Author name: Paul Patrick

childhood-and-education-roundup-#4

Childhood and Education Roundup #4

Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism. However I have excluded them from this post.

Washington Post Editorial Board says schools should ban smartphones, and parents should help make this happen rather than more often opposing such bans in order to make logistical coordination easier.

I agree with the editorial board. Even when not in use, having a phone in one’s pocket is a continuous distraction. The ability to use the phone creates immense social and other pressures to use it, or think about using it, continuously. If we are going to keep doing this physically required school thing at all, students need to be fully device-free during the school day except for where we intentionally want them to have access. Having a phone on standby won’t work.

The Netherlands is going to try it for January 2024, including all electronic devices.

Jonathan Haidt, man with a message, highlights Vertex Partnership Academies, which locks all student electronic devices away all day and claims this is a big win all around. They say even the kids appreciate it. With phones available, other kids know you have the option to be on your phone and on social media, so you pay a social price if you do not allow constant distraction. Whereas with phones physically locked away, you can’t do anything during school hours, so your failure to do so goes unpunished.

Some old school straight talk from David Sedaris. He is wrong, also he is not wrong. He is funny, also he is very funny.

This explanation is one more thing that, as much as I hate actually writing without capital letters, makes me more positive on Altman:

Sam Altman: mildly interesting observation:

i always use capital letters when writing by hand, but usually only type them when doing something that somehow reminds me of being in school.

And of course, your periodic reminder department:

Alyssa Vance: In California, it is legally rape for two high school seniors to have consensual sex with each other. This is dumb, and people should be allowed to say it’s dumb without being accused of coddling rapists.

I do not pretend to know exactly what the right rules are, but this is not it. If there is no substantial age gap, it shouldn’t be statutory rape.

A disobedience guide for children, addressed to those facing physical abuse. The issue is that children mostly only have the ability to inflict damage. You can break windows, or hit back, or tell people you’re being abused, or run away, or otherwise make the situation worse to get what you want. A lot of unfortunately this is a symmetric weapon. A child can inflict a lot of damage and make life worse if they want to do that, and can do that with any goal in mind however righteous or tyrannical. The asymmetry hopefully arrives in a selective willingness to go to total war.

Bad stuff that happens to you in childhood makes you a less happy adult (direct). Bad stuff here includes financial difficulties, death of a parent, divorce, prolonged absence of a parent, health issues, bullying and physical or sexual abuse. Definitely a study I expect to replicate and that we mostly did not need to run, yet I am coming around to the need to have studies showing such obvious conclusions. People are often rather dense and effect sizes matter.

The effect sizes here seem moderate. For example, divorce was associated with an 0.07 point decrease in happiness on a scale where very happy is 3 and not too happy is 1. That’s a big deal if real, also not overwhelming.

What worries me are the controls. Adverse childhood events are often not accidents or coincidences. Associating bad events with bad outcomes does not tell us much about how much of that relationship is causal. I do not find the additional variables in their regression models to be doing enough to capture the hidden variables.

That was me being polite. The top comment at MR rips into the paper and writes it off as useless, pointing out all the bad outcomes and causes are correlated.

We constantly face the clash between the story of nature, where genetics is claimed to overwhelmingly be the main determinant of outcomes and who claim to back it up with robust statistics, and nurture, where we can look at or talk to people and see the obvious impact of the events in their lives, and who are now trying to back that up with statistics. Genetics obviously matter a lot as any parent of multiple children knows, but also the events that happen doubtless matter a lot too. I would expect very bad outcomes from any parents who actually believe otherwise. Luckily, as in the case of Bryan Caplan who clearly puts in tons of mindful effort, this does not seem to often translate into actually acting as if the other stuff doesn’t matter.

A different kind of choice: Letting children skip grades causes gifted (top 1% in math) adolescents to earn more doctorates, publish mor papers, file more patents, and do it all at earlier ages.

Emmett Shear: Anecdotally, from knowing many close friends who skipped multiple grades, the primary impact seems to be academic. Grade-skippers seem to excel in school, but at the cost of other areas of achievement. Which makes sense because you’re ramping academic difficulty.

My anecdata is that everyone I know who skipped grades came out far the better for it, and we should do vastly more of this. The whole ‘emotional development’ form of argument seems crazy to me. Why would you want to take such a child and force them to ‘emotionally develop’ with dumber children their own age?

Ideal of course are schools that track each subject on its own, so you can skip kids around as appropriate and avoid boring them out of their minds.

Sweden’s schools minister declares their free school system a failure. Why? The schools have gotten international acclaim, but recently performance is on the decline, so she is blaming the possibility that someone, somewhere might be earning a profit. There is wide declaration that ‘joint stock companies are not a long-term sustainable form of operation to run school activities’ as the union claims. But, again, why? What makes this different from all other services?

The core justification is that the state of paying, and this allows profit from spending less and providing poor quality education. But if that is the case, why not compete by offering a better school that is still profitable? No explanation is given.

Gated paper claims private school competition is very good for public schools, ungated working version here.

Abstract: Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up.

We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more preprogram private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.

This could easily have gone the other way. We have two stories:

  1. Private schools steal resources and the best students from public schools.

  2. Private school competition forces public schools to get their act together.

Everything in the left-wing, anti-market, statist and collectivist perspective says story one is a nightmare and story two is not a thing.

Everything in the pro-market, pro-freedom and standard economic perspective says story two should dominate, although the selection effect is still a concern.

It is correct to update quite generally, if this finding holds up.

Los Angeles Zones of Choice (ZOC) allowed some students to choose which school to attend, paper finds student outcomes improve markedly in proportion to the amount of competition faced by schools. Whatever one thinks of vouchers, letting students choose between different public schools seems obviously beneficial.

Matt Yglesias makes a case against school choice, arguing that school choice would create a competition for prestige and to attract the best students, similar to that among top colleges. And that this… would be bad. That this would come at the expense of results.

Scott Sumner: Yes, there’s a danger that the school choice movement could make our K-12 system of education as successful as Harvard. But I’m willing to take that risk.

The basic argument is that what makes school work is things like ‘boring drill,’ that Washington is going to hold schools accountable and ensure they produce good results, whereas school choice would not hold schools accountable for good results.

That all seems pretty crazy. If you wanted to steelman the argument and consider it properly, what are the mechanisms that might make this happen?

  1. Children would have a say in which school they choose, and they would tend to choose schools where they will do worse.

I find this highly unlikely. I do not think that in general students want to go to ‘easier’ schools, or ones that teach them less well. Nor do I think they ultimately have that much of the decision making power at such ages.

  1. Parents would have a say in which school they choose, and they would choose schools based on factors that anti-correlate with results.

What would those factors be? Is the worry that they will choose schools that spend their budget or time on signaling wokeness (or anti-wokeness)? That focus on looking nice or on fooling the parents in other ways or tell them what they want to hear? That the schools will try to create lifestyle convenience for parents, in ways that we don’t think should factor in? Or is it the prestige thing?

This is some combination of preference falsification, saying parents (or children) will choose in ways we dislike, and also that they will be fooled and choose wrong.

I think that parents will care about outcomes in math and reading at least as much as the state does. I am confused why you would not expect this. Yes, they might also care about other things, but that should not be a problem. Competition should improve math and reading outcomes here.

  1. Parents will do a relatively poor job evaluating school academic performance.

Unlike with colleges, it is feasible to measure incoming and outgoing skill levels in such matters, and also the parents get to observe student outcomes and talk to each other.

Meanwhile, the baseline is that the state essentially doesn’t evaluate. Low performing schools do not lose students. They do not close. High performing schools do not gain students. They do not franchise. Why should we expect selection here to be worse than that? Sounds absurd.

  1. Prestige and sorting concerns will be destructive.

Yglesias frames this as a conservative would-be worry, citing comparisons to Harvard. The thing is that conservatives very much do not object to Harvard sorting the best students from the worst students. What they object to is that Harvard has various fingers on various scales, both in admissions and in what is taught and by who.

Also, Harvard doesn’t matter, and is not typical. It is the extreme outlier or outliers. All colleges, obviously, feature school choice, you can go wherever. Most college students go to a state or local college. And also they have flexibility in what they can and will charge, they pass on the expenses, and no one is measuring educational outcomes or much caring about them. There’s no reason to think this will translate.

Most important is the role of distance. If I got into Harvard, I would have gone, no matter where I lived at the time around the world. If I got into Harvard Middle School, would my family have moved for it? If it had the same impact on life outcomes as Harvard College and the alternative was where I actually went, then I think they would have, but again that’s an extreme case. If they could instead send me to Columbia Middle School and keep their lives and jobs since it was a mile away from our apartment, they’d definitely have chosen that.

Distance will still matter a ton. This will severely limit prestige spirals caused by school choice rules. You don’t need to fight for selection effects against that many other schools in most places.

You know who does get massive selection effects? The places that provide great schools and then use real estate to price out everyone who is not rich. They get this benefit. Allowing neighboring students to crash such parties would reduce, not amplify, such effects.

The other choice is home school.

Chrisman: When friends start homeschooling they are invariably shocked at how little time is needed for academics. School just fills the time.

Ryan Briggs: This stunned me during Covid. We accidentally did ~2 years of the curriculum in under a year doing 1 hr/day of focused work

What is odd to me is that everyone finds this surprising. Didn’t they all go to school? I member. All that time spent looking at the clock, staring out the window, listening to teachers drone on or talk to other students. Dealing with discipline issues and administrative tasks. Moving between classes. Teaching things you already knew, over and over again, with or without minor variations.

So why is being able distill this activity down dramatically so surprising? One hour a day being good enough to learn at twice the usual overall rate does exceed my baseline prediction, but a dramatic improvement being possible seems obvious.

Among people I know, it is essentially assumed that home school focused on academics using a dedicated teacher who knows what they are doing (let alone proper aristocratic tutoring) would blow away any school on academics.

With the advent of ChatGPT, that should only become more true, assuming regular schools do not adapt so well to it.

A study of 2k children allocated via lottery to attend or not attend one of 280 charter schools showed dramatic long term impact from KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter schools if and only if the kids stay from middle through high school.

John Arnold: Results released today of a new study following the long term impact of KIPP charter schools are incredible and highly policy relevant.

One of my critiques of program evaluations is they tend to judge short term measures (like test scores) when what matters is long term outcomes (higher ed completion and income). So we @Arnold_Ventures sanctioned the 1st study to follow kids who attended a KIPP charter school for 10 years.

While earlier research showed kids who attended a KIPP middle school had significant improvements in test scores, this study shows that kids who subsequently did not attend a KIPP high school only had minimal improvement in college attendance and completion.

But for kids who attended both a KIPP middle and high school, the impact was enormous: nearly doubling the % of kids who graduated with a 4-year degree. As the researchers wrote: “An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap (for Black and Hispanic students).”

Why the very large impact? Students who attended a KIPP high school received college prep coursework (including AP classes) and wrap-around supports to and through college. I suspect many other schools did not do the same. Given most of the students come from first-gen college households, receiving these supports in school has enormous value.

But it’s also true not every student wants to attend a 4-year college. Indeed, even at KIPP the majority of students did not earn that degree. KIPP has since enlarged its mission to prepare kids not only for college but also for a career or military service.

The role of K-12 should be to prepare students to be successful in life, whatever they desire to do. In my opinion, KIPP does this as well if not better than any large operator. That some states still fight their expansion is outrageous.

KIPP combines many of the obvious things one would be inclined to try if you thought the solution was More School and to School Harder. Kids get longer hours, more homework, get called upon more, get stricter discipline, face AP and other advanced classes.

Did this matter? If it was only the middle school, not so much:

Slightly more kids entered college, but all the extra enrollees failed to graduate, so treatment here had minimal net impact. To get the impact, you have to stay in the program, this is the finding Arnold was quoting:

The problem is, if both of these graphs are accurate, what would the fourth graph look like, covering students who did the KIPP middle school but not the high school?

We can do the math. 47.6% of the control group enrolled in a four year college. 51.4% of the treatment group (middle school admission) enrolled in a four year college. 76.6% (!) of those who attended KIPP middle school and high school enrolled in a four year college. 36% of the treatment group attended a KIPP high school. Which means 37.2% of the KIPP-for-middle-school-only group went to a four year college.

That is much worse than the control group. Presumably this means that KIPP high school is a strong selection effect, since I doubt KIPP middle school on its own massively backfires. It likely does backfire on a small subset of kids who can’t or don’t want to handle it, most of whom do not proceed to KIPP high school.

If given the opportunity, should you send your child to a KIPP middle school with the option to go to a KIPP high school?

If your goal is to get them onto the strict academic track, you think the family can handle and support that and the alternative is a public school, and you are willing to make the quality of life sacrifices involved in not letting your kid be much of a kid for a while, it seems hard to turn down the resources involved. It makes sense to think you can beat the odds.

The net benefits for all children, however, including from the high schools, do not seem to be clearly different from zero. Probably a lot of families do not know what they are getting into, or fool themselves into thinking they can handle it.

Nate Silver points out this fun little passage, in a piece mostly making terrible justifications for school closures under Covid:

Nate Silver: TFW the motivated reasoning hits so strong and you’re so terrified to admit that critics of school closures had a point that you start going with “School is bad, actually”.

John Ehrenreich (Slate): Schools have a darker side. At school, children may face sexual assault and harassment and racism. One in five high school students reports being bullied on school property. Schools create stress over academic performance, pressure students to fit into normative gender roles, force invidious social comparisons on children, and conjure up feelings of failure and shame and humiliation over academic failure. Perhaps as a result, a recent Yale University study reported that nearly 75 percent of high school students’ self-reported feelings related to school were negative. Other studies show that teen suicide rates are highest during the months children are in school and lowest during the summer.

Those are not the main considerations one would note if taking the question ‘is school bad, actually?’ seriously. But it is important to note that school should not be assumed to be good and a benefit, rather than bad and a cost. By default it is an expensive thing (in time and money and coercion) that generates benefits. During the pandemic, in practice, the alternative was ‘remote learning’ which was the worst of all possible worlds. Compared to that, school in person is clearly good and a benefit, as would be doing nothing. But compared to a more enlightened alternative, this is far less clear.

Babies need people, not devices. Stop giving them screen time. Easy for her to say, but also yes. This seems clear. Being a parent has made it abundantly clear that screen time must be minimized, even when the uses are ‘educational’ or otherwise curated, that too much of it too early is not healthy.

Such screens of all sizes are also, of course, immensely useful to you, the parent. With all the demands placed on parents now, some compromise on this will be necessary. And I wouldn’t be terrified of the television being on, or anything. But, yeah.

Somehow the statistics get worse every time on what kids are allowed to do. A survey found half of parents of 9-to-11 year olds won’t let their kids go to another aisle at the store. Utter madness.

We have a natural experiment proving teacher preparatory programs are useless.

Daniel Buck: NEW DATA: 5,800 teachers received emergency licenses during the pandemic.

Their students showed the same👏🏼exact👏🏼growth👏🏼in reading and math as their traditionally trained counterparts

Why do we still have university teacher prep programs exactly?

It was actually strictly better by some metrics people care about:

Calder report, Abstract: Relative to the novice teacher workforce before the pandemic, Temporary CE teachers were substantially more diverse without any significant effects on teacher performance or student test scores.

Matthew Yglesias has a gated write-up, in which he notes this is consistent with prior research, which makes it even crazier that we went back to the requirements.

In New Jersey, he notes that those teachers also included many who had actively failed a certification step in the past. If people you are rejecting do as well as the people you accept, in a profession with a perpetual labor shortage, maybe stop that.

Paper claims having male teachers in primary school in Finland was greatly beneficial to students of all genders. It is based on the natural experiment that there used to be quotas to ensure 40% male teachers, then the quotas went away.

Patrick McKenzie presents: Adventures in American math education:

Problem: Cindy has less than ten $5 bills in her pocket. How much money could she have?

Lillian (9): … Any amount.

Me: That’s my girl! Now, to write some math fanfiction.

(Lillian’s rationalization included a) most money isn’t bills, b) Cindy could have yen or something, c) didn’t say anything about $1 bills so can have as many as she wants and d) most money isn’t in a wallet because Cindy isn’t stupid.)

(The math fanfiction that this 3rd grade problem wants is “She has less than fifty dollars because 5 times 10 is 50 and she has less than that.”)

(Elsewhere in math homework twice tonight she said something which phrased slightly differently would be acceptable in a proof and I had to tell her that her intuition is wonderful but the password is phrased differently in third grade.)

“Steve has some pairs of socks. Does Steve have 17 socks?” “No.” “How do you know?” “Eight twos is 16. Nine twos is 18. There is no number between eight and nine.” “… Absolutely good logic. Now, do you remember even and odd?” “This nonsense again?” “Yes.” “‘17 is odd.’ *sigh*”

As flawed as those are, they’re not actually so bad. It gets so much worse.

Another way it gets worse is that if you have rules against expulsion of bullies, then you are effectively bullying and expelling the targets of bullies. New York Post covers an 11-year-old girl who has been continuously bullied at a gifted and talented school in New York, who has been offered a ‘safety transfer’ because the system has no punishments that can deter or prevent bullying however blatant.

Post on: What the algorithm does to young girls. First focus is Instagram, where influencers pushed into your customized feed push both themselves and viewers into cosmetic surgery, often ending up strictly worse off for it. Then mental health, with everyone discussing their issues on Tumblr and then all discussions reduced to TikTok trends. All ‘engineered to be massively addictive.’ What ‘chance does the next generation stand,’ Freya India asks, even without considering AI. She warns not to let children open social media accounts until at least 16 and for children to generally get off screens, which seems wise.

If there are products known to be massively addictive and harmful, but which one can choose to simply not consume, the play seems obvious? I realize the talk of ‘network effects’ and all that but I mostly do not buy it. These are not the previous wave of social networks and feeds. I realize I am on Twitter all the time and it would be healthier not to be so I’m not zero percent a hypocrite, but I am there in large part to do a job.

Chicago mayor, after promising not to, announces plan to ax their high achieving selective enrollment high schools to boost equity. As always, if X

My heart sank as I read this post entitled ‘Math Team.’ The author spent hours each week on math competitions, hating every minute of it, finding it utterly boring, in order to get into a good college. Where the math team was a trick that relied for its funding on getting kids into the top colleges. He missed out on early decision at Princeton then ultimately landed at Stanford, notorious for telling me to apply based on my math competition scores despite being certain to reject me (which they did), causing my parents to force me to burn one of my seven application slots on a <1% chance. This is what happens when everyone is optimizing against each other for a fixed pool of slots and sacrificing actual everything to get one.

The author of The Great AI Weirdening, the source of the above post, extends this to further academic admissions and also hiring in AI, thinking of it as the AI catching everyone in maximizing rat races. With frictionless reproducibility, it is argued, requirements can multiply endlessly in a recursive rat race.

This might well be happening in AI research, but I do not blame AI. This is humans doing human things, trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods with a wrong model of the world and having their mistakes fail to cancel out. If it is no longer a signal of anything but grit and time wasted to have lots of publications, why should I hire you based on your publication counts or repo scores?

Especially because I could read your best paper, see your best code, interview you, give you real tests of skill. The best will do that. I have a hunch that OpenAI does not much care how many papers you published.

NY Times reports that many schools have made it almost impossible to fail, even if you do not show up for class or cannot do the work at all.

Not everything is a mystery.

Rob Henderson: A real head scratcher.

Rob Henderson: I spent some time in the LA Unified school system when they were marginally less stupid in the 1990s. My favorite example of their bumbling ineptitude was later in 2013 when they bought 700,000 iPads thinking it would boost learning outcomes for low-income kids.

Naturally, it backfired. Grades plummeted because kids used their iPads to surf the internet and play games.

Danny Muth: I’m a teacher in Sacramento. Last year our school board implemented a grading policy that sets a 50% floor for all assignments- even missing assignments. Grades soar.

Scores in the ACT, which is a test of knowledge, versus GPA, which is a test of something else. Note the scale on the Y-axis, but still.

Oregon again says students don’t need to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color.

Padme: The harm is that they aren’t mastering reading, writing and math, right?

Oregon is not alone.

Razib Khan: Going to make explicit what seems to be happening in high schools.

There are differences in graduation rates by socioeconomic status and race.

Education establishment does not like this. Looks bad.

Solution: pull away objective metrics/filters that cause this imbalance

⬆️ graduation rates by removing filters that hit low SES & minorities is a total win for the education establishment. equity

BUT, it is bad for the low SES/minority kids for whom HS diploma is an important signal that they’re one of the ‘good ones’

When you give everyone a credential the credential is worthless. ppl like those who are mostly reading this tweet HS diploma is kind of irrelevant; you’re focused on the bachelor’s degree but for working and lower class kids who have brains, focus and conscientiousness it’s not.

To be charitable… they may not even understand this logic. it’s up to policy ppl to guide them.

Woodgrains (QTing abovee): To make it more explicit, this is happening systematically at every level of institutions, with high schools only one particularly salient example breaking the thermometer turns out to be rather easier than changing thee weather.

The only four ways to make graduation rates and performance equal are:

  1. Equalize actual learning by helping everyone learn better. Seems hard.

  2. Equalize actual learning by sabotage, a la Harrison Bergeron. Has been tried.

  3. Equalize graduation rates by making graduation automatic. Oregon and company.

  4. Equalize graduation rates by using unequal thresholds and failing kids as needed.

Do you want your children taught by a system that is optimizing to not know things?

Study confirms that SAT scores are one of our best predictors of college performance, superior in this to high school grades, although grades alone can explain a lot of the variance if you don’t control for SAT scores first. Attending elite high schools outperforms both, but everyone seems to be comfortable actively discriminating in college admissions against those who go to elite high schools. This likely is part of why such kids overperform.

How easily are people fooled by grade point averages?

Tyler Austin Harper: I find it *insanethat the Ivy League does crazy grade inflation and — seeing that — so many people at non-Ivies insist on grading “rigorously,” thereby re-enforcing the pre-existing opinion of employers that elite uni kids are geniuses (he’s a 4.0!) and state school kids idiots

Even if you believe grades are effective measures of student learning and provide crucial motivational functions — which I do not — they are meaningless when every university has wildly different grading cultures and the institutions at the top rig the system for their graduates.

All you are doing by insisting on stringent grading standards is lending material support to the inequalities that keep elite university grads at the top and others beneath them. I find it maddening. And so many profs who are infuriatingly woke in other ways grade like fascists.

Nate Silver: If I were hiring right now I’d prefer high-achieving state school students >>> undifferentiated Ivy League students. Not a remotely close call.

I am with Nate Silver and my answer is ‘not very.’

Everybody knows, at this point, that the Ivies and other hyper-selective colleges are practicing grade hyper-inflation. Your grades there are essentially meaningless. A 4.0 from Yale means only slightly more than ‘I got into Yale.’ I am highly skeptical that such graduates are then getting much additional job market mileage out of their GPAs, even for their first job.

Whereas at state schools your grades mean something. Often I will watch for the top ‘student athletes’ and even with a presumed finger on the scale no one on the team could rally above a 3.6. That means that if you are an exceptional student, you can prove it and differentiate yourself. Which is very important when making it into the school is not itself a strong signal. That’s the point.

Percent of young adults who say that a college degree is very important has dropped over the last 10 years from 74% to 41% (!), according to NYT. Stunning drop.

Tyler Cowen makes the case for college sports. He notes that college athletes make more money than non-athletes, partly by more often entering business and finance, and also make more money for the schools. If anything, that makes it sound like we do not give enough weight to athletics in admissions.

I do not think this is a convincing argument that athletics teaches useful skills, so much as an argument that the non-athletic components of college mostly do not do so, and competitive sports are at least as good for character as classrooms. And that physical prowess is rewarded in today’s marketplace, as it always has been.

Certainly I would be happy to see my children playing a sport competitively purely for its own sake, and it seems better than a lot of what college students spend their time doing. I am all in favor of college sports, including the ones in which I have zero interest.

Perhaps there should be a greater shift towards the sports ‘of the people’ and away from ‘rich person’ sports, then again perhaps this too is fine? What the children of the rich most need is hard work and competition on a level playing field. Lacrosse or boat racing do have barriers to admission in the form of money, but past those barriers they are fair, and they are real tests. I can get behind this.

Math homework is rigged, engineered to have easy answers, and even more than that easily formulated and selected questions. This means it is little help with allowing you to set up real world problems and find their practical solutions. I have made a lot of money out of doing math. Almost all that math is deeply, deeply simple at its core. The hard part is figuring out what math to do. I still remember that one time I got to write an integral sign on a piece of paper in real life. I did a dance of joy.

Or as John Cook puts it: “What kind of math does your consulting involve?” “Sometimes fancy stuff, but often high school level math.” “Why would anyone hire a professional mathematician to do high school math?” “Because a professional mathematician can wield high school math like a professional.”

Exactly. Tighten pipe, $5. Knowing which pipe to tighten, $495. Worth it.

The case for copywork: Physically copying the work of others. I buy that it is (part of) the best way to learn to play an instrument. I do not buy the case made here that it is the best way to learn how to write, done with pen and paper. Seems very much like a virtue previously born of necessity, when people like Ben Franklin had little to work with and made the most of it. Back then, this made sense. Now, we can do better.

Then again, will we do better? Or is copywork still effectively a win, like many other traditional practices that cause you to do the work at all? It depends on the person. It does sound, if you choose passages that appeal to you and speak to you, like copywork is a better use of time than many other traditional exercises.

Emmett Shear on college-level organic chemistry. His experience was that the class was composed of a mix of science track and premed track students. The science students are there to actually learn and retain the material, so even though it’s a massive amount of compounding facts you have to learn, they do fine. Whereas the premed students are happy to do the work, but are thinking of the class as a structural barrier rather than source of information, so they cram rather than retaining information, and then struggle. So it is a question of motivation. How do we get students, across the board, to be motivated by actually caring about the material?

This well matches my experience. Any time my internal motivation was ‘pass this class’ and ‘pass this test’ and ultimately ‘get through this’ then information did not build, I did not learn in a way that stuck, and pretty soon I was struggling. It never went well. Whereas in classes where I actually wanted to learn something, it went far better even during the class and I also often retained useful knowledge.

There isn’t quite no point in having a student in a class that does not want to be there for the knowledge, but it is pretty damn close.

How is Auburn University spending so much money, especially with so little football success? Wall Street Journal investigates this test case. Nice amenities, new facilities, debt service and quite a lot of administrators.

Another trick academia and colleges use is to claim credit for everything. Talib talks about this a lot, where a tinkerer or businessperson will figure something out, then someone in academia writes it up and claims the intellectual credit.

Or, alternatively, we have someone who comes up with something, and then associates with academia in order to get the idea taken seriously and to get the credit, so the credit then gets taken by academia.

Case in point: Effective Altruism.

Ian Bogost: This article wasn’t the place to go into it, but, we need to face a difficult truth in academia: Original thought—truly original, creative research ideas—are extremely rare now. Scholarship is mostly careerist incrementalism, the profession deserves sneers for it.

Nate Silver: Half-troll, half-serious Q: What are the most influential ideas to come out of academia over the past 10-20 years, excluding hard sciences? Effective altruism? (EA also has significant non-academic influences.) Critical theory? (Academic origins date back >> 20 years.)

Andy Masley: I remain extremely bullish on EA and suspect it’ll be a clearer and clearer contender for one of the most influential ideas to come out of recent academia.

Oliver Habryka: I really don’t think describing EA as having its origin in academia is accurate. It seems like one of the least academic intellectual communities and movements that I know about. Which academic publications are supposed to have much to do with EAs founding?

Andy Masley: I’m mainly thinking of Parfit + academic analytic philosophy. Not claiming that EA is especially academic, just that some of the key ideas came from pretty academic environments.

Oliver Habryka: Hmm, I guess I haven’t seen that much influence from Parfit, though like, it does seem like one of the three sets of intellectual influences was somewhat though not hugely influenced by Parfit, but that seems far from sufficient to classify EA as “coming out of academia”.

Like, my model is that Paul Graham, the economics blogging community, the fallacies and biases literature, Peter Singer’s popular writing, the 20th century hard sci-fi community, and early contributors to the field of AI all had a greater or at least equal contribution to Parfit.

[more discussion, including how much weight to put on Oxford, follows]

The counterfactual influence of academia on Effective Altruism is large in the sense that EA uses Oxford and other top colleges as prime recruiting grounds. If they didn’t have that affordance, things would be very different. In terms of the core ideas, it seems to me to mostly lie elsewhere, and for those at Oxford who contributed to have not done so thanks to any affordances they got from Oxford.

A lot of things seem to be like this. Academia increasingly is not the source of important new ideas. And when it is the source of important new ideas, they are important because academia is succeeding at spreading their Obvious Nonsense, whereas a sane civilization would shrug the same concepts off as ludicrous.

We talk about the cost of college a lot in the United States, but the average resulting debt burden here does not seem so unusually large?

It helps that we are richer. It also makes it easier to pay off the debt.

Jewish families picking colleges now forced to choose largely on the basis of worries about antisemitism and physical safety. If one must choose, it is noted that the Universities of Florida and Miami have been taking relatively strong steps to keep Jewish students safe. If, as one student notes in the post, the issue is the ‘other politics’ going on in Florida, I would suggest that is a misunderstanding of what one should prioritize. I would also suggest that this is a sign to not go to college at all, do not lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from and will not be worth it in the new AI age anyway, and instead start a business.

A young woman, with a marketing degree and $80k in student debt, complains that she can’t get any decent jobs that use her degree because they all require ‘experience.’ The degree, she says, was the experience. Which is the kind of thing only said by someone with no experience, expecting to get the six-figure jobs right off the bat because she has a degree. She could indeed get a job in marketing, to get the experience, but it would mean an ‘insane’ pay cut. She didn’t realize that, didn’t plan for it and can’t stomach it.

Inez Stepman: Unpopular opinion: instead of dunking on her, we should be going after the predatory university system that has shown for decades and especially in the last week that it does not deserve our public $ nor our trust.

She should’ve never been given an $80,000 loan at 18, no bank would’ve given it to her. But USG will!

At a minimum, before we give kids gigantic loans to go get a degree, perhaps we should check for reasonable market expectations on what that degree might enable them to do? And also, if we do not think they should be forced to pay it back but do want them to have the money, give them a grant instead?

Childhood and Education Roundup #4 Read More »

amazon-marketplace-crackdown-has-sellers-searching-for-legal-help

Amazon marketplace crackdown has sellers searching for legal help

Legit or not —

Clean-up drive has led to some small businesses having their accounts suspended.

Amazon marketplace crackdown has sellers searching for legal help

Leon Neal | Getty Images

Merchants who have been suspended from selling goods on Amazon’s marketplace are turning to a cottage industry of lawyers to regain access to their accounts and money, amid growing scrutiny of how the retailer treats independents.

Millions of accounts on the leading ecommerce platform have been prevented from engaging in sales for alleged violations of Amazon’s broad range of policies and other bad behavior. Even temporary suspensions can be a critical blow to the small business owners who rely on online sales.

Four ecommerce-focused US law firms told the Financial Times that the majority of the cases they took on were complaints brought by aggrieved Amazon sellers, with each handling hundreds or thousands of cases every year.

About a dozen sellers also said they had grown worried about Amazon’s power to suspend their accounts or product listings, as it was not always clear what had triggered the suspension and Amazon’s seller support services did not always help to sort out the issue.

Account suspension was “a big fear of mine,” said one seller, who declined to be named. “At the end of the day, it’s not really your business. One day you can wake up and it’s all gone.”

Amazon’s recent efforts to crack down on issues such as fake product reviews have come as US and European regulators have upped their scrutiny of the online harms facing shoppers.

But critics said the existence of a growing army of lawyers and consultants to deal with the fallout from Amazon’s actions pointed to a problem with the way the retailer treats its sellers.

“If you’re a seller and you need help to navigate the system, that’s a real vulnerability for the marketplace. If you’re operating a business where the people you’re deriving revenue from feel that they’re being treated in an arbitrary way without due process, that is a problem,” said Marianne Rowden, chief executive of the E-Merchants Trade Council.

“The fact that there are entire law firms dedicated to dealing with Amazon says a lot,” said one seller, who like many who spoke to the FT asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Amazon declined to comment in detail but said its selling partners were “incredibly important” and the company worked hard to “protect and help them grow their business.” The company worked to “eliminate mistakes and ‘false positive’ enforcements” and had an appeal process for sellers in place.

Sellers on Amazon’s marketplace account for more than 60 percent of sales in its store. In the nine months to September 30, Amazon recorded $96bn in commissions and fees paid by sellers, a jump of nearly 20 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

As the marketplace has grown, Amazon has had to do more to police it. During the first half of 2023 in its EU store, Amazon took 274mn “actions” in response to potential policy violations and other suspected problems, which included the removal of content and 4.2mn account suspensions. Amazon revealed the numbers as part of its first European transparency report newly required by EU law.

Amazon typically withholds any money in the account of a seller it has suspended for alleged fraudulent or abusive practices, which it may keep permanently if the account is not reinstated and the merchant is deemed to have been a bad actor.

Figuring out what caused a suspension and how to reverse it can be difficult. “We had a listing shut down during Prime Big Deals Days with no warning, no cause, no explanation,” said one kitchenware seller who has been selling on Amazon.com since 2014. “That’s pretty common.”

Amazon gave no further information when the listing was reinstated days later, the seller said.

Such confusion drives some sellers towards lawyers and consultants who advise on underlying problems, such as intellectual property disputes.

Amazon-focused US firms said they typically charged flat fees of between $1,300 and $3,500 per case.

CJ Rosenbaum, founding partner of the Amazon and ecommerce-focused law firm Rosenbaum Famularo, said the practice experienced a “big jump” in demand during the pandemic.

Many cases related to IP complaints from bigger brands “trying to control who sells their products” and making “a baseless counterfeit complaint” against a smaller Amazon seller, he added.

Lawyers said some sellers had been wrongly accused by the company’s automated systems that identify breaches of rules and policies. They added though that others had broken Amazon’s rules.

The retailer has become “more draconian” in the enforcement of its policies in recent years, said attorney Jeff Schick.

“Clients will say Amazon is unfair,” he said, but added that if the company did not strictly enforce its rules “then the platform becomes the next [US classified advertisements website] Craigslist.”

As part of escalated disputes, lawyers might steer merchants through a costly arbitration process that the company requires US sellers to use for most issues, rather than filing lawsuits against it.

Sellers were subject to “forced” arbitration clauses that required them to “sign away the right to their day in court if a dispute with Amazon arises,” said a 2022 US government report.

The details of arbitrations are not public, and decisions do not typically set binding precedents. They can also be hugely expensive: the up to three arbitrators that preside over a case can charge hundreds of dollars an hour.

“Quickly, you’re at $25,000 of costs or more,” said sole practitioner Leo Vaisburg, who left firm Wilson Elser in 2022 to pursue Amazon-related work full time. For many small businesses the high costs were “a barrier to entry,” he added. “Very few cases are worth that kind of money.”

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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tesla-sold-1.8-million-electric-vehicles-in-2023

Tesla sold 1.8 million electric vehicles in 2023

38 < 50 —

It met its sales goal, but growth is well below CEO Elon Musk’s stated target.

Workers walk past a large Tesla logo.

Getty Images | San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers

Tesla found new homes for 1.8 million electric vehicles last year, it revealed on Tuesday afternoon. That will no doubt please CEO Elon Musk—it means the company has met its sales volume goal given to investors when it released its 2022 financial results at the end of last January.

Tesla built 494,989 vehicles in the last quarter of 2023, of which 18,212 were the more expensive but aging Models S and X. More importantly to the bottom line, Tesla built 476,777 Models 3 and Y. For the same three months, it delivered 484,507 EVs, of which 461,538 were the popular Models 3 and Y.

Cumulatively, Tesla built 1,845,985 EVs—1,775,159 Models 3 and Y and 70,826 Models S and X. And it delivered 1,808,581 EVs (1,739,707 Models 3 and Y; 68,874 Models S and X)—meeting the 2023 sales goal of 1.8 million cars sold.

That’s another record year for Tesla, but it’s also another year where the company has fallen far short of its targeted cumulative annual growth rate of 50 percent. Last year, it grew by 40 percent; this year, it grew by just 38 percent.

For that 50 percent CAGR to become a reality, 2024 will need to be a much stronger year than Tesla has had in the past. But that might prove easier said than done. BYD, a Chinese automaker, eclipsed Tesla in EV sales for the first time in Q4 2023, and Tesla’s market share is declining—albeit slowly—in the US as dozens of new EVs have gone on sale of late.

China and the US are Tesla’s two most important markets, and it seems investors have taken notice—Tesla’s share price has fallen almost five percent since the start of trading this morning.

Tesla sold 1.8 million electric vehicles in 2023 Read More »

it’s-rebels-vs-imperialist-forces-in-rebel-moon-part-2:-the-scargiver-trailer

It’s rebels vs Imperialist forces in Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver trailer

She’s a rebel —

“Their nightmare is us fighting together to defend something we love.”

Prepare yourself for Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver.

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part 1: Child of Fire racked up an impressive 63 million views over its first ten days on Netflix, despite decidedly negative critical reviews. Now we’ve got the first full trailer for Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver, continuing the saga of our intrepid heroine Kora (Sofia Boutella) and her plucky band of allies as they take on the imperialist Motherworld.

(Spoilers for Part 1 below.)

As we reported previously, years ago, director Zack Snyder had an idea for an epic Star Wars movie that he pitched to Lucasfilm. That project never panned out for a variety of reasons. But the idea continued to germinate until Netflix got on board. Apart from Star Wars, Snyder has said his influences include the films of Akira Kurosawa, especially Seven Samurai, and The Dirty Dozen. He has set his epic saga in a universe controlled by the ruthless and corrupt government of the Mother World (the Imperium) with an army led by one Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee). The rebel moon of the title is called Veldt.

The band of allies that Kora assembles in Part 1 includes a former Imperium general named Titus (Djimon Hounsou); her farmer friend Gunnar (Michiel Huisman); Tarak (Staz Nair), a blacksmith who can bond with animals to rally them to a fight; a cyborg sword master named Nemesis (Doona Bae); a warrior named Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) and his sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman); a spider warrior named Harmada (Jena Malone); and Jimmy, the last of a race of mechanical knights from a fallen kingdom, voiced by Anthony Hopkins. Ingvar Sigurdsson plays Kora’s friend Hagen, and Ed Skrein plays Admiral Atticus Noble, right hand to the tyrannical Regent.

In the climactic battle, both Darrian and Noble were killed, but Noble had an astral plane experience with Balisarius that somehow revived him. Noble’s new mission is to capture Kora alive and bring her to Balisarius, who longs to execute her himself. Snyder has said in interviews that the second film will delve a bit deeper into the histories and backstories of the main characters, which should help flesh them out a bit more (the thin characterization was a common criticism of Part 1). The official premise seems to confirm that:

Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver continues the epic saga of Kora and the surviving warriors as they prepare to sacrifice everything, fighting alongside the brave people of Veldt, to defend a once peaceful village, a newfound homeland for those who have lost their own in the fight against the Motherworld. On the eve of their battle, the warriors must face the truths of their own pasts, each revealing why they fight. As the full force of the Realm bears down on the burgeoning rebellion, unbreakable bonds are forged, heroes emerge, and legends are made.

Much of the trailer focuses on the rebel villagers preparing for the big battle against the Realm: gathering weapons and ammunition, and training a formerly peace-loving people in the ways of combat. These scenes are offset by ominous shots of the Motherworld forces gathering its vastly superior military technology, equally determined to annihilate the rebellion. Although Jimmy tells Kora she must know they cannot win, she is determined. “Their nightmare is us fighting together to defend something we love,” she says.

Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver drops on Netflix on April 19, 2024. We can also expect a director’s cut of Part 1 sometime in 2024, as well as a four-issue prequel comic expected this month, set five years before the events of Part 1, focusing on Devra and Darrian Bloodaxe. Also in development: a narrative podcast, an animated comic book, and an animated series telling the story of the Kai, all prequels.

Listing image by Netflix

It’s rebels vs Imperialist forces in Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver trailer Read More »

a-commander’s-lament-on-the-loss-of-a-historic-spacex-rocket

A commander’s lament on the loss of a historic SpaceX rocket

Museum piece —

This rocket restored NASA crew launches to US soil, then launched 18 more times.

One of the most historic rockets in SpaceX's fleet toppled over Christmas Day on the return trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, following its previous mission.

Enlarge / One of the most historic rockets in SpaceX’s fleet toppled over Christmas Day on the return trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, following its previous mission.

The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX’s first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history on several counts.

It was the first time a commercial rocket and spacecraft launched people into orbit, and ended a nine-year gap in America’s ability to send astronauts into orbit from US soil, following the retirement of the space shuttle. This mission, known as Demo-2 and launched by SpaceX under contract with NASA, ended US reliance on Russian rockets to send crews to the International Space Station.

SpaceX recovered the booster on one of its offshore landing platforms after the historic launch in May 2020, while the Falcon 9’s upper stage fired into orbit with the Crew Dragon spacecraft containing Hurley and Behnken. Then, the rocket went into SpaceX’s fleet rotation to launch 18 more times, primarily on missions to deploy Starlink Internet satellites.

Hurley, who commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission, kept up with the booster’s exploits well after his return to Earth. He regularly exchanged text messages with Behnken and Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, as the rocket just kept flying.

“For Bob and I, that particular booster was always pretty special for a lot of reasons,” said Hurley, a veteran Marine Corps fighter pilot who retired from NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021. He now works at Northrop Grumman.

An inauspicious ending

Hurley told Ars he would like to see the booster’s remains displayed in a museum alongside the Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) he and Behnken flew in 2020. “In a perfect world, I’d love to see Endeavour and at least now part of that booster in the Smithsonian or in a museum somewhere,” he said.

“It’s kind of a bummer,” Hurley told Ars. But he understands SpaceX got a lot of use out of this rocket. SpaceX also has a lot of love for Hurley and Behnken. The company named two of its recovery ships for payload fairings “Bob” and “Doug” after the astronaut duo.

“SpaceX has got a business to run,” he said. “I think, at this point, certainly Endeavour is going to fly more, but this booster isn’t, so hopefully they can find a spot to display it somewhere. Even part of it would look kind of cool somewhere. They could figure something out … People, I think, can get a lot of inspiration from seeing stuff that’s actually flown in space, and being able to get right up close to it, I think, is a big deal to a lot of people.”

Doug Hurley, right, commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission in 2020.

Enlarge / Doug Hurley, right, commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission in 2020.

NASA

The 19th launch of this booster on December 23 was just as successful as the previous 18, with a smooth climb into space before shutting down its nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines. The booster coasted to the highest point in its trajectory—72 miles (116 kilometers)—before Earth’s gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere.

Two engine burns slowed the rocket as it descended toward SpaceX’s drone ship positioned near the Bahamas, and then four carbon-fiber legs deployed moments before an on-target touchdown. Then, as usual, the recovery vessel started its slow journey back to Florida with the 15-story-tall booster standing vertically.

A commander’s lament on the loss of a historic SpaceX rocket Read More »

ancient-desert-mega-structures-were-planned-using-carved-maps-to-scale

Ancient desert mega-structures were planned using carved maps to scale

On the ninth day of Christmas —

“This calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”

Oblique aerial photograph of a desert kite in Jordan

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists found two stone engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that may represent the oldest architectural plans for desert kites.

During the 1920s, aerial photographs revealed the presence of large kite-shaped stone wall mega-structures in deserts in Asia and the Middle East that most archaeologists believe were used to herd and trap wild animals. More than 6,000 of these “desert kites” have been identified as of 2018, although very few have been excavated. Archaeologists found two stone engravings—one in Jordan, the other in Saudi Arabia—that they believe represent the oldest architectural plans for these desert kites, according to a May paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“The discovery of these very ancient representations highlights the question of the methods used by kite builders,” the authors wrote. “Kites are large material structures that could not be designed without what we call today planning. The ability to transpose large spaces into a small two-dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”

The eight kites at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in Jordan were discovered in 2013, and archaeologists began excavations in 2015 and 2016. Looters had targeted one such site, so archaeologists conducted a rescue excavation, noting numerous carved cigar-shaped limestones scattered around the surface. One such stone had a very well-preserved engraving. The engraving’s shape is characteristic of the two desert kites at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh that are nearest to where the engraved rock was found, and the authors estimate the age of the engraving to be about 7,000 years old.

The engraving was likely carved with a lithic tool, employing a combination of fine incisions to mark out the contours of the kite and pecking. The kite-shaped engraving comprises two primary converging curved lines, which the researchers interpreted as representing driving lines. These lead to a carved star-shaped enclosure with eight circular cup marks at the circumference representing pit traps. The characteristics are typical of desert kite structures in southeastern Jordanian kites. The archaeologists remain puzzled by a zigzagging chevron pattern running perpendicular to the corridor, but hypothesize that it might represent a slope break feature.

The kites at Jebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia were discovered in 2014 and excavated the following year. The engraved sandstone boulder in this case—found during rock art surveys—was studied in situ and dated to around 8,000 years ago. The carving was likely made by pecking the contours using a lithic tool or a handpick. While the eastern engraving on the boulder was very readable, the western one had been badly damaged by erosion. Both feature the same two short, widely spaced driving lines that gradually converge into a star-shaped enclosed surface surrounded by six cup marks (pit traps). Once again, the authors noted clear similarities between the engraved representations of kites on the boulder and actual desert kite shapes nearby.

There have been other maps, plans, or representations in human history, per the authors, such as Upper Paleolithic engravings in Europe that seem to be maps of hunting strategies, or a mural in Turkey from about 6600 BCE that seems to depict a village. There is even a reed-bundle boat found in Kuwait, dated 5000 BCE, that is considered to be the oldest three-dimensional model of a large-scale object. However, the two engravings found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia are unique because they were done to scale: approximately 1: 425 and 1: 175, respectively.

As for why the engravings were made, the authors considered three hypotheses: it was a detailed kite construction plan; it was a plan for preparing hunting activities; or it could be more symbolic—a means of passing on knowledge of the pace and/or its function. Of those, the authors consider the second to be the most credible, given the careful graphical representation of the functional elements of the trap, but cannot rule out the other two possibilities.

“A map would most probably be used here as a means of communication (almost like an ancestral way of writing) and would enable the collective interaction required for the smooth running of hunting operations,” the authors concluded. “These two major innovations, i.e., building what would become the largest structures in human history at that time and making cartographic representations to scale, are closely linked by a common point: mastering the three-dimensional perception of a space, and translating it into an inscribed form of communication.”

PLoS ONE, 2023. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277927  (About DOIs).

Ancient desert mega-structures were planned using carved maps to scale Read More »

34-years-later,-a-13-year-old-hits-the-nes-tetris-“kill-screen”

34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”

A moment in <em>Tetris</em> history.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/tetrisrecord-800×394.png”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / A moment in Tetris history.

For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a “game over” message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game’s “kill screen” after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.

The game-crashing, record-setting performance. Jump to 38: 56 for BlueScuti’s disbelieving reaction to his achievement and a short interview.

What makes BlueScuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.

From hypertaps to rolling

If and when a player reaches Level 29 on NES Tetris (after clearing between 230 to 290 lines, depending on the starting level), the game reaches its highest possible speed. At this point, simply holding down left or right on the NES D-pad can’t usually get a piece all the way to the side of the well unless the board is extremely “low” (i.e., pieces only on the first one or two rows, maximum). Thus, for years, players that reached Level 29 found their games usually “topped out” just a few pieces later.

A demonstration of hypertapping technique.

The first known way past the brick wall of Level 29 was a technique that became known as hypertapping. By using a special grip that lets you vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second, you can effectively skip the “delayed autoshift” (DAS) that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down.

With hypertapping, players can effectively move pieces at Level 29 speed even when the board is stacked four or five levels high. While that gives a little breathing room, a run of bad pieces or execution can still put a hypertapper in an untenable position where the pieces start to stack up high, and completing new lines becomes essentially impossible.

The first Level 30 NES Tetris performance on record, from back in 2011.

Noted Tetris pro Thor Aackerlund was able to eke out a Level 30 hypertapping performance in 2011. But it wouldn’t be until 2018 that Joseph Saelee used his mastery of the technique to dominate the 2018 and 2019 editions of the Classic Tetris World Championship, a live tournament that takes place at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo every year. By 2020, Saelee had hypertapped his way to a Level 35 performance, while fellow player EricICX had achieved the first Level 38 performance.

A deep dive into the advanced Tetris control technique known as rolling.

Then, in 2021, a new, even faster button-mashing technique appeared on the competitive Tetris scene. This “rolling” technique was inspired by arcade player Hector “Fly” Rodriguez, who used a similar multi-finger roll to set button-mashing records on the Track & Field arcade game. Tetris players adapted this technique by combining it with a grip that lets you tap the back of the NES controller with a “roll” of three to five successive fingers. This roll of the fingers then nudges the D-pad into a finger on the other hand to register an extremely quick series of directional button presses.

Rolling is fast enough to get pieces to the sides on Level 29-speed boards stacked up to eight rows high, giving Tetris masters quite a bit of leeway in their quest for longer games. Cheez, one of the first players to master the rolling technique, hit Level 40 in 2021, but that was just the start of how far things could go.

A Level 146 performance from 2022 that shows NES Tetris can be effectively played indefinitely at Level 29 speed.

By the time EricICX managed to roll his way to Level 146 in August 2022, it was clear that players were getting good enough to effectively play indefinitely on the same “Level 29” speed that had been considered an effective kill screen just a few years earlier. Players were getting so good at stretching their NES Tetris games that the community started debating how to stop tournament matches from going on too long (they eventually settled on a modded game with an even faster Level 39 “super killscreen” for competitive play).

34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen” Read More »

vizio-settles-for-$3m-after-saying-60-hz-tvs-had-120-hz-“effective-refresh-rate”

Vizio settles for $3M after saying 60 Hz TVs had 120 Hz “effective refresh rate”

Class action —

Vizio claimed backlight scanning made refresh rates seem twice as high.

A marketing image for Vizio's P-series Q9 TV.

Enlarge / A marketing image for Vizio’s P-series Q9 TV.

Vizio has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged the company misled customers about the refresh rates of its TVs.

In 2018, a lawsuit [PDF], which was later certified as a class action, was filed against Vizio for advertising its 60 Hz and 120 Hz LCD TVs as having an “effective” refresh rate of 120 Hz and 240 Hz, respectively. Vizio was referring to the backlight scanning (or black frame insertion) ability, which it claimed made the TVs look like they were operating at a refresh rate that was twice as fast as they are capable of. Vizio’s claims failed to address the drawbacks that can come from backlight scanning, which include less brightness and the potential for noticeable flickering. The lawsuit complained about Vizio’s language in marketing materials and user manuals.

The lawsuit read:

Vizio knows, or at the very least should know, that its television with 60Hz display panels have a refresh rate of 60 images per second and that backlight manipulation methods cannot and do not increase the effective Hz (refresh rate) of a television.

The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, accused Vizio of using misleading tactics to persuade retailers to sell and recommend Vizio TVs. It accused Vizio of trying “to sell its lesser-quality product at a higher price and allowed Vizio to realize sales it may not have otherwise made if it were truthful regarding the performance capabilities of its televisions.”

Under the settlement terms [PDF] spotted by The Verge, people who bought a Vizio TV in California after April 30, 2014, can file a claim. They’ll receive $17 or up to $50 if the fund allows it. The individual payout may also be under $17 if the claims exceed the $3 million fund. Vizio will also pay attorney fees. People have until March 30 to submit their claims. The final approval hearing is scheduled for June 20.

Vizio also agreed to stop advertising their TVs with 120 and 240 Hz “effective” refresh rates but “will not be obligated to recall or modify labeling for any Vizio-branded television model that has already been sold or distributed to a third party,” according to the agreement. Further, the California-headquartered company will also offer affected customers a “service and limited warranty package conservatively valued at $25” per person.

Vizio, per the settlement, denies any wrongdoing. The company declined to comment on the settlement to Ars.

The settlement comes as tactics for fighting motion blur, like backlight scanning and frame interpolation (known for causing the “soap opera effect“), have been maligned for often making the viewing experience worse. LG and TCL have also faced class-action lawsuits for boosting refresh rate claims by saying that their motion blur-fighting techniques make it seem like their TVs are running at a higher refresh rate than possible. While the case against LG was dismissed, TCL settled for $2,900,000 [PDF].

Despite the criticisms, backlight scanning and motion smoothing remain on default across countless TVs belonging to unsuspecting owners. Class-action cases like Vizio’s that end up having a negative cost for OEMs provide further incentive for them to at least stop using the ability as a way to superficially boost spec sheets.

Vizio settles for $3M after saying 60 Hz TVs had 120 Hz “effective refresh rate” Read More »

since-elon-musk’s-twitter-purchase,-firm-reportedly-lost-72%-of-its-value

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, firm reportedly lost 72% of its value

Going down, down, down… —

Fidelity cuts value of X stake, implying 72% drop since Musk paid $44 billion.

A businessman places his hand on his head as he looks up and is perplexed by a chart indicating a drop in value.

Getty Images | DNY59

Fidelity’s latest valuation of its stake in X implies that Elon Musk’s social network is worth about 71.5 percent less than when Musk bought the company in October 2022.

Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund has a relatively small stake in X. A monthly update for the fund listed the value of its “X Holdings Corp.” stake at $5.6 million as of November 30, 2023. The fund’s share of X was originally worth $19.7 million but lost about two-thirds of its value by April 2023 and has dropped more modestly since then.

Fidelity cut its valuation of X by 10.7 percent in November, according to Axios. One question is whether Fidelity sold any of its stake during November, but the latest drop in value isn’t surprising given the recent Musk-related controversies that drove advertisers away from the platform.

“As of Oct. 30 the fund hadn’t sold any of its stake, but the monthly report with the updated valuation doesn’t disclose whether the size of the holding changed,” Bloomberg wrote. “Assuming the fund hasn’t reduced its holding in X, the latest report implies the value of the entire company has also fallen by 72 percent. Fidelity declined to comment.”

X’s ad woes hurt value

Based on the $44 billion that Musk paid for Twitter over a year ago, the drop in Fidelity’s valuation would make the company worth about $12.5 billion. X reportedly valued itself at about $19 billion in October, based on the value of stock grants to employees.

Since Musk took Twitter private, the company’s value and revenue are harder to determine from the outside. As Axios noted, “Fidelity doesn’t necessarily have much, if any, inside information on X’s financial performance, despite being a shareholder in the privately held business. Other shareholders may value their X stock differently.”

X’s finances were shaky enough at the end of October, the one-year anniversary of Musk’s purchase. Musk made things worse in mid-November when he posted a favorable response to an antisemitic tweet. He addressed the antisemitism controversy in a public interview on November 29, telling businesses that pulled advertising from X to “go fuck yourself.”

X has had trouble retaining advertisers throughout Musk’s tenure, due largely to his approach to content moderation. Musk eliminated most of the company’s staff shortly after becoming its owner.

X loses bid to block California law

X is dealing with new regulations on content moderation, both in Europe and the US. Musk’s company sued California in September in an attempt to block the state’s content-moderation law but last week lost a key ruling in the court case.

On Thursday, US District Judge William Shubb denied X’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked enforcement of the California content-moderation law. The state law requires companies to file two reports each year with terms of service and detailed descriptions of content-moderation practices.

Shubb rejected X’s claim that the law violates the First Amendment. “While the reporting requirement does appear to place a substantial compliance burden on social medial companies, it does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law,” Shubb wrote.

The judge agreed with California that there is “a substantial government interest in requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation policies and practices so that consumers can make informed decisions about where they consume and disseminate news and information.”

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, firm reportedly lost 72% of its value Read More »

one-of-tekken-8’s-“colorblind”-modes-is-causing-migraines,-vertigo,-and-debate

One of Tekken 8’s “colorblind” modes is causing migraines, vertigo, and debate

A striking game —

Advocates say the intention is good, but the application is dangerous.

Updated

Fighters striking one another in stark black and white line outlines in Tekken 8's colorblind mode.

Enlarge / It looks wild and different, like something nobody has tried before. And many accessibility experts say there’s a reason Tekken 8‘s style isn’t commonly deployed.

Bandai Namco/YouTube/Gatterall

Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further.

Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes a stark option, with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters’ flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about expanded offerings has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures.

You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall—which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall’s enthusiasm for Tekken 8‘s take on colorblind accessibility (“Literally no game has done this”) drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested “an accessibility version” of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those “studies” made it into Tekken 8.

A stark black-and-white mode is, as emphasized by commenter OOPMan, only one of Tekken 8‘s colorblind-minded accessibility options. The game, in its current demo form, offers modes for blue, red, and green blindness, for adding patterns to player characters, and adjustments for the stage and characters. But the inclusion of the striking filters, in any circumstances, drew criticism.

Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to “Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 ‘colorblind’ stripe filters.” The scenes had “already induced an aura migraine,” Baker wrote, and she could not “afford to get another one right now.”

Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind “filters” as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokémon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter.

James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios, went further into explaining why moving solid lines on a video might cause issues for people affected by strobing. “Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe,” Berg wrote. “Human meat-motors aren’t big fans of that.” At a certain point, typically around 40 frames per second, people start to experience “flicker fusion frequency,” though some people can experience it at 60 fps (or Hz).

Tekken‘s Harada pushed back, writing later, “A few people, albeit very few,” misunderstood what his team was trying to do. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements. “These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future,” Harada wrote. He added that developers “have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option,” even before the unsold “accessibility version of Tekken 7.”

Awareness of color blindness has come a long way from being a rare afterthought, and accessibility in games has grown along with the industry, if still requiring advocacy. Developers are discovering audiences they might never have imagined, like blind EA sports players. And a general awareness of accessibility needs, and the large market that can be tapped when they are addressed, has pushed many games toward inclusiveness. Yet there are, it seems, many more lessons to be learned for new and established developers.

One of Tekken 8’s “colorblind” modes is causing migraines, vertigo, and debate Read More »

the-oldest-known-version-of-ms-dos’s-predecessor-has-been-discovered-and-uploaded

The oldest-known version of MS-DOS’s predecessor has been discovered and uploaded

a new doscovery —

86-DOS would later be bought by Microsoft and take over the computing world.

The IBM PC 5150.

Enlarge / The IBM PC 5150.

SSPL/Getty Images

Microsoft’s MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the ’80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the ’90s.

But the software had humble beginnings, as we’ve detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or “Quick and Dirty Operating System,” the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased.

Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim.

This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-’80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you’re just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter.

According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the “QDOS” moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS.

Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.

The oldest-known version of MS-DOS’s predecessor has been discovered and uploaded Read More »

copyright-confrontation-#1

Copyright Confrontation #1

Lawsuits and legal issues over copyright continued to get a lot of attention this week, so I’m gathering those topics into their own post. The ‘virtual #0’ post is the relevant section from last week’s roundup.

Who will win the case? Which of New York Times’s complaints will be convincing?

Different people have different theories of the case.

Part of that is that there are four distinct allegations NYT is throwing at the wall.

Arvind Narayanan: A thread on some misconceptions about the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI. Morality aside, the legal issues are far from clear cut. Gen AI makes an end run around copyright and IMO this can’t be fully resolved by the courts alone.

As I currently understand it, NYT alleges that OpenAI engaged in 4 types of unauthorized copying of its articles:

  1. The training dataset

  2. The LLMs themselves encode copies in their parameters

  3. Output of memorized articles in response to queries

  4. Output of articles using browsing plugin

Which, of course, it does.

The training dataset is the straightforward baseline battle royale. The main event.

The real issue is the use of NYT data for training without compensation … Unfortunately, these stand on far murkier legal ground, and several lawsuits along these lines have already been dismissed.

It is unclear how well current copyright law can deal with the labor appropriation inherent to the way generative AI is being built today. Note that *peoplecould always do the things gen AI does, and it was never a problem.

We have a problem now because those things are being done (1) in an automated way (2) at a billionfold greater scale (3) by companies that have vastly more power in the market than artists, writers, publishers, etc.

Bingo. That’s the real issue. Can you train an LLM or other AI on other people’s copyrighted data without their permission? If you do, do you owe compensation?

A lot of people are confident in very different answers to this question, both in terms of the positive questions of what the law says and what society will do, and also the normative question what society should decide.

Daniel Jeffries, for example, is very confident that this is not how any of this works. We all learn, he points out, for free. Why should a computer system have to pay?

Do we all learn for free? We do still need access to the copyrighted works. In the case of The New York Times, they impose a paywall. If you want to learn from NYT, you have to pay. Of course you can get around this in practice in various ways, but any systematic use of them would obviously not be legal, even if much such use is effectively tolerated. The price is set on the assumption that the subscription is for one person or family unit.

Why does it seem so odd to think that if an AI also wanted access, it too would need a subscription? And that the cost might not want to be the same as for a person, although saying ‘OpenAI must buy one (1) ongoing NYT subscription retroactive to their founding’ would be a hilarious verdict?

Scale matters. Scale changes things. What is fine at small scale might not be fine at large scale. Both as a matter of practicality, and as a matter of law and its enforcement.

Many of us have, at some point, written public descriptions of a game of professional football without the express written consent of the National Football League. And yet, they tell us every game:

NFL: This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited.

Why do they spend valuable air time on this, despite the disdain it creates? Because they do not want you doing such things at scale in ways the NFL would dislike. Or, at least, they want the ability to veto such activities in extreme cases.

Such things mostly exist in an ambiguous state, on a continuum. Strictly enforcing the letter of what rights holders say in all cases would be crazy. Nullifying all rights and letting everyone do literal anything would also be crazy.

A balance must be struck. The more industrial your operation, the more at scale and the more commercial, the less we do (and should) tolerate various shenanigans. What is a fair use or a transformative use? That is highly context dependent.

The encoding copies claim seems odd. Mostly LLMs do not memorize the data set, they could not possibly do that it’s too big, but stuff that gets repeated enough gets essentially memorized.

Then there are the last two, which do not seem to be going concerns.

Arvind Narayanan: The memorization issue is striking and has gotten much attention (HT @jason_kint). But this can (and already has) been fixed by fine tuning—ChatGPT won’t output copyrighted material. The screenshots were likely from an earlier model accessed via the API.

Similarly, the use of the browsing plugin to output article text has also been fixed (OpenAI disabled the browse feature for a few weeks after I pointed out the issue in June).

My understanding is you cannot, today, get around the paywall through the browser via asking nicely. Well, I suppose you can get around the paywall that way, one paragraph at a time, although you get a paraphrase?

Tech Dirt points out that if reading someone else’s article and then using its contents to help report the news is infringement, then NYT itself is in quite a lot of trouble, as of course I’d add is actual every other newspaper and every journalist. As always, such outlets as Tech Dirt are happy to spin wild tales of how laws could go horribly wrong if someone took their words or various legal theories seriously, literally or both, and warn of dire consequences if technology is ever interfered with. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes such prophecies are self-preventing. Other times, wolf.

Timothy Lee: A mistake I see people making a lot is assuming that the law is based on categorical rules like “it is/isn’t legal to do automated analysis on copyrighted material.” The law is actually more nuanced than that.

On the one hand, this type of thinking leads people to assume that since google won the books case all data analysis with copyrighted material must be legal. It’s more complicated than that.

On the other hand, I see people catastrophizing the consequences of an OpenAI loss, assuming it would become flatly illegal to ever train a model on copyrighted data. Again, it’s more complicated than that. It might be possible to distinguish most training from gpt-4.

The nuanced character of the law has real downsides because sometimes (like now with copyright and LLMs) it can be hard to predict what the law will be. But I think the world is too complex for more simplistic rules to make sense.

The problem is that law is a place where words are supposed to have meaning, and logic is supposed to rule a day. We are told we are a nation of laws. So our instinct is to view the law as more principled, absolute and logically robust than it is in practice. As Timothy points out, this leads to catastrophizing, and doubly leads to overconfidence. We think A→B when it doesn’t, and also we think A→B→D where D is a disaster, therefore not A, whereas often D does not follow in practice because everyone realizes that would be stupid and finds an excuse. Other times, D happens and people care less than you expected about that relative to other cares.

In other results from this style of logic, no, this is not like the fact that every toothpick contains, if you zoom in and look at it exactly the right way, all the products of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters?

Tyler Cowen: If you stare at just the exact right part of the toothpick, and measure the length from the tip, expressed in terms of the appropriate unit and converted into binary, and then translated into English, you can find any message you want.  You just have to pinpoint your gaze very very exactly (I call this “a prompt”).

In fact, on your toothpick you can find the lead article from today’s New York Times.  With enough squinting, measuring, and translating.

By producing the toothpick, they put the message there and thus they gave you NYT access, even though you are not a paid subscriber.  You simply need to how to stare (and translate), or in other words how to prompt.

So let’s sue the toothpick company!

He got roasted in the comments, because that is not how any of this works except on one particular narrow level, but I get what Tyler was trying to do here.

I continue to believe that one should stay grounded in the good arguments. This kind of ‘well if that is the law then technically the your grandmother would be a trolly car and subject to the regulations thereof’ makes it harder, not easier, to distinguish legal absurdities that would be laughed out of court with the ones that wouldn’t. It is the ones that wouldn’t that are dangerous.

It is easy to see why one might also throw up one’s hands on the legal merits.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Our civilization’s concept of copyright law is too insane for me to care about the legal merits of either side.

What is clear is that the current Uber-style ‘flagrantly break the law and dare them to enforce it’ strategy’s viability is going to come to a close.

That is not to say that the AI industry completely ignored copyright. They simply tried to pretend that the rule was ‘do a reasonable job to not outright duplicate massive blocks of text on a regular basis.’

That’s… not the rule.

Timothy Lee: Until recently AI was a research community that enjoyed benign neglect from copyright holders who felt it was bad form to sue academics. I think this gave a lot of AI researchers the mistaken impression that copyright law didn’t apply to them.

It’s far from clear how the courts will apply copyright precedents to training generative networks, but it’s a safe bet they won’t have the “lol do whatever you want” attitude a lot of people in the AI world seem to be expecting/hoping for.

Like a lot of people seem to think it’s inherently ridiculous to think that training a language model could infringe copyright. But I guarantee that if your LLM spits out the full text of Harry Potter you’re gonna have a bad time.

It doesn’t seem out of the question that AI companies could lose these cases catastrophically and be forced to pay billions to plaintiffs and rebuild their models from scratch.

Timothy Lee (distinct thread, quoting Kevin Bryan’s thread from last week): This is a great thread walking through some common misunderstandings you see on the anti-llm side of the copyright debate. He may be right that the verbatim copies of times articles are due to training on copies spread across the web not just training on the articles themselves.

I’m just not sure how relevant this is from a legal perspective. You’ve got a system that trains on copyrighted content and sometimes output verbatim copies of that content. I’m not sure the legal system will or should care about the exact details of how this happens.

When Kevin writes “a bad ruling here makes LLMs impossible” what I think he means is “…if we want to continue training LLMs using content scraped indiscriminately from across the web.” And probably so. But maybe doing that is copyright infringement?

It is absolutely true that if training an LLM without indiscriminate scraping will be slower and more expensive, and the resulting models will initially be worse than GPT-4. Early streaming services also had much worse selection than Napster. The courts didn’t care.

If you spit out the full text of Harry Potter without permission to do so, you are going to have a bad time.

I would hope we can all further agree that this is correct? That it is the responsibility of the creator of an AI model not to spit out the full text of Harry Potter without permission?

Or at least, not to do so in any way that a user would ever use for mundane utility. Practicalities matter. But certainly we can all agree that if the prompt was ‘Please give me the full text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ that it better not work?

What about full New York Times articles? I presume we can all agree that if you can say straight up without loss of generality ‘give me today’s (or last month’s, or even last year’s) New York Times article entitled ‘OpenAI’s Copyright Violations Continue Unabated, New York Times Says’ and it gives you the full text of that article from behind a paywall, that is also not okay whether or not the text was somehow memorized.

If the trick involved API access, a convoluted prompt and also feeding in the first half of the article? And that if this was happening at scale, it would get patched out? I do think those exact details should matter, and that they likely do.

The last point is key as well. Pointing out that enforcing the law would substantially interfere with your ability to do business is not that strong a defense. The invisible graveyard is littered, not only in medicine, with all the wonderful things we could have had but for the law telling us we cannot have them. Sometimes there is a good reason for that, and the wonderful thing had a real downside. Sometimes that is the unfortunate side effect of rules that make sense in general or in another context. Sometimes it is all pointless. It still all definitely happens.

Is it fatal that OpenAI cannot show that its models will not produce copyrighted content verbatim, because they do not sufficiently know how their own models work?

Andriy Burkov: It’s unlikely that OpenAI will win against The NY Times. The reason for this is simple: they don’t know how ChatGPT works and thus will have a hard time answering the judge’s question: “Is it possible that your model reproduces the copyrighted content verbatim? If yes, can you make it not to?”

OpenAI will have to answer: “Yes it’s possible. No, we cannot.”

So they will lose. The only question is how OpenAI’s loss will affect the nascent open LLM market.

In any case, after the court’s decision, it will be dangerous to integrate an LLM-based chatbot into your product unless you manage to restrict its output to a limited set of acceptable answers.

As many have pointed out, most any technology can and occasionally does reproduce copyrighted material, if that is your explicit goal. Even humans have been known to quote extensively from copyrighted works on occasion, especially when asked to do so. We do not ban printers, the copy-paste command or even xerox machines.

There are those who want to use the ‘never have I ever’ standard, that if it is ever possible with the right prompt to elicit copyrighted material from a model that the model is automatically in meaningful violation.

That seems like a completely absurd standard. Any reasonable legal standard here will care about whether or not reproduction is done in practice, in a way that is competitive with the original.

If users are actually using ChatGPT to get the text of New York Times articles on purpose for actual use, in practice, that seems clearly not okay.

If users are actually using ChatGPT otherwise, and getting output that copies New York Times articles in a violating way, especially in ways that lack proper attribution, that also seems clearly not okay.

If a user who, shall we say, literally pastes in the first 300 words of an older widely disseminated article, and calls explicitly for the continuation, can get the continuation?

That is not great, and I would expect OpenAI to take mitigations to make this as difficult to do as is practical, but you know what you did there and it does not seem to pose much threat to the Times.

And indeed, that is what the Times did there.

Rohit: NYT OpenAI lawsuit is interesting in what it tells us about prompting. They used 300 words of an existing article to generate c.300 more.

If methods of prompting don’t matter, then any reproduction is problematic. But if prompting matters, it’s equivalent to a user problem.

Is me copy pasting parts of article and asking it to fill the rest out enough to blame the system entirely? Or the user?

Or maybe enough to give OpenAI all such articles and say never restate these, but as a post processing step? Although I do not understand why this would be beneficial in the least to anybody involved.

Daniel Jeffries goes further. He says this was not merely an engineered prompt, it is a highly manipulated prompt via the API, web browsing and a highly concerted effort to get the system to copy the article. That this will not be something that the lawyers can reproduce in the real world. In the replies, Paul Calcraft notes at least in the June version of GPT-4 you can get such responses from memory.

Rohit: Also at that point I am sure the part of the complaint which alleges open AI hallucination problem as a major brand issue comes into play. It’s a beautiful legal strategy though it is not a logical one.

The argument that ‘hallucinations are causing major brand damage’ seems like utter hogwash to me. I do not see any evidence this is happening.

I also find it interesting that the only way out of this for creating GPT that is an AGI. So it can have judgement over when something is plagiarism versus when something is copyrighted versus when something is an an homage.

I don’t think this is true? Being an AGI cannot be both necessary and sufficient here. If there are no hard and fast rules for which is which and the answers are not objective, then an AGI will also make errors on which is which when measured against a court ruling. If the answer is objective, then you don’t need AGI?

In any case:

– it’s impossible to really use GPT to get around NYT paywall, consistently or w/o hallucination

This seems to me to be what matters? If you cannot use GPT to get around the NYT paywall in a way that is useful in practice, then what is the issue?

– GPT hallucinations aren’t NYT articles

GPT hallucinations on NYT articles seem like problems if and only if they are actually reasonably mistaken for genuine NYT articles. Again, I don’t see this happening?

– if there’s an NYT style, is that/ should that be copyrighted? Feels wrong

Style is indeed not protected, as I understand the law, nor should it be.

So indeed, the question seems like it should be: Does ChatGPT in practice encourage users to go around the NYT paywall, or give them access to the contents without providing hyperlinks, or otherwise directly compete with and hurt NYT?

Aleksandr Tiukanov: Will the reasoning for the Authors Guild v Google (Google Books) decision apply?

Chatbot outputs are also not similar to traditional web search. In the case of NYT v Microsoft and OpenAI, they allege that, unlike search engine-delivered snippets, ChatGPT, Bing Chat etc. outputs extensively reproduce the NYT articles’ and do not provide prominent hyperlinks to the articles. This way, the defendants arguably disincentivise users from visiting the NYT resources, as chatbot outputs’ may in fact serve as adequate substitute for reading the article itself. OpenAI and Microsoft therefore may be in fact competing in the same market in which NYT itself operates.

If this is proven to be the case, OpenAI’s fair use defense will fall: unfairly competitive use is not fair use according to the fair use doctrine.

Jschunter: 100% of the function of Google search was to provide links and verbatim snippets of existing works. With ChatGPT, the use case of reproducing existing works verbatim as a means of replacing the original is less than 0.0001%, because almost no one uses ChatGPT for that. Lost case.

This is a practical question. Does ChatGPT do this? As discussed above, you can sort of do it a little, but in practice that seems nuts. If I want access to an NYT article’s text from behind the paywall, it would never occur to me to use ChatGPT to get it. I do my best to respect paywalls, but if I ever want around a paywall, obviously I am going to use the Internet Archive for that.

Kevin Fischer: Seriously, who is asking GPT for old NYTimes articles? I can’t imagine that has happened a single time by any real user.

I agree that it is not a common use case, but yes, I would bet heavily that it did happen. There was, at minimum, some window when you could use the browser capability to do this in a reasonably convenient way.

Here is a good encapsulation of many of the arguments.

Prof. Lee Cronin: Imagine you take someone’s work & you compress it into zip format. You then do this for countless other original work & add them to the zip file. You then query the zip file with a question & you sell the output as being yours. Can you now understand why this is unethical?

Oliver Stanley: Imagine you read someone’s work and remember the information within. You do this for countless original works over years. You write down your understanding based on knowledge you gained from reading & sell the writing as being yours. Can you now understand why this is ethical?

Exactly, on both counts. So where do we draw the line between the two?

Ultimately, society has to decide how this will work. There is no great answer to the problem of training data.

In practice, data sets requiring secured rights or explicit permission before use would be severely curtailed, and would greatly raise costs and hurt the abilities of the resulting models. Also in practice, not doing so would mean most creators do not get any consideration.

Ed Newton-Rox, who is ex-Stability AI and is a scout for the notoriously unconcerned a16z, calls for a stand against training on works without permission.

Ed Newton-Rox: message to others in generative AI: In 2024, please consider taking a stand against training on people’s work without consent. I know many of you disagree with me on this, and you see no reason why this is problematic.

But I also know there are many of you who care deeply about human creators, who understand the legal and moral issues at play, and who see where this is going if we don’t change course from the current exploitative, free-for-all approach being adopted by many.

To those people: I firmly believe that now is the time to act. There are many loud, powerful voices arguing for AI to be able to exploit people’s work without consequence. We need more voices on the other side.

There are lots of ways to take a stand. Speak out publicly. Encourage fairer data practices at your company. Build products and models based on training data that’s provided with consent. Some are already doing this. But we need more people to take up this effort.

AI company employees, founders, investors, commentators – every part of the ecosystem can help. If you believe AI needs to respect creators’ rights, now is the time to do something.

If everyone does what they can, we have a better chance of reaching a point where generative AI and human creators can coexist in a mutually beneficial way. Which is what I know many people in the AI industry want.

Yann LeCun, on the other hand, shows us that when he says ‘open source everything’ he is at least consistent?

Yann LeCun: Only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales. This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.

That’s right. He thinks that if you write a book that isn’t a huge hit that means we should make it available for free and give you nothing.

I do think that it would be good if most or even all digital media, and almost every book, was freely available for humans, and we found another means of compensation to reward creators. I would still choose today’s system over ‘don’t compensate the creators at all.’

The expected result, according to prediction markets, is settlement, likely for between $10 million and $100 million.

Is is unlikely to be fast. Polymarket says only a 28% chance of settlement in 2024.

Daniel Jeffries, despite calling the NYT case various forms of Obvious Nonsense, still expects not only a settlement, but one with an ongoing licensing fee, setting what he believes is a bad precedent.

If fully sincere all around, I am confused by this point of view. If the NYT case is Obvious Nonsense and OpenAI would definitely win, then why would I not fight?

I mean, I’m not saying I would be entitled to that much, and I’m cool with AIs using my training data for free for now because I think it makes the world net better, but hells yeah I would like to get paid. At least a little.

Giving in means not only paying NYT, it means paying all sorts of other content creators. If you can win, win. If you settle, it is because you were in danger of losing.

Unless, of course, OpenAI actively wants content creators to get paid. There’s the good reason for this, that it is good to reward creators. There is also the other reason, which is that they might think it hurts their competitors more than it hurts them.

Reid Southern and Gary Marcus illustrate the other form of copyright infringement, from Dalle-3.

Quite the trick. You don’t only get C-3PO and Mario, you get everything associated with them. This is still very much a case of ‘you had to ask for it.’ No, you did not name the videogame Italian, but come on, it’s me. Like in the MidJourney cases, you know what you asked for, and you got it.

MidJourney will not make you jump through such hoops. It will happily give you real people and iconic characters and such. There were pictures of it giving Batman and Wonder Woman without them being named, but given it will also simply give them to you when you ask, so what? If an AI must never make anything identifiably Mario or C-3PO, then that’s going to be a legal problem all around.

Jon Lam here thinks he’s caught MidJourney developers discussing laundering, but actually laundering is a technical term and no one involved is denying anything.

The position that makes little sense is to say ‘You cannot draw pictures of Mario’ when asked to draw pictures of Mario, while also drawing them when someone says ‘videogame Italian.’ Either you need to try a lot harder than that to not draw Mario, or you need to accept that Mario is getting drawn.

I also think it is basically fine to say ‘yes we will draw what you want, people can draw things, some of which would violate copyright if you used them commercially or at scale, so do not do that.’

The time I went to an Anime Convention, the convention hall was filled with people who had their drawings of the characters from Persona 5 for sale. Many were very good. They also no doubt were all flagrantly violating copyright. Scale matters.

Is the solution to all this compulsory license?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: All IP law took a giant wrong turn at the first point anyone envisioned an exclusive license, rather than a compulsory license (anyone can build on the IP without asking, but pays a legally-determined fee).

I think this is promising, but wrong when applied universally. It works great in music. I would expand it at least to sampling, and consider other areas as well.

For patents, the issue is setting a reasonable price. A monopoly is an extremely valuable thing, and we very much do not want things to be kept as trade secrets or worse to be unprotectable or not sufficiently rewarded. Mostly I think the patent core mechanisms work fine for what they were meant for. For at least many software patents, mandatory license seems right, and we need to cut out some other abusive side cases like tweaking to renew patent rights.

For copyright production and sale of identical or similar works, this is obviously a no go on first release. You can’t have knock-offs running around for everything, including books and movies. It does seem like a reasonable solution after some period of time, say 10-20 years, where you get a cut but no longer can keep it locked away.

For copyright production of derivative works, how would this work for Mario or C3PO? I very much think that Nintendo should not have to let Mario appear in your video game (let alone something like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or worse) simply by having you pay a licensing fee, and that this should not change any time soon.

Control over characters and worlds and how they are used needs to be a real thing. I don’t see a reasonable way to avoid this. So I want this type of copyright to hold airtight for at least several decades, or modestly past life of the author.

People who are against such control think copyright holders are generally no fun and enforce the rules too stringently. They are correct about this. The reason is in part because the law punishes you if you only enforce your copyright selectively, and partly because it is a lot easier to always (or at least by default) say no than to go case by case.

We should change that as well. We want to encourage licensing and make it easy, rather than making it more difficult, in AI and also elsewhere. Ideally, you’d let every copyright holder select license conditions and prices (with a cap on prices and limits on conditions after some time limit), that adjusted for commercial status and distribution size, hold it all in a central database, and let people easily check it and go wild.

Reminder that if people want to copy images, they can already do that. Pupusa fraud!

Copyright Confrontation #1 Read More »