Politico wrote, "Perhaps the most pressing concern is around the Chinese government’s potential access to troves of data from TikTok’s millions of users." The concern that TikTok supposedly is spyware is frequently made in discussions about why it should be banned.
If the main issue is content moderation decisions, the best way to deal with it would be to legislate transparency around content moderation decisions and require TikTok to outsource the moderation decisions to some US contractor.
I don't have confidence in my models of how coherent and competent governments are at getting and using data like this.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote a report about this question that was declassified last year. They use the abbreviation CAI for "commercially accessible data".
"2.5. (U) Counter-Intelligence Risks in CAI. There is also a growing recognition that CAI, as a generally available resource, offers intelligence benefits to our adversaries, some of which may create counter-intelligence risk for the IC. For example, the January 2021 CSIS report cited above also urges the IC to “test and demonstrate the utility of OSINT and AI in analysis on critical threats, such as the adversary use of AI-enabled capabilities in disinformation and influence operations."
Last month there was a political fight about warrant requirements when the US intelligence agencies use commercially brought data, that was likely partly caused by the concerns from that report.
I think the tension is what does it even mean to be targeted by a government.
Here, I mean that you are doing something that's of interest to Chinese intelligence services. People who want to lobby for Chinese AI policy probably fall under that class.
I'm not sure to what extent people working at top AI labs might be blackmailed by the Chinese government to do things like give them their source code.
The FDC just fined US phone carriers for sharing the location data of US customers to anyone willing to buy them. The fines don't seem to be high enough to deter this kind of behavior.
That likely includes either directly or indirectly the Chinese government.
What does the US Congress do to protect spying by China? Of course, banning tik tok instead of actually protecting the data of US citizens.
If you have thread models that the Chinese government might target you, assume that they know where your phone is and shut it of when going somewhere you don't want the Chinese government (or for that matter anyone with a decent amount of capital) to know.
Isn't the main argument that Zvi makes that China is willing to do AI regulation and thus we can also do AI regulation.
In that frame the fact that Meta releases it's weights is just regulatory failure on our part.
Using the word 'cruxy' encourages people to use the mental model of what the cruxes in the conversation happen to be. Encouraging the use of effective mental models is a useful task for language.
This response appears to discourage "holistic" treatments with "no herbal products have been shown to be effective for treating cancer", despite a large body of evidence to the contrary (like green tea reliably slowing metastasis, and garlic for slowing tumor growth by immune system support + a bunch of other pathways (GARLIC IS SO OP)).
As far as I remember "effective for treating cancer" usually means an increase in cancer survival time. Drugs that do show some slowing of tumor growth but where the patient still dies at the same time are not considered effective for treatment of cancer.
There are many poisons that you can give people that slow tumor growth but that don't increase patient lifespan, do it makes sense to define "effective for treating cancer" that way.
Generally, hedgehogs are less trustworthy than foxes. If you see a debate as being about either believing in a mainstream hedgehog position or a contrarian hedgehog position you are often not having the most accurate view.
Instead of thinking that either Matthew Walker or Guzey is right, maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle and Guzey is pointing to real issues but exaggerating the effect.
I think most of the cases that the OP lists are of that nature that there's an effect and that the hedgehog contrarian position exaggerates that effect.
Instead of thinking about how you can divide a discussion into two sides you can also focus on "what's actually true". In that case, it would make sense to end with an estimation of the size of the real gap.
If we, however, look at "what people argue", https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf assumes the two categories culture-only (0% genetic–100% environmental) and the hereditarian (50% genetic–50% environmental).
Jay M defines the environmental model as <33% genetic and the genetic model as >66% genetic. What Rushton called the hereditarian position is right in the middle between Jay's environmental and genetic model.
Counterfactual means, that if something would not have happened something else would have happened. It's a key concept in Judea Pearl's work on causality.
Whether or not you face government assault risks depends on what you do. Most people don't face government assault risks. Some people engage in work or activism that results in them having government assault risks.
The Chinese government has strategic goals and most people are unimportant to those. Some people however work on topics like AI policy in which the Chinese government has an interest.