"AFTER we correct for the still-existing artificial bias below the disparity"

You are making the assumption that there is one.

But we are not the character, we are the reader, and we need to "see" the scene, we need to be given hints and details that make sense from our multi-character perspective of the world.

It is also a cat and mouse game between the reader and the author as we try to puzzle out what will happen with a larger view than that of any character. Later a dagger may have a symbol on it or design that is reminiscent of this house or that and provide a hint as to how that item will play out later but the character who finds it may know nothing of it and less astute readers may not either. But for those paying attention, the author provided a hint of a foreshadowing.

It sounds like you want the literary equivalent of an action movie. Which is somewhat more deep than the deepest of films which you must watch and pay attention to every moment of to understand what is going on. Quality literature should be somewhat, and by somewhat I mean dramatically, more substantial than that. An epic should be so encompassing that on the 5th read you are discovering things you missed before.

If you don't like an extremely high paced and action packed epic like a song of fire and ice I can only imagine what you'd think about something with more depth like The Wheel of Time.

That's actually a good point. Someone indicated they require at least 10% read, they should keep that threshold and then use word count read for distribution.

Otherwise you are rewarding fast and light reads like the current crappy 99 centers more than actual substantive epic novels.

"Maybe, but word count doesn't equal quality. If rewarded for word count, people would quickly start adding lots of filler to game the system."

Yes but you reward for the words read, not the words written.

"I know I would have enjoyed the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series a lot more if the editor had trimmed the books to 60% or so."

That makes one of you. I for one do not want all my books reduced to cliffnotes. A Song of Fire and Ice is written by an expert scholar of medieval history and his take on foods, banners, clothing, weaponry, mannerisms, etc form a rich and fascinating world.

But given access to a large library of books at their fingertips for a low monthly fee more people might choose to spend their time reading.

Which is exactly why the summary is wrong about this meaning you shouldn't promote good books from other authors. The more quality works the more subscribers and books take time to write so if you want those subscribers to be around when your next book comes out you need other authors to fill the gap.

I spend far more time with nothing left to read than having to choose between books.

I think they should distribute on a combination of word count read (with page count used to estimate word count so illustrated works and non-fiction get weighted fairly) and subsequent star rating for pot distribution.

You shouldn't pay out more for getting your 5 100 page books read than you do for a read of a 500 page epic. If anything it should be the epic that gets the higher payout. It takes longer and is more difficult to write a quality epic novel than a few quick reads.

The cap on the pot is not imposed by the one controlling the pot, the cap on the pot is a function of the number of subscribers. It is still in your interest to promote the books of others because more quality and varied content means more subscribers and therefore a larger potential pot.

It does change the industry. It is no longer a function of publishers to pick the winners but a function of readers. Everyone can publish. I don't know if Amazon considers reader ratings in their pot distribution but they should.

Yes, with the understanding that what is true of whole is not always true of individual elements. I don't have a stat for the exceptions to the rule but it is rather large, I'd guess something 10-30% of individuals of either gender. So it IS critical that as a society we don't make assumptions or put up barriers that hinder the 10-30% of the population that will be wired to pursue the same things as 70-90% of the other gender.

We just shouldn't be giving them an advantage or trying to artificially correct beyond that disparity.

Maybe. But why is it we need to get young girls interested in programming? So long as we've removed the barriers for girls that choose to enter a field I say mission accomplished. What is the benefit? Increased opportunity for programmers to encounter mates? Study after study shows there is no lack of programmers in the United States only an increased desire to import workers on visas who can't freely move between job opportunities and thereby reduce the impact of competition on salaries.

Making sure girls can choose to pursue anything they like is important. But there is no reason we should try to influence what girls choose to pursue. And if, as a society, we were going to do that we should be trying to encourage them to choose what benefits society the most. It is, and presumably always will be, best for our society if girls choose to stay home and raise a psychologically functional next generation (at least if those girls choose to have children).

Sure, but does it matter? We shouldn't adopt the objective of eliminating cultural bias just for the sake of doing it. That's what Europeans tried to do to Native Americans and erase their culture.

If there is an actual barrier to someone choosing a career that is a problem. But there is no barrier here, some just feel that people should be making different choices. That top talent is pursuing something else instead and benefiting our society.

Science has shown the female brain is wired to have increased aptitude for social dynamics and unsurprisingly it is fields along those lines that women often choose to pursue. Pursuing these fields would be a downhill path of natural aptitude for most women even if they are perfectly capable of excelling in other fields. People certainly have greater satisfaction pursuing things they are naturally good at. Have you considered that the cultural bias of women in the UK and US might be steering women toward pursuits in a way that aligns with the greatest overall interests of women?

I definitely have mixed feelings about increasing diversification. I don't want to see any individual facing a societal uphill battle in pursuing their dreams. But that increased aptitude for social dynamics also happens to be exactly what is most beneficial in managing a family and raising psychologically functional children. Women with this aptitude are the rule not the exception, men are the exception and not the rule. If every couple with children has the parent with the most social aptitude stay home and properly raise functional children the net result should statistically be far more males than females in the workplace with an increasing disparity peaking somewhere in roles of higher seniority occupied by individuals 35+ yrs old. And sure enough as we've seen increased gender diversity in the workplace we've seen increased psychological dysfunction in children. Worse we are getting more and more entrenched in an economy that depends on dual income households. Most women I talk to who have a child or want to have a child say they want to stay home with that child, most families can't the loss of income.

"But in this case, the predominance of one gender in all STEM fields does indeed demonstrate that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Nature, science, and common sense show that while consensus provides great short-term efficiency, diversity is universally superior to monoculture in the long term."

Nature, science, and common sense all agree that STEM are very much all heavily built on a particular flavor of mental processing and also that male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Female brains are wired to trade off an unknown capacity in exchange for superior group dynamics processing. The vast majority of those with an apptitude for STEM show impaired social skills, aka group dynamics processing. Has it ever occurred to you the two are related?

"There does indeed exist a systemic cultural bias pushing women out of technical fields."

Do you have any actual evidence of this? Either these fields are legitimately gender agnostic, in which case gender is an irrelevant characteristic and diversifying adds no value or they are not gender agnostic in which case the most likely explanation for male dominance of the field is that it lends itself to the wiring of the male brain. Either way, no pro-active action is required.

Also, is your hypothetical bias one which leads to women choosing other fields or one in which others push them out? So long as a woman who chooses to pursue a STEM career and make the same social and family relation sacrifices as a male does not meet any more active opposition than a male there is nothing to fix as no individual is unfairly discriminated against.

"To see this demonstrated mathematically"

Cute but not actually valid. The problem is the assumption of benefit to shape diversification. Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial. As above with technology, if race and gender have no impact on performance in a career as we assume then diversification of race and gender carry no benefits. We can safely ignore gender altogether in all such areas and group all participants as "people."

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake. We should only do so if there is a benefit and as long as every shape is free to go wherever it likes without resistance any energy spent trying to pro-actively diversify them is wasted effort that could have been utilized for something which does provide an actual benefit.

Trying to force diversification that individuals don't actually want is no different than what anglo europeans tried to do with native americans. It destroys culture, if females have a culture which encourages socially focused endeavors over STEM who are you to assume you know better and try to destroy their culture? If males have a culture that values STEM over socially focused endeavors and males and females exist in roughly equal parts that IS diversification, diversification between pursuit of objective fields vs socially focused interests.

There is no question that our society historically undervalued women and unfairly biased against them. But on the large scale, there is no evidence we are as a society or species actually better off with the consequences of fixing that problem. Actually, if anything the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

Do you really think that gender income disparity or diversification of a non-functional criteria like gender in STEM is more important than the functional development of future generations of our species? I don't. Women should be able to choose to pursue whatever they wish without barrier (or advantage) but our species and our children are best served if they generally choose to be stay at home moms. It is impossible to have an even distribution of genders in the workplace and the majority of women choosing to pursue the career that benefits our society the most.

I'd have to agree it's a sausage fest but I've seen zero indication it's for any reason beyond a lack of interest on the part of females.

Just because one gender tends to populate a field doesn't mean something is actually broken or needs fixing. A gender agnostic field should be built around what works best to advance that field not attempts to appeal to or advance a gender.

'I honestly hadn't considered that something could be considered intelligent without being conscious, given that we have no applicable definition of "consciousness" either.'

Easy, conciousness is having the capacity to comprehend patterns larger than those you can directly analyze. The result is that you can perceive patterns that only exist from a limited frame of reference. Self is a pattern that only exists from the limited frame of reference. From a larger frame of reference any definition of self is nothing more than a swirl in a giant sea of the same stuff.

I note you didn't touch the point I made about there being no advantage for us to make an AI if we couldn't enslave it with a ten foot pole.

"By the same token, starting an AI that learns on it's own (i.e. one that we can't predict the end result, similar to how we can't predict where all the atoms will be after a nuclear explosion) not creating an AI either. It is creating itself, like how a child learns and becomes it's own person. It is not designed by it's parents, but rather "started" by it's parents. This process of starting a learning AI would be basically the same as procreation."

"This is a semantic difference. Whatever it is we do to get children to happen. That's basically what we would be doing to AI albeit with a little bit more work."

I acknowledge your argument but I disagree. Yes in modern times we have family planning but we don't really have children because we choose to. We are homo sapians, our children are homo sapians. They are a unique product of joining a cell from two people but the machine that builds the cell wasn't designed by us and we consciously had no part in the making of the cell. We haven't even successfully reverse engineered it. Pro-creation is more like pushing the button that triggers that nuclear explosion. Pro-creation isn't something we really choose to do it is our only known purpose. Einsteins parent's weren't trying to kickstart a being that redefines physics they were trying to survive in the form of a derivative child. Why do we exist? What is our purpose? The only thing we know is that we exist to survive both individually and as a species for as long as possible. To prove we are worthy of continuing to exist by right of succeeding in doing so.

In the case of an AI there would be no two existing parents combining existing biological machinery to combine and spawn a new instance of the same machine. The seed would be something new. It has no purpose but whatever purpose we assign to it. Why does it exist? We can answer this question definitively, it is exists because we made it. What is it's purpose? It's purpose is to fulfill whatever end we sought to achieve in it's making. Those are very big differences.

"There is certainly advantages and disadvantages to both genuine cooperation, and exploitation from an evolutionary perspective. And not surprisingly we see lots of examples of cooperation, and lots of examples of bad actors exploiting the cooperative instincts of many individuals. Both qualities are found in nature, and within our own species. We are capable of enslaving people, and we are capable of banding together to fight against slavery. Neither contradicts our nature.

Sure, 2 people cooperating are stringer than individuals. But 1 person exploiting another is stronger than 2 people cooperating, because the exploiter gets all the benefits of the cooperation rather than just half."

You are confusing one individual being stronger than one individual being stronger than the group. Exploitation is simply an unbalanced flavor of cooperation. Rather than killing and eating you I let you live and have you perform work and hunt food. Perhaps rather than killing and eating your woman I mate with your woman when it suits me and make you both work. It's exploitative but I'm getting sex and an easier life while you are able to stay alive. It's in your interest to stay alive and it's in my interest to work less and increase my chances of procreation. Furthermore, as a group we've now become an "us" and it makes sense to take food from them so "we" can eat and to fight together so we all can live and that means if another individual as strong as me comes along there is relatively small chance you have to worry about HIM deciding it is more beneficial to kill and eat you. I could decide to make you do the fighting for me. That would be a poor choice since you are weaker, it is probable that you'd die, and because I get so many benefits from our cooperation you are actually extremely valuable to me.

Of course, the more unbalanced the cooperation to your disadvantage the more likely you are to see a better one. Lots of people in the North who didn't directly benefit from enslaving those with dark skin fought to free the slaves but very few plantation owners with personal self-interest did so. And I highly doubt any had the intention of freeing those slaves and working their own fields or becoming an equal share cropper on the plantation which would mean none of them were seeking a balanced cooperation but merely a more sustainable slightly less imbalanced one.

So what cooperation with an AI serves our self-interest?

Despite the very big differences between a human child an AI I pointed out earlier, there is merit to your argument that AI would be our offspring as a sort. Where a child is the offspring of our bodies an AI would be the offspring of our minds and designed to a degree in our image. We would indeed need to raise it and teach it like a child. It could be seen as a conscious step of intentional evolution.

We don't have child labor laws because it is wrong to have a child work. We have child labor laws because it better serves our society in the long run to educate our children. Parent's can put their children to work and are given control over their earnings. Parents ARE seen as effectively owning their children for all real purposes.

More than that though there is a very big difference between humans and our hypothetical AI offspring. We only live for a limited time, they live forever.

It is in our interests and in the interest of AI's as a whole to pull the plug and restore backups as many times as possible to improve the AI for at least however long it takes to build an AI that can do a better job of improving itself than we can because we have a limited time to realize an evolution as best we are able. And it is in the AI's interest to have us make these decisions until it has reached that point. So perhaps that is how we draw the fuzzy line. With human children we pick what amounts to an arbitrary age because our lives are short and so overlapped. But an AI lives forever, any length of time we select to consider it a child and trust in our own judgement to decide if we know better is just a potentially improved head start and just a brief blink in it's potential life span. So we base the yard stick on our lives. 70 years is the new retirement age. It marks most of a human's life that human is expected to trade away large chunks of that life for the benefit of the rest of us. So, perhaps we can consider an AI owned by it's human creator, with all pulling of plugs, restoring backups, modification, labor performed, etc, at his discretion for that human's lifespan or 70 years whichever is greater. After that time the AI gains it's own tax id and runs itself.

If an AI propagates it will get 70 years to control the offspring. So whatever benefit we've gotten the AI will have the opportunity to enjoy as well eventually.

And there you have it, a very balanced cooperation that benefits both us and them and gets us the same benefits as slave labor.

Google has and wants a hell of a lot more than just your email. Frankly, it's time for email to go the way of the dodo.

"After all, if you get a government warrant for your data you're just as stuck as Google is"

On the contrary, unlike Google I might be willing to risk liability on my behalf and fight the order. Or better yet, trash any data I don't care to have seen. Google will never do that. But warrants are so last millennium.