alcohol affects life.
On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear and global studies also conclude that no amount of drinking alcohol is safe for you. On the basis that drinking alcohol is a pretty binary choice under the direct control of a human, peer pressure aside, this probably explains why people get defensive because it’s an attack - if you like - on their personal choices.
I cannot personally have an impact on whether my personal pollution emissions - cue gags - affect my health, and improvements in my own driving skills have a ceiling limit on my own safety. But booze is easy, not drinking has a disproportionate impact on me personally.
There’s a difference between banning things to improve public health and personally not partaking in them.
Me observing that people are quick to get defensive over alcohol consumption in general is poking fun at a thing called denial. I get that it’s a defence mechanism to defer anxiety, and the moment I quietly mentioned to friends I wasn’t drinking anymore I received the same defensive reaction from a few of them.
> So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues.
I understand, but that's your personal experience, which is invaluable, but not in general.
People have been drinking since we call them humans and it hasn't affected our path to progress.
Many wild animals do it too! (elephants, bears, monkeys, squirrels, bats, and many others)
I don't think people defend alcohol despite the negative effects, people think alcohol is not the problem, but the way it is consumed can be.
I've also witnessed personally the difference on how Americans drink alcohol in my city (Rome) and how we drink it. It's always surprising to me that they survive to live another day, they drink as they want to destroy themselves, we usually do it for the fun of it.
Same way a wedding or birthday cake is not responsible for obesity, but most obese people love them and eat too much of it.
> On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear
not alcohol per se, but large amounts of it.
Almonds contain cyanide, 10 of them raw and you're in big troubles, 50, you're dead.
Interesting. A common fruity off flavor (or desired flavor depending on what you want) of craft beer is caused by acetaldehyde being produced in the fermentation process. I wonder if certain craft beers are worse than regular beers because it contains acetaldehyde to begin with.
I'm guessing pear beer? Gave me the worst headache.
You can flush out acetaldehyde with 2 grams of Taurine before going to bed. It's probably why a big egg breakfast feels good after a long night. This isn't going to make alcohol safer, but you won't have a hang over the next day...
it's important to separate what is a threat (urban pollution) from what's a choice (abuse of substances)
One causes at least the same amount of damage of the other, but there's virtually no way to protect yourself from the former, while you can chose to quit the latter.
Another important distinction is that most people who drink (almost all of them) don't abuse of it, they consume a moderate amount of it in specific circumstances.
But they can't limit the amount of oxygen they need to survive and are forced to inhale venom from the air regardless.
These sorts of arguments just make people immediately think of Prohibition and the excesses of that era. No conspiracy required, just a knowledge of history.
We still have prohibition, it's just not for alcohol, so it's not that strange to consider. Prohibition wasn't about those kinds of health effects anyway, it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking as I understand it. I don't agree with it, but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation and for different reasons.
Oh I see, I guess I just meant different motives and intent. I agree that it would probably play out the same though, even if the motives were health related this time.
Ah I can see that that could've been the intended reading. I agree the purported motives would've been different this time.
I'm overly cynical about this particular matter though. Here in Ireland, the government recently introduced minimum unit pricing, selling it as a public health matter—completely ignoring the fact that about a decade ago they had suggested the same policy, but with the motivation that it would encourage people to go to pubs rather than drink at home (among many other moral problems with that bill).
The fact that a bunch of commenters immediately came out to defend alcohol here is actually hilarious. The damage to DNA caused by acetaldehyde is very well studied, yet here we have people who likely aren't involved in biological research nor have any formal exposure to it coming out to defend their intoxicant of choice.
Nobody was saying make it illegal, yet that's what people jump to. We need to increase educational awareness of the harms of these compounds because prohibition just makes things worse. Prohibition is why there is fentanyl in the heroin supply for example.
Reading the HN comments, I didn't get the same "defending alcohol" feel you did. I think many (most?) people understand there is some risk. But, there's also risk in driving a car, eating red meat, or not sleeping enough - some just choose that the benefits they receive outweigh the risks. Life's short, eh?
Many people feel the small (possible) reduction in average lifespan is worth the enjoyment or quality of life they get from those things.
Optimizing your life strictly around maximizing potential lifespan is certainly an option, but one that many people would feel is an unworthy tradeoff with what they'd have to give up.
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The difference with smoking vs the other things mentioned frequently in this thread (beyond likelihood of addiction), is that the reductions in lifespan with smoking are huge.
The average smoker loses at least a decade of their expected lifespan from what I can see.
Alcohol's effect on expected lifespan is more disputed, but even those claiming it's a negative in all quantities, generally make far smaller claims as to the degree of reduction for moderate/average use than are the case for smoking.
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Additionally, the average smoker doesn't appear to even be particularly fond of their activity. I do not meet many middle aged smokers that talk in any sort of particularly positive terms about their smoking or that seem to have positive memories associated with it.
I mean, no offense, but your tone comes off as an "I told you so" anti-alcohol comment, so I'd be careful criticizing others for their decisions. As other comments have mentioned, there are often plenty of enjoyable, social side effects that come from drinking alcohol with others in a common setting. Obviously alcohol isn't required (though, obviously people enjoy it - the taste, the side effect, whatever), but that's the way a fairly huge industry is setup in many countries.
Also, to clarify, drinking alcohol does NOT equate to making one's life shorter - that's not at all what the article discusses. Moderate drinking may have no effect, or even a positive effect, on life span.
Mu-opioid agonists have positive prosocial effects as do other GABAergics such as kava and alprazolam.
How about the prosocial effects of low doses of ketamine or other NMDA antagonists such as PCP and dextromethorphan?
Perhaps I'm anti alcohol because you can get the exact same effect from compounds with better risk profiles. Alcohol is a very old drug with a lot of risks compared to the benefit. It hammers so many different receptors, the off target effects are nuts and that's not even mentioning the risk from the toxic metabolite acetaldehyde.
There's no reason to use ethanol with so many better options for the same behavioral modifications.
Just speaking personally, but it's the social aspect. It's simply fun (subjectively, of course) to head to a brewery with some coworkers, after work, hang out in a cool environment, and sip beverages that taste good. If I lived in a bubble to maximize life expectancy, I expect I'd look back with some regrets.
There are other hobbies and gathering places that don't revolve around consuming carcinogens such as restaurants, gyms, sports leagues, libraries, ice cream shops, opium dens (although I'm not sure how many exist nowadays) and likely more that I can't think of. Not to mention, there are many beverages that don't contain alcohol.
"That was a fun day of work, let's hit the library" is not the same as "Let's go have a beer," for many people, as you're probably aware :-) To each their own, though. Your argument is just that people should stop doing what they enjoy - again, I think most understand a potential risk, they've just decided it's worth it.
Well nonalcoholic beer does exist, but I assume you aren't talking about that.
I personally find libraries incredibly relaxing, but I assume what you mean by "it's not the same" in that a library doesn't serve highly rewarding GABAergic drugs.
People enjoy drinking alcohol because it is rewarding and most have learned to like the taste through the association of that neurological reward. That's generally what enjoyment is, association of reward with an activity. There are many other activities and compounds that are just as rewarding or relaxing but society is conditioned to accept alcohol as the default it seems, at least in some communities.
As for your last point, that is absolutely not true from my experience. Whenever I discuss the risk of cancer that's associated with alcohol consumption the other person generally has no idea, that has been over 90% of my conversations on the topic.
What has been well understood for quite some time is that low, steady-state cardio will burn the most calories over high-intensity workload. The effort needed to maintain a high-intensity workload is exponential. The average non-trained person may be able to walk 20-30 miles at one time before their legs give out, that same person wouldn't be able to sprint a mile, let alone half a mile if we're talking all-out sprint. Even if you take into account increased VO2 max it doesn't add up. High-intensity exercise has its place in health, but is a poor tool for weight loss.
The post described the mechanism; it's not about the calories directly burned by the activity, but rather the effect on appetite. You lose weight by eating less, and hard exercise can make it easier to do so.
I think its a bit more complex than that. HIIT directly burns less calories, but it creates more muscles over time. Similar in weightlifting if you go for low reps high weight workouts which are basically HIIT.
In both cases, your metabolism adjusts - it feeds more muscles, its set into high-energy mode with 'fast' digestion.
I wouldn't recommend it to most though - if done properly its very taxing. I mean being in anaerobic state and pushing through is a hard sell to people who barely muster enough motivation to do occasional jog or spinning. One needs to be in top shape overall for it, no hidden heart issues etc.
I think people need both steady state and HIIT. Much like it's hard to go super heavy low reps all the time when lifting. It's good to cycle up and down.
As you mention, HIIT is also very hard for many people do even if they are healthy and want to do it. The body naturally fights going all out.
I've pitched training BJJ on HN (well to anyone really), and HIIT is yet another reason. People who train end up doing HIIT without even realizing. The body is in defense mode which breaks down some of the natural steady guardrails.
> wouldn't be able to sprint a mile, let alone half a mile if we're talking all-out sprint
Can anyone? Almost by definition, your top sprinting speed, e.g. what you would use for 100m race, is going to be different than your speed running a mile, even if you are an olympic athlete.
That's true, but people tend to misunderstand this.
Of course sprinting all-out for 5 minutes is better than walking for 5 minutes. If all you have is 5 minutes, and you're trying to get the most out of that session without any other consideration, you should sprint.
But for most people, 5 minutes of all-out sprinting is very, very hard, and has a very fatiguing effect - you won't want to (or be able to) exercise again for a while. As opposed to walking, which most people can realistically do for a long time.
The concept here is the amount of fatigue you're accumulating. As a fat-loss tool, a low-fatigue exercise that you can do for a long time will mean much more total calories burned, as opposed to a high-fatigue exercise you'll only realistically do for a very short duration.
This reminds me: Scott Adams said the optimal exercise routine is the one that maximizes your chances of exercising again the next day. A good way of thinking about it.
What about a ladder workout? We did these in track and field and it was a brutal burn that would send people puking by the fence by the end and not being able to walk up stairs for a few days after. You'd run a 100m, short rest, 200m, rest, 300m, rest, 400m, rest, 300m, rest, 200m, rest, 100m, then you are simply cooked. Two weeks of this though and you are whipped back into shape for track season.
I don't have exact figures, but the amount of calories burned in very strenuous activity is about 3 times "light" activity like walking (I think - would love a legit reference though!)
So let's say you do the ladder routine. I don't have any idea how fast people typically sprint, but let's take 2 minutes per sprint - we have 100 twice, 200 twice, 300 twice, and 400, for a total of 7 sprints - so we'll say 14 minutes (and I think I'm exaggerating up?) In terms of calories burned, this is the "same" as a 45 minute walk.
I assume, by the way you describe it (people can't walk up stairs for a few days, people puking) that this is very hard on people. They're probably not doing this every day.
As opposed to walking 45 minutes, which is incredibly easy and won't make anyone feel bad, and you can definitely do every day.
Of course, I'm only talking calories burned here - for health and for improving conditioning, of course you need something more strenuous!
Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their news from fake memes on facebook. There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen.
What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake? How long before someone uses this technology to frame someone for a crime? Could the FBI create a deepfake of a cartel leader meeting with them and leak it so they think he's a snitch?
I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly.
I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot.
Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physical contact. So people will get used to the fact that whoever you meet online is likely fake and so they'll start meeting people in the real world again.
I also predict that some advanced AIs will be classified as drugs, because people get so hooked on them that it destroys their life. We've already banned abusive loot box gambling mechanics in some EU countries, and I think abusive AI systems are next. We'll probably also age-limit generative AI models like DALL-E, due to their ability to generate naughty and/or disturbing images.
But overall, I believe we will just starting to treat everything online as fake, except in the rare case that you message a person which you have previously met in real life (to confirm their human-ness).
I want to agree with you, deeply, but the number of people who fall for simple PR/advertising in today's world suggests otherwise.
I think we'd have a chance if they taught PR tricks in schools starting at a young age. Or at minimum, if websites that aggregate news would identify sources that financially benefit from you believing what they're saying.
I've long thought that high school should require at least one course that I like to call "defense against the dark arts" (kids still dig Harry Potter, right? Hahaha).
The curriculum would mostly be reasoning, how to spot people lying with graphs and statistics, some rhetoric, and extensive coverage of Cialdini's Influence. The entire focus would be studying, and then learning to spot and resist, tricks, liars, and scam artists.
That's a good thing to teach but I do think that there are a large number of people out there that just don't have the capacity to do that. By virtue of being on this forum you are likely in the top quartile or near it of the population in terms of intelligence for whatever good that metric is. There is a cognitive bias that everyone frames most people as more or less the same as the person sees themselves and for me, a pretty skeptical person, it's tough to view the world through the lens of someone less skeptical. (I think it's the false consensus bias)
> In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.
> > In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
> Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.
It's a hard battle against status quo and bureaucratic institutions but I still think it's possible to reduce that by a lot. I'm willing to bet that a lot of those people are below basic because they weren't given chance to succeed due to child poverty, schools playing numbers game[1] and various other factors. We don't even have to add new curriculums. Just by getting the "basics" right, we can lift those numbers up.
A lot of the messages that are valuable exist as regular idioms that are pretty simple. 'Don't believe everything you read.' for example is only a few ideas away from 'the government, media and corporations are manipulating you for their benefit.'
One is probably generally considered good advice, the other is likely dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense.
We probably need a few more simple ideas like for modern times. "Facebook profits most when they make you depressed"
"Tiktok is exploiting your sexdrive to influence your personal politics"
"Google is telling people what you masterbate too for money"
They'd have to be less direct of course. I guess one modern one is, "if it's free, you're the product". But that tragically overlooks the generosity of the FOSS community so I'm not a fan.
When you say "everything online" do you mean every untrusted source? Surely the genie is out of the bottle on communication over the web. That local source will have a website. Because of that I feel like we'll always just have to be vigilant, just like we always should have been. After all, local scams still exist. Real humans are behind the bots.
Yes, but those humans are usually anonymous and on the other side of the planet which makes them feel safe. And that allows them to be evil without repercussions.
Back in the days, I went to LAN parties. If someone spotted a cheater, they would gang up with their friends and literally throw the offender out of the building. That was a pretty reliable deterrent. But now with all games being played online, cheating is rampant.
Similarly, imagine if those Indian call centers that scam old ladies out of their life savings were located just a quick drive away from their victims' families. I'm pretty sure they would have enough painful family visits such that nobody would want to work there.
Accordingly, I'm pretty sure the local expert would have strong incentives to behave better than an anonymous online expert would.
I was merely trying to argue that scams within a local community would be less severe than scams between strangers, because they are easier to punish and/or deter.
I suspect that many chat groups (such as Facebook groups), even small niche ones, already have GPT-3-like bots posting messages that seem to fit into the group but that are trained to provide opinions on certain topics that align with the message that the organisation/country controlling them wishes to push, or to nudge conversations in that direction.
Your second paragraph is very intriguing. I never really thought about this. I wonder if people will actually be able to restrict usage though. Its software, and historically it has been hard to restrict it. Of course cloud based systems have two advantages, software is hidden behind the API and they have really powerful systems. But the former requires a single lapse in security to leak and latter just requires time till consumer hardware can catch up. If I use past data to predict future (which might be a bad idea in this case), it might be almost impossible to restrict AI software.
I'm not sure the experts have to be local. I can't be sure that a random twitter account isn't a bot, but I can be pretty sure that tweets from @nasa are reasonably trustworthy. People will form webs-of-trust: they trust one source, the people viewed as trustworthy by them, etc. Anyone outside of that will be untrustworthy.
That's not too dissimilar from what we do today, after all people have always been able to lie. The problem is just that if you start trusting one wrong person this quickly sucks you into a world of misinformation.
I find your point about regulating AI interesting. We already see some of this, with good recommendation systems being harmful to vulnerable people (and to a lesser degree most of us). This will probably explode once we get chatbots that can provide a strong personal connection, replacing real human relationships for people.
This is the outcome I see as well, and I think it is a good thing. Every form of communication beyond physical face to face will be completely untrustworthy. It will affect banking. Remote work. Dating. Clubs. Everything.
Surprise Plot Twist: Maybe we're already living in a post-truth society and you are still sure you know what the truth is. How would you even know that what you were ferociously defending as the truth wasn't a lie? What makes you think you're not smart enough to not fall for lies?
Largely, I think most people's means of finding the truth is just to take a vote of the information sources they find credible and go with whatever they say. I was talking with some friends about the California propositions a while back. Some of them were not clear cut which way we should vote on them. Instead of discussing the actual issue, people just wanted to know what various authority figures thought. These were not dumb people I was talking to, and I used to remember an era in the 90s maybe where you could actually have a reasoned debate and come to the truth that way. It seems that's obsolete these days since nobody seems to agree on the basic facts about anything.
Disinformation is very common in traditional news media. This technology just democratizes this tool and allows anyone to engage in it.
There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.
> There will probably be a net increase in disinformation, but citizens will likely also get better at being skeptical of currently unquestioned modes of disinformation.
Russia seems to be farther along this path than we are and every account I've read of their experience of disinfo isn't that they got better at seeking the truth, but instead just assume everything's a lie & nothing's trustworthy, and disappear into apathy.
The real problem isn't the veracity of the information, but the consensus protocol we use to agree on what's true. Before the internet, we were more likely to debate with their neighbors to come to an understanding. Now, with the large bubbles we can find ourselves in, afforded by the internet social media, we can find a community to agree on anything, true or not. It's that lack of challenge that allows false information to flourish and is the real problem we need to solve.
I would be curious if false information is actually more common now. It seems like people regularly believed all sorts of false things not too long ago.
A skeptic (i.e. someone who cares to verify) not being able to trust media because it might be fake is only a minor problem as long as you have at least one trusted channel.
The president, say, can just release the statement on that channel and it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS).
If you lose that channel, then you're pretty much screwed because you'll never know which one is the real president. But there are physical access controls on some channels, say the Emergency Alert System, which can be used to bootstrap a trust chain.
What will be much more possible is that someone who will not check the veracity of the message will take it at face value without bothering to validate it. This is your news-via-Facebook crowd.
At that point, it's less a technical issue than simply people don't want to know the truth. No amount of fact-checking and secure tamper-proofing of information chains of custody will help that.
An incredibly small minority of people even understand your phrase with any actual fidelity and depth of meaning:
>>it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS)
Even fewer of that microscopic minority have and understand how to use the tools required to verify the video cryptographically, AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert).
Worse yet, even in the good case where everyone is properly skeptical, and 90+% of us figure out that no source is trustworthy, the criminals have won.
The goal of disinformation is not to get people to believe your lie (although the few useful idiots who do may be a nice bonus).
The goal of disinformation is to get people to give up an even seeking the truth - just give up and say "we can't know who's right or what's real" — that is the opening that authoritarians need to take over governments and end democracies.
> AND even fewer know how to fully validate that the tools themselves are valie (e.g., not compromised by a bogus cert).
Kind of, but once you have a single verifiable channel back to the source (in this case, some statement by the president) it's now possible for anyone to construct a web of trust that leads back to that source. For example, multiple trustworthy independent outlets reporting on the same statement in the same way, providing some way to locate the original source. This is why new articles that do not link to (on the web) or otherwise unambiguously identify a source wind me up. "Scientists say" is a common one. It's so hard to find the original source from such things.
This falls over in two ways: sources become non-independent and/or non-trustworthy as an ensemble. Then you can't use them as an information proxy. This is what is often claimed about "the mainstream media" and the "non-mainstream media" by the adherents if the other. All the fact checks in the world are worthless if they are immediately written of y those they are aimed at as lies-from-the-system.
The second way is that people simply do not care. It was said, it sounds plausible, and they want to believe it.
So I would say that actually the risks here are social, not technological. Granted, perhaps a deepfake-2'd video might convince more people than a Photoshopped photo. The core issue isn't the quality of the fake, it's that a significant number of people simply wouldn't care if it were fake.
Doesn't mean we're not screwed, just not specifically and proximally because of falsification technology, that's accelerant but not the fuel.
Yes, indeed! Which is why I'm having so much trouble with ppl proposing technological solutions - technically it might solve the problem in some situations, but the bigger problem is indeed some combination of general confusion, highly adversarial information environment laden with disinformation, and people's all-too-frequent love of confirmation bias and willingly believing BS and overlooking warning signs.
This tech will certainly be used to frame someone for a crime, like I am sure Photoshop was used in such a way, and thousands of other techniques. And modern technology offers counters. It is an arms race but because of the sheer amount of data that is collected, I think that truth is more accessible than ever. The more data you have, the harder it is to fake and keep consistent.
I don’t know, it seems like the existence of widespread, easy photo/video/audio faking technology could be a really strong argument for dismissing any purported photo/video/audio evidence.
Wouldn’t it be funny if deepfakes destroyed the blackmail industry?
I don't much about the blackmail industry, but I would imagine the reverse would be more likely.
I would think blackmail works best when being used on things which are actually true. If someone wanted to blackmail me by sharing a fake photo of my cheating on my spouse I wouldn't cave for anything because I know I haven't so I feel confident I have enough other evidence to fight that claim. My location data, who is the "other woman", etc.?
On the flip side if I had commit some crime and someone made a deepfake of me doing that crime but they didn't actually have a legitimate photo, I might cave at that point since I would think it's a genuine photo and presumably they know even more about the incident.
I don't think it'll be way too much different than it has been for most of human history. We really only had a brief blip of having video, which was generally trustable, but keep in mind that before that for thousands of years it was just as hard to know truth.
Someone told you stuff about the outside world, and you either had the skepticism to take it with a grain of salt, or you didn't.
This doesn’t bother me that much because evidence isn’t required to convince millions of people that a lie is true. We already know this. Why make fake evidence that could be debunked when you can just have no evidence instead?
Different instruments can be used to capture different segments of the population. You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence. But it isn’t necessarily about the most impressionable people, nor is it about installing sincerely held beliefs.
Instead, what may be a cause for concern is simply the installation of doubt in an otherwise reasonable person because of the perceived validity of contrived evidence. Not so much that it becomes a sincerely held belief, but but just enough that it paralyzes action and encourages indifference due to ambiguity.
Think about how few people believe in Bigfoot when video, photographs, footprints, eye witness testimony all exist.
Think about how many people believe in Jesus without any of that physical evidence.
If anything, the physical evidence turns most people off. And I'd argue that most Bigfooters don't even believe in the physical evidence, but use it as a tool to hopelessly attempt to convince other people to believe in what they already believe is true.
For some reason many people react to learning about deep fakes' potential with huge concern as if photos and video used to be infallible and it's suddenly being overturned when this really hasn't been the case.
> You’re right there are gullible people who are more likely to believe things with limited or no evidence
Often the lack of evidence is the proof of whatever is being peddled. "No evidence for $foo? OF COURSE NOT! Because 'they' scrubbed it so you wouldn't be any wiser! But I have the 'truth' here... just sign up for my newsletter..."
This discussion isn't useful because you're assuming people actually care if something is true before they "believe" it, which they don't, so they don't need evidence. "Believing" doesn't even mean people actually hold beliefs. It means they're willing to agree with something in public, and that's just tribal affiliation.
>you're assuming people actually care if something is true before they "believe" it, which they don't
This seems like an assumption too. I know there are instances like you’ve described but they’re not absolute nor universal and I accounted for that in my original comment.
People with some degree of knowledge already know that any photo could be photoshopped. People that don't care will blindly trust a picture of someone with a quote or caption saying whatever, as long as it fits their narrative.
This has been the case for photos for almost 2 decades. The fact that you can now do it with video or audio doesn't change that much IMO.
I think it does, because while you obviously couldn't trust images since two decades or so, you could resort to video which wasn't easy to believably deep fake until recently. But if everything online could be a deep fake, how can you find out the truth?
It's called special fx, is more than a century old (people are now aware it's fake but remember the word is that the train coming in la ciotat movie made people run out of the movie theatre).
Photos have been altered for much longer than 2 decades. Think of airbrushing models in magazines (used to be literal airbrushes painting over photos). This has had a serious impact on our perception of beauty and reality.
> I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly.
Makes you also think whether anybody from the Hacker News crowd working on any contributing tech is acting ethically responsibly. For myself, I have answered this question with "no", which rules out many jobs for me, but at least my kids won't eventually look me in the eye and ask "how could you?"
Sure it's cool tech. But so was what eventually brought us nuclear war heads.
I was listening to "This American Life" and they had a segment on someone who setup an site to give you a random number to call in Russia where you were supposed to give them info about what's happening in the Ukraine. It was someone shocking to hear their side of the story, that Russia is a hero for helping oppresed Russians in Ukraine.
But then I stepped back and wondered, I'm assuming that the story I've been told is also 100% correct. What proof do I have it is? I get my news from sources who've been wrong before or who have a record of reporting only the official line. My gut still tells me the story I'm being told in the west is correct, but still, the bigger picture is how do I know who to trust?
I see this all over the news. I think/assume the news I get about Ukraine in the west is correct but then I see so much spinning on every other topic that it's hard to know how much spinning is going on here too.
I was asked "What are we going to do about Ukraine!?" And I said, "It's a civil war that's been going on for almost 10 years, what is different now?" and their response was "what? I'd never heard that." And I added, "In 2014 there was an overthrow of an elected president there and it started the war." Blank stares.
I have a friend who traveled to Europe regularly for tech training, including Ukraine, and he was surprised about how little people know what is going because people's news sources are so limited. (mostly by choice I assume)
No special tech needed to manipulate people, just lack of multiple information sources?
The president that lost power in 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, was a Russian puppet who refused to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement in favor of closer ties to Russa. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office by 328 to 0. He then fled to Russia.
It’s hard to fathom believing there’s nothing new or relevant happening with the 2022 invasion, or why if there was a lead-in to the conflict that would be on its own a reason to conclude that there’s nothing to be done now.
See this is the problem. While I follow plenty of international news, I didn't know this.
There is often times just too much to know to fully understand a situation. So how can anyone form a valid opinion?
As a follow up, was the election of Victor Yanukovych lawful? If not, then why not point out he was a puppet from a manipulated election? That would be worth a coupe, but not because you disagree with his politics, that's just insanity. Look what Trump believed and supported, we didn't start civil war because Trump wouldn't sign a treaty and he was accused of being a Russian puppet too. There is just more to this story than you are letting on.
So you were asked something about a major current event, you're surprised that they don't know about what happened 10 years ago, and they're surprised you don't know about what's happening now. Blank stares all around, I guess.
Yes, it was the morning after the Russian invasion. I just wasn't on the internet. Before that moment, Russia was just posturing on the border.
This is my point, it's easy to just not know something at any point in time, let alone some things you will only know if you have varying news sources, even if it's many years old.
How many of your friends, family and acquaintances know about the civil war in Ukraine for the nearly past decade?
I live in the US, and so far the only people that knew are the very few news skeptics that follow international news sources online. And even then, we had to share with each other a lot.
But I had watched documentaries about Ukraine years ago, and since most people watch only Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, etc... they knew nothing at all.
So when Russia invaded most people were shocked, where I, and those few others that were information, were not as suprised.
I don’t think that being aware of the history of the conflict had anything to do with being surprised or not by the invasion. I have family in both Russia and Ukraine and nobody expected it.
Even the Russian soldiers who found themselves being sent into Ukraine were surprised.
I guess I'm an outlier on this topic because I don't think deep fakes will continue to have significant societal impact after an initial disruptive period of perhaps a few years. During that time DFs will become so common that any impactful example will immediately be suspected and discounted by most people. Yes, there will always be those who choose to believe the unbelievable but the lunatic fringe already believe outlandish claims without the need for deep fakes, thus there will be little net change.
I think we'll solve it the same way we solved similar transitions when text and image faking became easy: provenance.
For many years now, most have understood that you can't take text and images as truth because they can easily be simulated or modified. In other words, the media itself is not self-verifying. Instead, we rely on knowing where a piece of media came from, and we associate truth value with those institutions. (Of course, people disagree on which institutions to trust, but that's a separate issue.)
In other words, the same way we dealt with information before photographs and videos were invented. The answer to how to we deal with the fact that images and videos can't be trusted is to look at what we did before we relied on them. If we're smart about it we'll try to pick out the good things that worked and try to build in safeguards (as much as possible) against the things that didn't, but I won't hold my breath. We're already heading back towards some of the more problematic behavior, such as popularity or celebrity equating to trust.
I think that people will adapt. Humans are very clever and have been evolutionarily successful because of the ability to adapt to a wide range of environments.
Think about how devastatingly effective print, radio, and television propaganda at the time each medium was widely adopted compared to how effective they are now. They still work, but for the most part people have caught on to the game and adjusted their cognitive filters.
My guess is that we will see a bifurcation of society into those who are able to successfully weed out bullshit from those who can’t. The people who are able to process information and build better internal models of the world will be more successful, and eventually people will start imitating what they do.
Edit: I do think that these tools coupled with widespread surveillance and persuasion tech (aka ad networks), have set up conditions where the few can rule over the many min a way that was not possible before. I do think some of the decentralized / autonomous organization tech - scaling bottom up decision making to make it more transparent and efficient - is a possible counter. Imo, this struggle between technological mediated centralization and top down enforcement and control vs decentralization and bottom up consensus will be the defining ideological struggle of our time.
I think there are quite a few recent historical examples of this - WW2, US invasion of Iraq, Russian Invasion of Ukraine, etc.
However there is a price to pay for operating on beliefs that do not align with reality. It’s why almost all organizations engage in some form of intelligence gathering. Those who are at an information disadvantage get weeded out.
Philip K Dick has a great quote “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
Here's the thing though: in theory, we should already be skeptical of video and audio evidence on its own.
Most of our institutions, in theory, do not focus on single mediums for assessing veracity of truth. The strength of claims and our ability to split the difference between noise and truth comes down to corroboration. How many other sources strength and work consistently with a claim? That's, in theory, how law enforcement, intelligence, and reporting should work.
In practice, there are massive gaps here and people's attention -> decision is lower than ever.
I don't think it's impossible for us to handle deep fakes, but I sense the same fear you have. I think ultimately it is more about our attention spans, and the "urgency" we feel to act quickly, that will be more of our down fall than the ability to produce fakes more easily.
You don't in fact need a convincing fake to create a powerful conspiracy theory. Honestly you only need an emotional provocation, maybe even some green text on an anonymous web form.
So there are information theoretic ways to certify that media is genuine, if you assume trust at least somewhere in the process. Basically just cryptographic signing.
For instance, a camera sensor could be designed such that every image that is captured on the sensor gets signed by the sensor at the hardware level, with a certificate that is embedded by the manufacturer. Then any video released could be verified against a certificate provided by the manufacturer. Of course, you have to trust the manufacturer, but that’s an easier pill to swallow (and better supported by our legal framework) than having to try and authenticate each video you watch independently.
There are issues that can arise (what if I put a screen in front of a real camera??, what if the CIA compromises the supply chain???), but at the end of the day it makes attacks much more challenging than just running some deepfake software. So there are things that can be done, we’re not destined for a post truth world where we can’t trust any media we see.
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for mentioning blockchain tech, but this might at least help, maybe not in its current form but... I did not follow that project, but there do exist some concepts in this direction, e.g. this: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/12/numbers-protocols-blockcha...
The idea of having a public record that attests to when an event happened is interesting, although not sure it has to be blockchain for it to be useful.
That's helpful for the legal system, but it's not going to help for attacks designed to cause mass panic/unrest/revolts. If another US president wants to attempt a coup, it'll be much more successful if they're competent and determined enough to produce deepfakes that support their narrative.
The only way to prevent stuff like that is to educate the public and teach people how important it is to be skeptical of anything they see on the internet. Even then, human emotions are a hell of a drug so idk how much it'd help.
US Presidents have had the ability to make false claims based on video of something completely different, create material using actors and/or compromised communications, stage events or use testimony that information has been obtained via secret channels from appointees heading up agencies whose job it is to obtain information via secret channels for a long time now.
If anything, recent events suggests the opposite: deepfakes can't be that much of a game changer when an election candidate doesn't even have to try to manufacture evidence to get half the people who voted for him to believe his most outlandish claims.
The concerns in your second paragraph can be mostly mititgated using a combination of trusted timestamping, PKI, cryptographically chained logs and trusted hardware. Recordings from normal hardware will increasingly approach complete untrustworthiness as time goes on.
The concerns raised in the first paragraph however... the next few decades are going to be a wild ride. Hopefully humanity eventually reaches an AI-supported utopic state where people can wrap themselves in their own realities, without it meaningfuly affecting anyone else. Perception of reality is already highly subjective, most of the fundamental issues are due to resource scarcity/inequality. Most other issues evaporate once that's solved.
I think you can technically mitigate some concerns for the people who understand that, but practically it's going to be a very different story. People will believe who/what they believe, and an expert opinion on trustworthiness is unlikely to change that.
I think being in the real world and meeting real people is the only way to create a real, functional society. Allowing people to drift away into their own AI supported worlds would eventually make cooperation very difficult. I think it would just accelerate the tendency we've seen with social media, creating ever more extreme positions and ideologies.
"I don't think we'll have the ability to handle this kind of tech responsibly."
I do not think so either, but so far we survived 75+years with nukes around.
But you can argue, it was mainly by chance. Technological progress is awesome, but our societies cannot keep up yet. They will have to do heavy transition anyway, or perish. Or rather, we are in the process of transition. 20 years ago most people did not really know, what the internet is, now most are always online. Data mining, personalised algorithms for ad exposing, ..
So deepfakes are a concern, but not my biggest. Rather the contrary, when people see how easy it is to fake things, they might start developing a healthy sceptism to illuminating youtube videos.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "post-truth", but I think for the vast majority of human history we've lived in a time where it was rare to have easy/cheap to create and hard to fake records of what happened (photography, videos, audio recordings).
In terms of a single photograph though that's been very easy to fake in compelling ways for at least the past 30 years look at lochness and bigfoot photos.
Video's harder, but still pretty much all of this is not horribly difficult to fake. We've long been able to edit things out and mix audio to make a compelling video of a cartel leader meeting with them, no need for deep fakes.
Thankfully things that a real are very cheap to follow up on. Questioning some security footage? No worries there's 100+ hours of it to cross check with the footage and three other cameras too.
I think a bigger question is whether reputable sources --those people trust for whatever reason, would use this technology to prop up ideas and or to create narratives.
I don't think it's far-fetched. We've already seen where videos are misattributed[1] to stoke fear or to promote narratives --by widely trusted news sources.
[1] This was foreshadowed with "Wag the Dog" but happens often enough in the media today that I don't think use of "deepfake" technology is beyond the pale for any of them.
It almost doesn't matter now that people have fractured on which sources they consider reputable. Trump called a CNN reporter "fake news" and presumably his followers think of them the same way I think of Fox. I absolutely think that Fox would use technology to lie, and I'm sure Fox fans think that "the liberal media" would. So people are going to think that reporting is fake whether or not it is
According to an article you found online. That's exactly my point, if we can't trust news sources then we can't really know anything. Because of my aforementioned distrust of Fox News, if it were written by them I'd dismiss that article out of hand placing no truth value on it either way. I'd expect somebody that distrusts CNN to do the same if it were written by them.
"It's confirmed!", "They admitted it!", and other unprovable internet turns of phrase in comments sections are really just "I believe it because somebody I trust said so" and that only has weight as long as trust has weight.
If the accused admit to something it's more believable than the alternative (that they were forced into false admission).
So in this case if the Ukrainian government admit to making things up then I would think it's believable that they made something up for the sake of propaganda. We can also check more independent sources --read Japanese news, or Indian news sources, etc.
We don't know that the accused admitted to anything. We know that the Washington Post says that they did. The world becomes very solipsistic when you lose trust in reporting.
Reminds me of Stephenson's "Fall; Or Dodge in Hell" where all digital media is signed by their anonymous author and public keys become synonymous with identities. An entire industry of media curation existed in the book to handle bucketing media as spam, "fake", "true", interesting, etc.
And how many use or will use the tech, and how many of those will use it competently, and how many of those are competent to validate and know that their checking technology has not been compromised (e.g., hacking or distributing bad authenticity checkers and/or certs like hacking or distributing bad crypto-wallets)?
End-to-end encryption was a giant pain in the butt that required dinking around with PGP or whatever, but now it is a pretty mainstream feature for chat apps (once they figured out how to monetize despite it). Tech takes a while to trickle down to mainstream applications, but it'll get there if the problem becomes well known enough.
I agree that e2e encryption is becoming more widespread and "user friendly".
However, the friendliness seems inversely proportional with the ability of the users to detect that their tool is failing/corrupted/hacked/etc. So while we might have more widespread tools, we also have a more widespread ability to give a false sense of security.
The thing I don't like about these 'well people have been complaining about this forever' arguments is that, it's entirely possible to have a) people pointing at an issue for a long time and b) still have that issue get progressively, objectively worse over time.
There's that example of people pointing out smartphones might be bad for children, then someone counters with 'well thirty years ago people complained about children reading too much instead of playing outside', with the implication being: adults of all ages will find some fault with newer generations, and not to worry so much.
But just because it is true that adults will probably always worry about 'new, evil things' corrupting the youth, this does not mean that the 'new, evil things' aren't getting _objectively more dangerous_ over time. Today adults would be happy if children still had the attention span and motivation necessary to read a book. They'd be happy if they themselves still had it, actually.
Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation, I would say.
>Graphing the progress of a sinking ship and pointing out that the downwards gradient has been stable for a while now and we should therefore be okay is generally not a useful extrapolation,
I like this analogy. I've had similar thoughts for a while too. Granted I also saw some research that society has been objectively getting better in a lot of areas people think is getting worse (like violence, specifically police abuse) compared to the past. theoretically this is because we have a lot more information now than before, so smaller occurrences are generating a larger impression.
that said, I still very much agree with your point and that it is very applicable to specific individualized issues. Saying that people have been concerned for a while and nothing bad has happened yet is accurate for the situation where nothing bad will happen, AND the situation that it was bad then and is worse now, AND the situation where we are approaching a tipping point / threshold where the bad will start.
not entirely tautological. the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today for the first time is very different than the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today GIVEN weve been doing X every day for 50 years.
It is still insufficient to say nothing bad will happen, of course
> The one unwavering thing about technology is that it doesn't stop advancing, and we can't use it responsibly.
While I think that is true in general, I am optimistic that we've seen at least one technology where we were able to constraint ourselves from self-destruction: nuclear weapons.
Of course, nuclear weapons tech is not in reach of individuals or corporations, which means there are only a handful of players in this game-theory setting.
Does that matter when they stakes are as high as these arguments always claim?
If we're doomsaying about a "post-truth society", we're talking about high-stakes society-scaled skullduggery.
If you're aiming for that level of disruption, easy deepfakes vs hard video/photo editing is not an issue, getting people to trust your made up chain of custody is.
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This is like when people worry about general AI becoming self-aware and enslaving mankind... the "boring version" of the danger is already happening: ML models being trained on biased data are getting embedded in products that are core to our society (policing, credit ratings, etc.), and that's really dangerous.
Likewise, people worry about being able to easily make fake news, when the real danger is people not being equipped to evaluate the trustworthiness of a source... and that's already happening.
You don't even need a deepfake, you tweet that so and so said X, write a fake article saying they said X, amplify it all with some bots, and suddenly millions of people believe you.
The good news is that public awareness of potentially manipulated media is on the rise. Coupled with good laws, good detection tech - public awareness and media literacy is important.
At Metaphysic.ai, we created the @DeepTomCruise account on Tiktok to raise awareness.
We also created www.Everyany.one to help regular people claim their hyperreal ID and protect their biometric face and voice data. We think that the metaverse of the future will feature the hyperreal likenesses of regular people - so we all have to work hard today to empower people to be in control of their identity.
Creating yet another product to monetize is not a solution, it's just more of the problem. It incentivizes a perpetual arms race between fabrication and verification at the cost of everyday users. No thanks.
Free but collecting and storing peoples biometric data on your servers (per the FAQ). How do I know it's not a clearview ai clone but with easier data gathering? What is that saying about what the real product is if something is free?
I think the uncomfortable truth is that we're already there and it just doesn't matter because everything works on trust anyway. Sure, quality faked media has a ways to go before you're watching an Avengers quality deepfake porn but for groups that care to a professional degree (intelligence agencies, militaries, digital media companies, etc.) the quality is already good enough for intelligently planted media. The real limiter is access to trusted distribution channels for your faked media. A homunculi media consumer who gets their information from AP News/Reuters/Fox News/CNN/LA Times/New York Times/Verified Twitter Professionals/etc. is probably not at all in a position to judge the veracity of the material presented. If they were in a position to make such judgements they wouldn't need to care so much about whichprestigious media outlets they favor. But they do care, precisely because they know that they're gullible and so they want the media outlet that will give them the real truth (which usually means either the truth they like or the truth they don't like but from a brand that conforms to their ideals of what a news media brand should be). If CNN and Fox News both ran the same deepfaked video of Joe Biden shooting his veep with supplementary text stories and such then I wager a good portion of the American populace would believe it had happened and have serious conern.
> What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see because it could be completely fake?
I don't understand your point. This has been the case for a while. People were editing photos to remove people in the time of Stalin. And even before that, you can lie, write false records, destroy them.
These are not equivalent. Russia did interfere, there were links between Trump and Russia, therefore there is circumstantial evidence that collusion occurred, sufficient to trigger a widely publicized investigation. The allegations of election fraud in 2020 however are 100% alternate universe yarns spun for political gain with no basis in fact whatsoever.
Russia may have interfered but I would imagine it does every year to sew what they percieve to be maximum discord. There are no links between Trump and Russia, and the Mueller and subsequent investigations proved that. Recent trials also proved that the "server links" to Russia from Trump Towers originated with the Hillary campaign.
In the 2020 election, plenty of rules were changed to favour postal votes and vote harvesting. Was it sufficient to change the results? No idea. Did it definitely occur? Yes.
This is all before we get people to understand that having a discussion where some of their points might not be a strong as they think they are...somehow means you're attacking.
The world that we have created for ourselves over the last 20 years is weird.
