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The system we got for this is called parenting.

And there is a saying where I grew up: you need a village to raise a kid, I feel like we lost track of that and feel the issues of that now.

Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.

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>Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.

And Germans and Europeans looked at that and thought the best place for her is leading the EU?!

Remind me again how she got elected in that position?

Because it seems like the entire EU population knew her being infamous for that, except for the few elites who appointed her there via "democratic process" to the head of the EU.

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The president of the European Commission is “elected” through a thin pretence of democracy that the people of Europe have effectively no control over, and mostly pay no attention to. If you think she’s there because the greater public decided she’s the best person for the job then you don’t know how the EU works.

Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.

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Not a single person that is not attached to EU voted for he. She is second hand vote. These roles should all be result of direct vote. This way you only get votes by people who are sucking the money of Eu parliament or. The only position people vote for is EP. And that % is so small, that if they ask the people who didn't vote if they want it, they would have to tear it down.

I am not against EU cooperation, mainly in external security and free market economy. But the system we have is not very democratic, and def not very representative of people. They act like demigods, elected by parliament with no real consequences of their actions.

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These roles should all be result of direct vote.

I disagree. That's an executive power position for an entity that lacks sovereignty. Giving it the legitimacy of direct vote is highly problematic.

Start by giving more power to parliament.

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I think you'll find it's the EU member countries that lack sovereignty, not the EU. EU law overrides member state law, not the other way around.
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You have to reconsider what "elected" means when it comes to the EU. Certainly not acts of "Germans and Europeans".
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> The system we got for this is called parenting

And it fails miserably.

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Not really. Yes most kids will see porn before they're 18 but it doesn't damage them or give them the wrong idea about consensual behaviour.

If anything I find GenZ a lot more focused on explicit consent than GenX.

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>And it fails miserably.

No it doesn't. That's just needlessly reductionist doomerist take with no argumentation to back that up.

Define failure and success of the system in this context.

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It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids and entrusted that to educational institutions instead.
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I genuinely think it’s all three:

1. The cultural factor is rising expectations for children and their parents, costing both time and money;

2. The political/social factor is nanny states and academic institutions that the public expects to not only teach but raise their kids;

3. Technology. Especially the Internet, mobile devices, social media, and short form content. Technology distracts and isolates both kids and parents.

An example of the three factors at work is the all-too-common local news trope of ”Nosy neighbor calls CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school. Whole family traumatized as a result.”

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>It's been working for tens of thousands of years.

I mean, I'll gladly send you 10k years back and have you tell me how it goes.

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It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
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>the goal that it must never fail

That's a good way to put it

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If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it fails first very slowly then very suddenly.

In fact that's why nothing ever gets done to improve things in the EU/west, because we expect perfect outcome in every new change and we want potential risks to be zero before something new is implemented, so it's easier for leaders to just never do anything, never change anything, just sit and maintain the status quo while we go through managed decline complaining things keep slowly getting worse.

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Do you realize you'll end up in fascist dystopia where your children belong to the state, with this line of thinking?

Or is that where you want other people to end up while you peddle propagandist fairytales about failed parenting?

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The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.
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The mentioned accuracy in the comment you are replying to already encapsulates the relation of true positives to false positives.
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It really doesn’t, and it is easy to demonstrate by using an extreme example.

Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%

Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?

Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.

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No I don't believe it does. I interpret 99.9% accurate to mean 1 in 1000 false positives. If 0.1% of your population are terrorists that means each alert has a 50% chance of being correct. That's nowhere near good enough to fully automate things but it is quite reasonable assuming this is merely information provided to a human agent.

Whereas if only 0.001% of your population are terrorists then 99 out of 100 alerts are false positives at which point the system is well on its way to being useless.

There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.

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You're right it doesn't. At least not completely. I was thinking about precision (i.e.: if the test is positive, what are the odds that its prediction is true). It turns out, that accuracy is not defined as "true positive / (true pos. + true neg.)", but "correct predictions / all predictions". The whole point of OP's statement: "It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.", which you actually support with your example.

> There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.

The context is chat control without probable cause over the whole population of Europe with a low prevalence. My point, and presumably that of OP, is that even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.

> This is merely information provided to a human agent.

It will be in theory. In practice the human agent will just forward the decision. A human agent is not sufficient; you need to test only with probable cause for the kind of scenario we're talking about. The exact opposite of "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0".

P.S.: The comment I originally replied to choose a very convoluted way of saying that the false discovery rate of the test matters for a proper evaluation. Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions. I got the definitions mixed up differently, which led to this follow-up.

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I think we largely agree about being opposed to chat control however we seem to disagree somewhat about the underlying reasoning leading us to that conclusion.

> even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.

That depends entirely on the rate of true positives in the general population and the rate at which the test successfully catches them. If the success rate is reasonably high and the rate of true positives is within one base ten order of magnitude of the rate of false positives then regardless of volume the stream of reports would be expected to prove quite useful.

To put this in concrete terms, if 1 billion messages are scanned, there are 100 violations, 99 of those violations are successfully detected, and there are an additional 1000 false positives reported, then you've got about a 10% hit rate when examining reports. That would provide a genuinely useful starting point.

But it's not at all clear that we can expect numbers like that. Both because the scanners are likely much worse but also because criminals can't reasonably be expected to stick around on conforming platforms in the event that such measures are enacted.

Even if the reports were 100% accurate I'd still be opposed to it on ideological grounds. I don't think pervasive surveillance of that nature is compatible in the long term with a free and democratic system of government.

> Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions.

It was my intent to provide reasoning for all the numbers I put forward. They were meant as examples.

As to definitions I wasn't going by anything formal. I tried to spell out exactly what I meant by each term. Apologies if I wasn't entirely clear about that. Regardless, the precise definitions of the terms aren't what matters here. It's the practical end result - what percentage of the alerts are false?

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False result rate is a property of the test. They're describing predictive value, derived from that rate and population statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predicti...

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Because no one around me understood how to calculate false positive/false negative probabilities, I put together this calculator[1] in 2020.

[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...

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