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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 355


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I guess I'm mostly talking about European airlines here. I guess the US generally has more of a "money is cheap" (when compared to the loyalty of a high-status customer?) attitude.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Eh. The fundamental argument that if you respond to "Country X occupies the land and immiserates the people" by taking in all the people and giving them a better life, you make country X's job very easy and hasten the opportunity for them to do it to you next, is sound enough, both for X=Israel and X=Russia. The fundamental difference here is that the Eurocrat lobby assert their mandate over anyone who would stand against them, within or without their dominion, by claiming moral superiority as the defenders of universal individual human rights, and to my best knowledge Egypt does no such thing. By doing this, but then still turning around and making their military convenience trump those same notions they just declared universal (e.g. when browbeating the internal opposition that takes issue with their importing of Muslim refugees), they are guilty of hypocrisy. In my eyes, official hypocrisy, being a meta-level crime against the very concept of principles, is a worse crime than any object-level violation of principles can be.


(Those who build moral frameworks to protect hypocrisy, like the concept of "whataboutism", get close to being yet another level of abstraction up, thus deserving their own deeper circle of hell.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The vast majority of my customer service interactions has been with various transportation companies (airlines most frequently), who very much do appear to optimise for dodging refunds that their customers are in fact legally entitled to. There is a reason "pay us a third of the refund and we will take on the effort and risk of enforcing your statutory compensation claim against the airline" is a real business category that exists out there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem with customer service (and a lot of other similar domains, actually) is that as the problem to be dealt with rather than the employer, the human bottleneck actually often worked in your favour. Having human employees working the phone line and wanting them to not quit or flame out and shoot up the office is the fundamental limit that makes it hard for Corporate to institute their ideal customer service policy, which is "trap any complainants in a Kafkaesque gaslighting nightmare until they give up". Mr. Claude has no limitations there, because he does not feel the "I am screwing over a fellow human being and making a mockery of the very concept of 'support'" qualia nor the "it sucks to be screamed at all day by people who hate me" ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know. Many societies (e.g. Germany) have decided to not acknowledge a right to contractually sign away your bodily integrity (e.g. you can't sell your arm, while you are alive; the person taking it will be criminally liable for the mutilation regardless of your consent). I don't think there are obvious reasons why this is bad, beyond an easy-to-draw Schelling fence around "consenting adults shall not be restricted in their dealings with each other" which never actually existed anywhere. Once you have this, though, making reproductive autonomy another thing that a woman may not contractually sell is not a far leap.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
...but doesn't that mean you don't in fact make the distinction? You seem to be saying that the cases of undesirable outcomes I mentioned (guns, procedural acquittals) are in fact all instances of slippery slopes, and there is just nobody making the claim that expecting the slope to be slippery is fallacious.


(When I say "slippery slopes", I really do mean what I understand that lemma to mean, not shorthand for "instances of the slippery slope fallacy". My view is that neither of the three cases in discussion (abortion, guns, procedural acquittals) should count as an example of having slipped down a slope, because there was no widespread slipping - guns caused a rounding-error number of mass shootings and still approximately nobody likes mass shootings, and legal abortion plus surrogacy are now producing a rounding-error number of surrogates being pressured to abort, which also approximately nobody likes)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm happy to accept that refusing to publicly concede that there is such a thing as a tradeoff at all, and their policies might not be all upsides, is an endemic vice of US progressives as well as many other movements that code left. I'm not sure if it's so much a left-wing thing as it's a "progressive and in power" thing, where if you have some utopian vision that you are already ramming through and just want to ram through faster against the feeble protestations of a browbeaten conservative opposition, conceding that there might be downsides at all is tantamount to surrendering to those voices who are begging you to slow down and reconsider (and you suspect are just angling for some more time to extract value under the curve of their evil ways before they are reduced to zero).


Regardless, do I understand correctly that are you saying that this is really a "slippery slope" rather than an "unfortunate consequence" specifically because the hypothetical progressives beforehand said "this won't happen"? (and if they said "it will happen but that's a good thing"/"worth it" that would be enough to make it an "unfortunate consequence"?) Not only am I not sure I've seen evidence that the proponents actually addressed this specific case, it seems a bit strange to me to pin such a great distinction in evaluating a policy and its consequences not on anything about the policy and consequences, but instead on the honesty of the propaganda of its proponents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It absolutely is because it never could have happened in the first place without the prerequisite social and legal changes at the top of the slope.






This is like the entire point of the slippery slope as an argument.




Are you willing at all to make a distinction between "slippery slopes" and "unfortunate consequences"? With the particular case at hand, I doubt a lot of progressives are particularly happy with what is going on either; it's just that they would pin their displeasure on the surrogacy aspect of it, not the abortion one. If almost nobody wanted an outcome and it happened in one instance, is that enough to make a slippery slope? In that case, there are really a lot of slippery slopes everywhere. Is every gun murder and mass shooting is at the bottom of the "slippery slope" that started with the 2nd Amendment?  Is the entirety of the Anglo-American legal system a slippery slope that led to OJ Simpson walking free? If not, what's different there?




the past




Actually, I have to apologise there - I expected to find a particular shape of scenario (like "some nobleman forces his mistress to get an abortion") but after putting in some time to search it did in fact not seem to have occurred (at least not in a way that left any evidence known to us today). The closest-in-vibes stories I can find are Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn, a variety of "queen used her legal authority to torture pregnant mistresses" stories, and the whole lot of sexual violence in American slavery (though I guess someone very upset at abortion in particular would find compelled impregnation/reproduction much less reprehensible than compelled abortion?). Mea culpa, my claim that similar things must have happened in the past was unsupported.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's not evidence of a slippery slope if someone, somewhere, did one thing that maximally enrages you, out of hundreds of millions of opportunities for people to do such a thing. Do you see evidence of an epidemic of surrogates being pushed by their clients to abort? Do you have any particular reason to believe that things like that, or things that you would find worse than this, did not happen in the past? My vague impression of humanity in general and European history in particular (which I am of course more familiar with than the totality of humanity) is that there was never a shortage of any of the ingredients here, like sexual compulsion, inferiors being made to bear children for superiors, abortion and actual infanticide out of convenience. It seems very likely that something like this would have happened many times in the past, say, some high-status man impregnating a domestic worker or slave and then using his superior status to force her into abortion or to kill the child after birth. But if it did, when exactly did we supposedly slip down a slope?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This theory of ownership seems bizarre to me. If I convince the local paper to run an article saying my house is much nicer than my neighbour's, and this results in his property value going down while mine goes up, am I stealing from him?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The thing is that with such a loose definition of "in the training data", the hypothesis that AIs will only be able to do what's in the training data is not reassuring against doom. Persuasive propaganda is in the training data. Mass murder is in the training data. Deadly diseases are in the training data. World wars are in the training data. Doing all those things hundreds of times faster and cheaper than humans, like the current set of programming and science tasks where AI doing them faster and cheaper is being dismissed as uninteresting because it was all in the training data, would be more than enough to largely end humanity.