Loved the interview and the podcast in general, but the audio quality of some episodes can make it hard to enjoy/follow at times. Some low-hanging fruit that could make a big difference:
1) Some voices come in very loud and others very quiet, which can require listeners to constantly adjust the volume and lead to occasional ear-splitting interjections when a louder host cuts in. Try to normalize/compress audio levels for all speakers; most audio software will let you do this for an entire file when you're done editing (if you're only recording from a single source), but ideally you would just boost the entire track for whoever is quiet.
2) Audio quality in general could be better. I'm not sure if everyone usually uses a headset or dedicated mic (not built in to their laptop), but that goes a long way toward reducing echoes, etc. Low bitrate audio/dropouts/digital noise can be solved by having each speaker record their own audio locally, then share their files with whoever is editing. That way you'll have 3 separate high-quality tracks to work with, instead of 1 high quality and 2 that have been heavily compressed and generally bastardized by video conferencing software.
3) Latency seems to be a real problem, both for the hosts struggling to have a free-flowing conversation as they accidentally cut each other off, and listeners occasionally experiencing awkward/disjointed/delayed moments. This may be due to the software you're using; if that's not able to be fixed, consider implementing a process (eg. raised hand, either in software or a literal hand-wave on camera) so speakers can more seamlessly pass the baton without stepping on each others' toes.
Again, huge fan and I don't mean to be critical. Audio is hard, especially when everyone is remote and you're trying to keep production overhead to a minimum. Hope this helps.
>Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you're not expressing an idea, you're stopping them from expressing theirs.
>Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It's just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone.
There is a correlation between weird offensive ideas & harrassment, partly because trolls are more likely to pretend to be (to take your example) Nazis, partly because strange offensive ideas can be used by disagreeable people to signal their disagreeableness & attract compatible friends (David Chapman in https://vividness.live/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising makes this point about neoreactionaries & radical feminists, but I expect it would also apply to neo-Nazis). (&, of course, in the case of literal Nazism (though not for all of the far-right ideas that get criticized as fascist), the ideology itself tends to encourage harrassment & violence.) However, your point that bad actions & the ideas held by bad actors should not be ethically conflated is still important & probably more important in the present moment (especially given some people's strategy of claiming that the mere presence of opposing ideas or counterarguments constitutes harrassment).
> We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.
A likely failure mode of this strategy is creating a chilling effect. A company like Twitter or Facebook can't moderate all its content directly, so it has to adopt some organized system for moderation, like using algorithms or hiring special employees to do this, which will inevitably take time & miss things. A company that faces harsh sanctions for anything that it misses or leaves up too long will be incentivized to delete anything that looks like it might be illegal, which means that lots of legal content that's mislabeled or looks like something illegal will also be banned in practice. (Compare this to the chilling effect of workplace harrassment laws, as described by Eugene Volokh at https://web.archive.org/web/20210311051429/https://fileleaks.com/file/9d4e1574e83024cb56e80d0a61ed51afe256f747/volokh1992freedomOfSpeechworkplaceHarassment.pdf .) IIUC avoiding this is much of the reason why Section 230 exists.
I found it really hard to understand what that federated twitter would solve.
From the description it looks like a very cumbersome way to create what amounts to a shared block list.
Loved the interview and the podcast in general, but the audio quality of some episodes can make it hard to enjoy/follow at times. Some low-hanging fruit that could make a big difference:
1) Some voices come in very loud and others very quiet, which can require listeners to constantly adjust the volume and lead to occasional ear-splitting interjections when a louder host cuts in. Try to normalize/compress audio levels for all speakers; most audio software will let you do this for an entire file when you're done editing (if you're only recording from a single source), but ideally you would just boost the entire track for whoever is quiet.
2) Audio quality in general could be better. I'm not sure if everyone usually uses a headset or dedicated mic (not built in to their laptop), but that goes a long way toward reducing echoes, etc. Low bitrate audio/dropouts/digital noise can be solved by having each speaker record their own audio locally, then share their files with whoever is editing. That way you'll have 3 separate high-quality tracks to work with, instead of 1 high quality and 2 that have been heavily compressed and generally bastardized by video conferencing software.
3) Latency seems to be a real problem, both for the hosts struggling to have a free-flowing conversation as they accidentally cut each other off, and listeners occasionally experiencing awkward/disjointed/delayed moments. This may be due to the software you're using; if that's not able to be fixed, consider implementing a process (eg. raised hand, either in software or a literal hand-wave on camera) so speakers can more seamlessly pass the baton without stepping on each others' toes.
Again, huge fan and I don't mean to be critical. Audio is hard, especially when everyone is remote and you're trying to keep production overhead to a minimum. Hope this helps.
>Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you're not expressing an idea, you're stopping them from expressing theirs.
>Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It's just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone.
There is a correlation between weird offensive ideas & harrassment, partly because trolls are more likely to pretend to be (to take your example) Nazis, partly because strange offensive ideas can be used by disagreeable people to signal their disagreeableness & attract compatible friends (David Chapman in https://vividness.live/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising makes this point about neoreactionaries & radical feminists, but I expect it would also apply to neo-Nazis). (&, of course, in the case of literal Nazism (though not for all of the far-right ideas that get criticized as fascist), the ideology itself tends to encourage harrassment & violence.) However, your point that bad actions & the ideas held by bad actors should not be ethically conflated is still important & probably more important in the present moment (especially given some people's strategy of claiming that the mere presence of opposing ideas or counterarguments constitutes harrassment).
> We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.
A likely failure mode of this strategy is creating a chilling effect. A company like Twitter or Facebook can't moderate all its content directly, so it has to adopt some organized system for moderation, like using algorithms or hiring special employees to do this, which will inevitably take time & miss things. A company that faces harsh sanctions for anything that it misses or leaves up too long will be incentivized to delete anything that looks like it might be illegal, which means that lots of legal content that's mislabeled or looks like something illegal will also be banned in practice. (Compare this to the chilling effect of workplace harrassment laws, as described by Eugene Volokh at https://web.archive.org/web/20210311051429/https://fileleaks.com/file/9d4e1574e83024cb56e80d0a61ed51afe256f747/volokh1992freedomOfSpeechworkplaceHarassment.pdf .) IIUC avoiding this is much of the reason why Section 230 exists.
I'm disappointed you didn't ask him about MMT. After a few months of study, he's become an "expert". Think of all you could have learned.