You ever notice the people always lecturing society on the benefits of communism are highly paid in their own fields? Yup. Us too.
Meet Professor Yann LeCun of NYU who also happens to be the Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales.
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 1, 2024
This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download.
The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison. https://t.co/4ObkW1tm85
So, communism.
Always.
Working for free sounds amazing. Why didn't we think of working for free before??
— ArchLobster 🇪🇨 🇺🇸 (@ArchLobster) January 1, 2024
Walk the talk — why don’t you start with your books? pic.twitter.com/z6iDic7YNz
— MAL (@mlopes) January 1, 2024
Not so fast!
A lot of misunderstanding in the comments.
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 1, 2024
I'm certainly not suggesting there should be a rule forcing authors to release their books for free or anything.
I'm just making the point that many authors who are more motivated by intellectual impact than by a thousand bucks of income…
A lot of misunderstanding in the comments. I'm certainly not suggesting there should be a rule forcing authors to release their books for free or anything. I'm just making the point that many authors who are more motivated by intellectual impact than by a thousand bucks of income should probably just make their book available for free download. This does not preclude publishing a paper version. A number of folks in the academic world do this.
Oh.
You see the problem here is just greedy authors.
You should be motivated by making the world a better place with your free labor!!
Do you work for free?
— Whateverdear (@WhateverDearest) January 1, 2024
But it's BETTER for you!
Most books would probably find more readers and have a larger intellectual impact if they were free for download.
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 1, 2024
It's demonstrably true for scientific publications.
Oh, Dear Professor doesn't mean ALL authors, just YOU.
Can you read, or does your bias blind you like a two-bit LLM?
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 1, 2024
We're talking about authors who make O($1000), not O($50,000).
We're discussing whether to give up $1000 in exchange for more readers is a good trade-off for both the author and society.
"Only a small number of businesses make significant money for their owners. This seems to suggest that most people should give away their products and services."
— A Cerbic (@a_cerbic) January 1, 2024
It’s always the wealthy guys in tech who think others should work for free, innit?
— Haz (@Michael_Haz) January 1, 2024
Rich kids who like playing commie with other peoples’ lives.
Writing a book is a form of entrepreneurship available to (nearly) everyone:
— Radek Osmulski 🇺🇦 (@radekosmulski) January 1, 2024
• single moms (JK Rawlings)
• teachers (Stephen King)
and so on.
Out of all the forms of economic activity such as for instance:
• corporations earning undue profits through externalities that…
Writing a book is a form of entrepreneurship available to (nearly) everyone:
• single moms (JK Rawlings)
• teachers (Stephen King) and so on.
Out of all the forms of economic activity such as for instance:
• corporations earning undue profits through externalities that don’t get priced
• wealthy individuals living from dividends on their capital is writing books really the activity we should remove financial incentives for? Does this move us towards a more fair society? 80% of companies fail in 5 years therefore it shouldn’t be legal to generate profits.
The median returns on a startup is 0 therefore we should make everything a startup creates available to society at cost + 0. Using a median to say something about an economic activity, not looking at who are some of the beneficiaries of said activity, seems like a not entirely thought out argument to me.
Wealthy intellectuals always imagine other people would find personal fulfillment in working for the 'betterment' of society.
And then no one would bother writing books. How do you not see that? https://t.co/6X3CtBi4R2
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) January 1, 2024
For those of you scoring at home, it took 1:59 to get a leader in the clubhouse for dumbest thing tweeted in 2024... https://t.co/SGbSXz2wF4
— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) January 1, 2024
Progressivism never changes.
You should work for free to better society, but they should get paid the big bucks to make sure you know how to do it correctly.
No thank you.
$1,000 is better than nothing!
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