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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
I was not particularly thinking of actual Israelis, Ukrainians or Russians when making that list. All of those deflections could be sampled from a smattering of Western European and American gentiles, in defense of a team they chose to support. (Was @FtttG himself even Jewish, on that matter?) You could add Chinese/Uyghurs to the list as well, except that topic area has largely dropped from the public consciousness.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Is this not just the general pattern of how everyone handles instances of violence (or, more generally, violations of something they claim to be a principle they hold when they actually don't) against an enemy? Pro-Israelis do the same thing about "Israeli military sniping women and children for sport" reports; pro-Ukrainians pulled it about North Stream, Ukrainian assassinations of their own opposition abroad, and whenever their own attacks hit civilians; pro-Russians could be seen pulling it in real time about the invasion of Ukraine itself, among others; and so on and so forth.
We are all by and large beasts wishing for peace and prosperity for our friends and misery and death for our enemies, and the pretense that there is any ethics or principles beyond that only serves to make us beastlier still, like the trope of the "why you hittin' yourself?" bully.
(On the other hand, of you are willing to forego treating your arguments, empathy and every other act of communication as soldiers, there isn't even any particular contradiction between being happy for the passengers and thinking Israel is in the wrong! You can cheer on both the Russian and the Ukrainian soldier cleverly dodging a drone, even though each act is sure to set back the cause of the respective other by a little and threading the needle to support both causes at once is hard. These are fellow humans; they fought to survive against stacked odds; by luck, quick thinking, skill and coordination, they managed to pull it off.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
It's not like he gave any examples of wars between Communist countries. The most obvious examples I am aware of all involved the China-Vietnam-Cambodia triangle, which I did cover with examples; I then added some more obviously nationalist communist countries because otherwise there would not be enough content.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
Many communist countries were not actually particularly globalist (North Korea in particular, but also e.g. Albania; North Vietnam came out of a nationalist movement of colonial liberation that was just desperate for backers after the US sacrificed them for the sake of their European postwar order political project; I think Laos might even still forbid its citizens from marrying foreigners). On the other hand, what are actually your Western examples? I won't take mere decades as evidence of durability here, on historical clocks it should at least be 100 years to transcend the realm of suspected expedience. England and the US are, well, the same nation; I wouldn't consider German-Austrian alignment to be evidence that nationalists can trust other nations either. Proper nationalism has not even been around for that long (it is commonly taught as really taking off with the revolutions of 1848, though arguably the English and French both woke up to national consciousness earlier than that), and the whole story of Europe is that up until the Pax Americana the alliances were constantly shifting.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
Would European Red-analogues, if they were had their day in the limelight, even be natural allies to American Reds? The existence of a "Blue Ummah" is, in a way, the intrinsic advantage of Blues; globalists everywhere have common cause, but nationalists can only have temporary allies of convenience. I forget if it was SSC or some other blog in the general sphere that proposed the thought experiment of some lizard species where a subset could be identified as cooperate-bots with a visual signal only visible to fellow cooperate-bots and thereby outcompeted all the others (as a metaphor for certain mind-killing minorities), but it's kind of like that except the signal is not even secret.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
Because the effort that is being fairly matched is cognitive effort, not incidental physical effort.
I don't deny text has more uses; if the point is to actually obtain information I seek, I don't care for the provenance (that's why I'm happy with a lot of AI-generated documentation, and will ask Gemini to sift through search results). However, the main point of reading and writing on a forum like this, or blog posts on SSC, is not seeking and providing specific information.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
You are ignoring the widely repeated argument against it that is based on the attention economy - "I read it because you took the time to write it" etc. - which I find much more compelling. Adjacent sentiments were reasonable long before genAI, which I find to disprove the "psychosis" angle: if my long-distance girlfriend wanted to call me to give me an identical 10-second good morning greeting every day, that would be much easier to accept than if she made a 10-second recording and insisted that I play it back at a fixed time every day, and if a friend wrote me a 10-page rant on some topic, I would feel much more compelled to read it than if be sent me a 10-page blog post by someone else that he thinks happens to summarise his exact thoughts on a subject.
More laconically, surely you can't complain if I answer your "I asked AI to write this post for me" by "I asked AI to read your post for me".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
I would put the suburban threshold at 2 rides/hour rather than 4. Hell, at the height of the train maintenance crisis a few years ago, some inner-ring parts of Berlin were reduced to 1/20min at peak hours, and I've lived in areas with 20- and 30-minute period transit that were nevertheless within 20 minutes of the centre and largely housed urban commuters.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
Did the part of Germany you lived in actually have good private schools? In the East, the best public schools are squarely superior, as evidenced by the intake of math/science olympiads, and private schools are mostly considered a way for rich people and politicians to sequester their kids.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
The whole point is that you needn't worry that you get lynched if you are protected by a tireless AI-controlled array of drones and Boston Dynamics dogs. To expect that the rabble will find a way around it is to believe, against all odds, that humans will remain superior in some way after all.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
Not quite, though I'm also happy with that. I wouldn't call a severed human arm an instance of the human species, for reasons that have nothing to do with "it is not enough of a Mensch", and I feel a fetus to be similar to that - entirely made of human stuff, but lacking critical parts needed to have the value associated with the whole thing.
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14d ago
(1) if I'm constitutionally (e.g. by way of brain damage, retardation, locked-in coma or otherwise) incapable of voicing my protest, then I would hope someone makes that decision
(2) if you write your ethics based on asking people "what if it happened to you", you will get rules like death penalty for especially ego-shattering insults.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
Do the likes of Amodei actually believe those things, or is this outgroup homogeneity bias?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
· Edited 15d ago
I don't think this is primarily a pro-choice/pro-life story at all. One of the kids she killed was five years old; even an extreme pro-choicer like me (on the record here before saying that I would not really personally detest parents who postnatally aborted a one-month-old) thinks this is unambiguously murder of a human being and should be treated as such. (Also, the usual kind of failure of theory of mind between tribes. No, we really do not believe fetuses are human. Being pro-abortion is really not particularly about women; I had my share of irresponsible unprotected sex back in the days, and felt very reassured by the existence of legal and easily accessed abortion.)
Instead, this is obviously just the usual case of the forces of tribalism having randomly coalesced around some nearly random figure, with the significance of the case for each tribe mostly having become how much significance it has for the other. Whether Clancy is convicted or not would primarily have the effect that it would be a visible public defeat for all the people who staked significant attention and political capital on the opposite outcome. If she is acquitted, it would bias expectations in future conflicts towards "women can get away with anything"; if she is convicted, it would bias expectations towards "all the efforts of women activists can't get one woman acquitted".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
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the Soviet Armenian one with its unusual scale
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Turkey as the pinnacle of the martial ones
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Israel though Smetana's Moldau is the better version of the melody and the Czechs should just replace theirs with it
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Taiwan does not stand out on any single quality, but is near the top in every category that I would score national anthems in: it's dignified, pleasant to listen to, the lyrics offer a positive vision for the country, the text is poetic and reflects the national character (with how it is entirely in four-character verse).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
Well, on the other hand, they only need to hold out until 2029 for presumable Democrat domination, at which point the street cred from having received such a personal token of Trump's ire will probably greatly work in their favour. In their eyes a bet that the Singularity does not happen until then is probably risky, but not downright untenable; if they determined that they will not get their regulatory regime under him, hunkering down and refusing to further stain your reputation on the other side with compromise may be the least bad strategy.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
What exactly was the UK bill about? "Assisted dying" in the culture-warred about, Canadian sense generally involves conscious people wanting to have themselves euthanised. That seems much more rare than the "braindead adult taken off life support" cases like Terri Schiavo (sp?), which seem more similar to this one. Those are also completely legal in the UK, and I have not seen OP or anyone else complain about instances of it in ages. You can dismiss the "controlling sexuality" theory as projection or otherwise all you want, but as I said that is not very compelling when you are not offering an alternative theory for why this is.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
One thing I do wonder about, what is your perspective on why this story is uniquely outrageous? Given the medical history, it seems to me more similar than usual to the numerous cases of the life support plug being pulled on the comatose and braindead of more advanced age. I'm aware that Christians tend to not particularly like those either, if prompted, but there does not seem to be that much of an organised opposition and ultimately they are just not what the outrage machine winds up putting on the frontpages of the internet. At the same time, neither the article you linked nor you seem to be pushing an angle suggesting that children are somehow more precious or morally valuable than adults; the focus is instead squarely on the adults making the decision.
Given this, you should understand why it is so easy for your outgroup to convince itself and the NPCface peanut gallery that pro-life activism is really about controlling women's sexuality. The account in which the pro-life activist is theory-of-minded as thinking something like "finally a woman got saddled with the deserved consequences [that is, being a joyless full-time caretaker who stays in the home] of all her fornicating, and now she is trying to weasel herself out of them!", however uncharitable, at least explains all the observations. If pro-lifers have a better account of what is actually the value function according to which they decide what to be outraged about, they have not succeeded in letting it be widely known.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
As I said in a different subthread, for me "human" is more load-bearing than "sentient" here, so I don't particularly like abbreviating to the latter, but sure.
In short, I take humans' moral value to lie in the unique configuration that their hardware compresses the totality of their human life experience into - more poetically, their "memories and personality", and more mechanistically, in ML terms, the "weights" as opposed to the "architecture".
Slightly related to the common computationalist saying that compression is intelligence: many years worth of human qualia is a large pile of mildly interesting data, but that information lossily squeezed into ~1kg of meat in a way that enables the meat to act in interesting ways and reprocess/reproduce parts of that data is a marvel.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
I don't actually think 9 months post conception is particularly human (the "human" part of "sentient human" is doing more work for me) either; it's just a convenient cutoff point since before it it for sure isn't and afterwards the cutoff is different for every instance.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
Since you apparently presume to know my definition, can you state it in your own words?
I don't see as strong an effect as you seem to do - if you open German newspaper comment sections now, there are still people trying to inject conspiracy theories about how the Nord Stream bombing was really a Russian false flag, and they are not falling behind your median Mossad tale in complexity. Whatever difference there still is, in terms of the complexity hostile conspiracy theories impute to Israeli plots, can surely be explained by the Israelis and their cheerleaders themselves cultivating an image of superhuman competence and non-pickiness of means. Surely the idea that they recruited Hitler's former right hand man to assassinate Germans working for their adversaries would have been in the class of conspiracy theories you would call out the ridiculousness of, had they not publicised it themselves.
Because they require continued Western backing, if not for the genocide itself then at least to sustain their long-term economy and strategy. I can't think of any historical precedent for the general configuration that necessitates this strategy, where an overwhelming global hegemon's actions are constrained by a somewhat well-informed population's perceptions of morality - the window perhaps opened with Vietnam, and is now closing as tribalism and consensus-manufacturing tech are catching up. Any candidate examples would therefore have to be putative genocides, by nations the US could be expected to intervene for or against, in the last 50 years. That's not a big pool, and what there is is largely still hot culture war material that it's impossible to analyse dispassionately.
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