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Philosophy, Public Policy lifecycle and the farm laws

Deontology and the farm bills I blame the recent failure of the farm bills on the ignorance of the government in how different philosophical frameworks map to different stages of the policy lifecycle.   Moral philosophers ponder the ethics of a situation through different philosophical frameworks. The two that are most prominently used are deontology & consequentialism. For simplicity's sake, without writing down the dictionary definitions of consequentialism and deontology , here is an operational definition of both. Deontologists say, "Principles & values matter". Consequentialists say, "Consequences matter. Ends justify the means".   For instance, say you told a child their drawing is good even though it was obviously bad. In this scenario, the deontologist would tell you, "Principles matter. Lying, especially to a child, is wrong in principle. So you are ethically wrong". Meanwhile the consequentialist would say "Consider the
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Repost: My preliminary research on the Adtech marketplace

I posted in the Effective Altruism Forum about the Adtech marketplace. At the time of writing this post, the article has 0 upvotes after 9 votes (i.e) it is probably not my best work :-p. You can read the article here: My preliminary research on the Adtech marketplace
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A two-layer network approach to Information Disorder

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attempt1 Information disorder, popularly referred to by its problematic synonym "fake news", is turning out to be a massive problem. Here I try to explain a framework with which I have been contextualizing the various aspects of the problem. I believe there are two layers of networks involved - one of information and another of people - and these two networks have interactions between and within them. I am going to use some jargon on Networks dynamics which I define in my earlier blog here . So if the jargon seems foreign, kindly read through that post first.   The two layers, separately As aforementioned, I think there are two layers of networks involved in the Information Disorder problem - The Information layer and The People layer. The Information layer - In this layer, the nodes are different pieces of information while the edges relate two pieces of information. The different pieces of information on a social network could be posts (aka tweets or threads) and com
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Network Dynamics framework for Social Network problems

final Social Networks are all the rage today (in many senses of that phrase). What we once thought would democratise content creation, is now breaking democratic norms. Given the scale of the problems involved, it is becoming increasingly difficult to think of them. Here I have made a humble attempt to do so and make the case for the framework I have been using. I am only beginning to think deeply about this issue so I might be wrong about this and change my mind later but I believe there is some utility to sharing it anyways - even a wrong clock shows the right time twice a day! So here goes nothing...   Network theorists classify network dynamics into 3 categories - dynamics on networks, dynamics of networks and hybrid dynamics [1]. I believe we can use a framework with a similar classification to categorize problems relating to social networks and to keep in mind all the dynamics involved before creating solutions.   Terminology Since I have begun by throwing around some ja
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