very_poggers_gay [they/them]

Yes, but that does not mean AI has 0 influence. Rather, AI is a circle, a shape with no beginning or end, suggesting that AI has endless and infinite potential. Now, let’s say you want to remove AI from the equation - imagining a world without AI. What happens when you divide by zero? You can’t, because dividing by zero is undefined. Thusly, a world (future or past) without AI is now an impossibility. This is simply the laws of mathematics.

• Property Manager, AI Consultant

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Oh absolutely. It’s a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it “WEIRD” populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that “weird” terminology is a bit stinky… I’m looking at the “E” and “D”). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.

There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don’t align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely

Yup, I’ve got a paper that’s just about ready for submission, and if the journal accepts it for publication, we pay ~3k USD, so about $4k CAD.

Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants.

Not really and certainly not directly. Almost all research grants (at least in Canada and the EU) are for the costs of running research, not for the PI’s salary, which their institution pays. I know those two can’t be separated, but the point is still true that most of the grant money that individual researchers apply for can only be spent on conducting research. It is not for them to live, it is for them to do their job.

If this was even a problem, which it isn’t,

What do you mean by this part?

The neoliberal logic consuming academia is bad for academia as a whole, and anyone who can stand to benefit from higher education and/or quality research (i.e., practically everyone everywhere). Almost anyone working on research in academia is severely underpaid and they’re expected to work countless hours for free. Academia is a house of cards help together by the grindset of graduate students and early- or mid-career researchers.

The ways that grunts and funding are allocated are deeply flawed, and fields that aren’t tied to profitable industries (e.g., “life sciences” like biology and chemistry) are severely underfunded. See:

NIMH funding. NSF funding

The only winners in the current system are the profit-driven capitalists who fund research for good PR and ‘passive’ income, and the few others in academia who game funding systems to cash out on shitty dead-end or naively idealist research

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Hey what are you some kind of Russian bo-

…

Checks Constitution

(Yes this is cringe but I want it that way)

Thank you for your comments they are packed with good info btw

Yes

Uhhh the “National Socialist” Party was fascist, right? Entities posing as socialist CAN lie and actually be fascist, correct? Or is this western propaganda too?

Wait 'til you learn that urinal cakes aren’t yummy baked treats

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So many words to tell us you’ve read zero theory…

Also, how on earth is “Fuck cars” a successful “socialist experiment”? The biggest action anyone associated with that movement is flatten a few tires from SUV’s

Right, now Tankie is all but useless because liberals and so-called leftists that criticize communism use it the same way conservatives use “woke”

Richard Wolff, a prominent marxist academic, talks often about a socialist system where democracy is employed in the workplace. He focuses less on reforms or abolition at the state/government-level, and instead emphasizes the bottom-up changes that giving workers power and agency (i.e., making it so workers at all levels are involved in the decision-making process of the companies that require their labour) provides. He has a youtube channel and podcast called “Democracy at Work” that provides great introductions to how he views things, and he has worthwhile podcast appearances on other podcasts like Lex Fridman’s, for example.

Consider how impactful countries like Wal-Mart or Amazon are in our daily lives. Their economic throughputs are larger than all but a few countries in the world, and their workforce populations are also larger than many countries. Clearly they aren’t organized as representative democracies?

Another question I wonder related to this, is what exactly makes “representative democracy” the gold standard? Is it even the gold standard?

What about the absolute lack of “representative democracy” we experience under capitalism?

I’d argue that the capitalist system is more at odds with representative democracy than other systems mentioned. Most workers have no say in what is produced, who produces it, how they are paid, how much products are sold for, etc. Instead, we end up with figurehead CEO’s and nameless investors making all of those decisions, and of course they do everything to minimize costs, maximize profits, and disempower workers so that they can collect billions of dollars at the expense of the workers who actually make their companies run. If we had representative democracy do you think we’d have billionaires?

Middle class between what

Lmao, this is such a good one

the climate change actions taken by Biden

Because who else would greenlight controversial pipeline projects that will accelerate the rot of remote ecosystems and the pollution of our atmosphere and waters? Oh right, any other elected official on either side of the Dem / Republican line…