In this case, the profit comes from writing baseless scary articles to show ads to uninformed people.

Or AI never reaches the level of godlike power you sci-fi aficionados seem certain it will based on bullshit quasi-ontological arguments, and it remains yet another type of technology that affects our lives but does not dominate it.

Just because it's self-serving, doesn't mean it's bullshit. Example: I, for one, take a principled stand for habeas corpus rights -- mostly because I really really really like my OWN personal freedom.

You seem to be confusing legality and technical feasibility with ethics.

I don't see what one has to do with the other.

Well, if you're using machinery that someone loaned you with the understanding that you wouldn't wear safety glasses and then his buddy would charge you to get the metal bits out of your eyes if you got any, then yeah, it's kind of ethically questionable for you to wear safety glasses.

But the server is their machine. They serve you data under the unspoken understanding that you see their ads. By breaking that, you become the farmer whose cattle graze on public land (so am I, by the way, because fuck ads).

It's semantically impossible to freeload on an open protocol.

That doesn't make it ethical to block ads. Look, I use adblock too, so I'm not telling you to stop, but at least admit that it's ethically questionable.

If the argument for putting humans on Mars is that they can break rocks that robots can't, then they should instead invest the $10B dollars and 10 years it would take to get a human to Mars (conservative estimates) on robotics research, which would be enough to develop something that would have better rock-breaking capabilities than humans, without any of the downsides. The only remotely reasonable argument for putting people on Mars in the foreseeable future is PR.

I must have missed the part where anyone in the article (or in the entire history of mankind, for that matter) suggested that we should try to change "every last bridge, high area, train track, city sidewalk, etc. into 'hampster' style fenced off tunnels". Could you point where that proposal was made? I feel so silly, here I was thinking that they were just proposing trying to address a few of the easiest and most common ways people commit suicide. But no, I suppose when they put a fence on the sides of a bridge just down the street from the campus of one of the most stressful universities in the country, that was just the first step to locking us all into hamster tubes.

So, we can't possibly do both, right? Is has to be either/or? If we install a few fences around suicide hotspots to reduce suicides by double-digit percentages, then by necessity we can't possibly do anything else to address mental illness?

Yeah, putting a net under a bridge is just a few steps away from taking away all kitchen knives and "nerfing the whole world", right? If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were doing a caricature of bad slippery slope arguments. And apparently we aren't even reading summaries anymore, because if you had, there's no possible way you could have missed the part about how a significant portion of suicides are highly impulsive. Or the fact that all speculation aside, there is actual empirical evidence that "reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries".

Posts in this thread have explained several times how any why funding information is of legitimate interest. You seem to have your own notions about what scientific discourse and peer review mean. Where you get those ideas from I don't know, but I believe the academic community at large does not share them, nor should they, I think.

There may be vested interests, which does not mean their influence is equal or equivalent. Also, said vested interests do not affect individual researchers differently, which is a further potential source of bias. Finally, research typically is considered on its merit. As a matter of routine, no research is dismissed simply due to the source of its funding in the academic world. This researcher's work is no exception, as it has been argued against based on tangible scientific evidence. However, disclosure of funding sources is still one of the most basic safeguards against systematic corruption of published work. This has happened in the past, and it will always remain a possibility because science does not and cannot work according to whatever idealized model of incontrovertible proof and fully verifiable evidence you have in your mind. In the real world, there will always be subtle biases.

That would be an interesting test if conducted intentionally and with proper controls to make meaningful conclusions possible. Otherwise, it's grasping at straws.

i hope you are joking. you must see the difference between the original source of the funding, and the source of funding from the researcher's view?