I agree with @Opt-out that stochastic terrorism is real, but what do we (society) do about it?
A problem specifically with stochastic terrorism (and what Scott explains in his article) is that it can consist of innocuous expressions that are OK on their own. For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral? Now, let's say there's a politician who's very curt, dresses very sharply, and has very conservative policies; he's not a Nazi, and his policies aren't that cruel, but he resembles one. Is it wrong to say "this guy really looks like a Nazi"? Or, back to Charlie Kirk, it's factually true that some of his policies were shared by Nazis (the Nazis had some moderate and good policies even to liberals, like establishing some national youth program, not the part where it taught Nazi ideology). Is it OK to point that out?
There are insane people, and if we try to make laws against insane people, we create a nanny state where normal people can't do things that wouldn't cause problems among normal people. I can use fancy labels too: I call that "stochastic regulation". Of course sometimes it's justified, like banning the average joe from building a nuclear bomb, but I think only when the potential negative consequences are much worse than the positive ones (what good reason would the average joe build a nuke? On the other hand...) Nobody sane would look at Wolfenstein 3D and a sharply-dressed politician and think "I need to kill that guy". But moreso, nobody sane would break into a random person's house claiming to be Harry Dresden from The Dresden Files, yet here we are. Certainly movies like The Dresden Files that depict heroes saving people from kidnapping shouldn't be condemned, and probably Wolfenstein, the Nazi appearance allegory, and pointing out facts shouldn't either. Where do we draw the line?
Also, general arguments against speech laws: the infrastructure can be used against innocent speech, and they create a general vibe-killing effect that affects uncontroversial expression.
To be clear, I do think some of the rhetoric against Charlie Kirk, specifically "Charlie Kirk is a Nazi" was not innocous and should be discouraged. The point is that other "stochastic terrorism" can arise from completely innocuous expression, like violent fictional media and pointing out obvious allegories and facts, which should barely if at all even be discouraged.
Brainwavez
21d ago
I still write some code by hand. No matter how smart Claude becomes, sometimes it’s much easier and faster to write code directly instead of English.
Like your example, but imagine many of those 1-liners. Or an IDE-assisted refactor, e.g. “rename class Cat to Feline everywhere”. Or data structures: prompting “create a record named File with field name that is a string and field size that is an integer” vs hand-coding record File(String name, int size) {}, and imagine creating several at once.
Plus, I already have my IDE open reading every Claude change because of another issue: sometimes I catch Claude writing terribly messy code, like duplicating a computation over and over rather than abstracting it into a function. I’ve never seen Claude go back and refactor old code on its own (that it didn’t touch to solve its current goal), and asking Claude to generally “improve the code” doesn’t work. I can ask Claude to write specific refactors, but I need the IDE open to read the code and figure out which ones; and if I ask Claude I have to read its output, because even if correct it may reveal another important refactor.
That front page screenshot looks a lot like Hacker News today. It's also getting worse although still miles ahead of today's Reddit. Or https://lobste.rs, which is more tech and higher quality, but invite-only and strictly left leaning.
Brainwavez
22d ago
Binding mandatory arbitration clauses in individually-negotiated contracts are benign and should be encouraged - even if they specify a Shariah judge or a Beth Din as the arbitrator.
Why? It seems like an easy way to confuse the other party, for example by giving them favorable terms that are effectively false because any complaint goes to a biased arbitrator, meanwhile judges are experts at interpreting documents fairly and textually.
Brainwavez
22d ago
Ironically
The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.
(Anyways, I think people should be allowed to sue for whatever reason, but it should really be more common that the accuser pays the defendant for a frivolous lawsuit, especially when the accuser is richer.)
Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?
Yes. Any argument for anything decent can be attacked with "this is a slippery slope towards..."
Building infrastructure like mass surveillance that can be used for good and evil is not a fallacy, but I wouldn't call it a slippery slope. The fallacy is, for example, arguing that a (completely optional) OS-level setting "is this user a child?" that gets sent to websites is a "slippery slope" towards mass surveillance.
Couple sues surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect
Here, obvious issues are the couple, that they were allowed to go through surrogacy in the first place, the frivolous lawsuit, and that apparently Canadian surrogates are cheap and can be further ripped-off by forced arbitration.
There's a good argument against surrogacy in general: the state foster care system. Personally, I believe surrogacy is OK if the parents choosing it demonstrate extreme willingness and capability to raise their child (by going through extensive, tedious, and long screening, then paying something like $100,000), because then they would statistically better than the median birth parent. I still strongly believe gay couples who go through screening (not these men) should be allowed to adopt, because of the state foster care system: I'm confident a capable gay couple would raise a child much better than an incapable straight couple (even birth parents) and much better than Canada.
But let's get to the real argument: that the relaxing of social norms including gay marriage and abortion was a slippery slope towards the FUBAR state of Canada, which manages to spawn scenarios this catastrophic. I actually think there is something here, but it's not "gay marriage and abortion caused the failed state of Canada", that's a correlation error; it's that the world has changed, in ways that eliminated unimportant religious taboos, in ways that eroded religion in ways it was important, and in ways that created terrible bureaucracy and enabled frivolous lawsuits. The world was going to and will continue to change inevitably, and these changes can't be reversed, only repaired differently, like patching a stuffed animal. I doubt for example repealing gay marriage and abortion will reestablish good social norms, because they didn't cause those to erode in the first place but were a side-effect; instead, I think they must be solved in a completely novel way.
Brainwavez
23d ago
Reddit has somehow, for some reason, banned /r/random "due to being unmoderated". That makes the "Random" button in https://old.reddit.com no longer work. That fairly represents the more general state of the site today.
My advice. I made it very specific, but of course you can take and leave whichever parts you want:
Start by re-creating this website, with better architecture and minor improvements, but no major new features. First list all the features of this website (posts, comment trees, upvote/downvote, context, user profile, followers...), then come up with an architecture, then implement it, then copy all the data from this site onto the new one, then deploy it on https://beta.themotte.org and let mods and volunteers test it, then replace this site with the new one. Feel free to use Claude for everything, not only to implement the copy but list the features and maybe even plan an architecture etc. He is very useful as long as you make sure to go over everything he does and improve it to your standards. Again, don't implement any major new features until it can replace https://themotte.org.
Submottes / communities
Do exactly what Reddit has done with subreddits except where you've noticed issues, specifically the ID/name thing. That is a textbook example of great design: extremely simple (low code maintenance cost and user-facing, you don't even have to mention it exists) and fixes a real problem without any real downside.
Accept that this forum may not grow much so there may not be many communities here. Maybe you can create separate ones for the recurring threads: Culture War, Tinkering, Wellness, etc. Or maybe keep the Motte one community, and create a separate spin-off that has multiple.
If you create a spin-off, ask yourself: why would someone join my forum instead of an alternative, or create a community instead of a subreddit etc.? For example, maybe you can make a game dev spinoff that's better than existing game dev subreddits. Make sure to advertise why wherever you promote it. I recommend any politically-correct spinoff be an entirely separate from this non-PC one. I don't think lack of interoperability will be an issue. Speaking of...
Federation
IMO, most attempts at federation are a "solution in search of a problem". I recommend adding all federation features ad-hoc: only when needed, as simply as you can. In fact, I recommend this for all features that don't already exist on this old site.
For example, if someone wants to link a post from another instance of this forum (which implies you succeeded enough for there to be two instances), they may simply create a post whose URL is that of the post from the other instance. What I would do, is tell people to do that initially. If it becomes common enough to be worth spending maintenance for better UX, I would add official support so that, when the website sees a link to another forum instance, it displays it as a fancy "crosspost". The website can even pull comments from the other instance's post, and let it provide authentication credentials, then push local comments to it (making both posts effectively the same)...but only after crossposts are first implemented, if by then it seems like it would be useful.
Similarly, if someone wants to create an account on another instance, they can create it with the same username. If they want to show that they own both accounts, they can add a PGP key and list both instances in the account bios. "Federation" could be adding explicit support for this: if it's common enough, split the "bio" into "bio" and "PGP" (you can migrate the database), allow instances to store a list of "federated" other instances, and then for example, when someone follows a user, the server can notify them if not only the local account posts, but any account with its PGP key on any instance posts (possible by the instance servers pinging each other any time a user posts, just to alert followers on other instances).
Formal ownership and hosting
Unfortunately, I'm skeptical this would work out. Why would people trust you to host their site (instead of Discourse etc.), especially when if they really trust you they can simply create a community? But I think the bigger issue is you will not want to host the instances of people who ask you. There are two big issues: 1) these people aren't technically proficient (or they'd self-host), so they'll constantly ask you for small fixes and threaten to move if you don't help them; and 2) these people will sometimes get into trouble with law enforcement, unless you moderate them the same way you moderate your own site. All these issues raise the question, why not just host the community yourself?
If you truly want to give others peace of mind and absolve yourself of responsibility, then make your forum software open-source and self-hostable. You can make it easy to self-host by creating a Docker container, which is deployable to a VPS in basically one click, and I don't think you have to worry about making it accessible for complete laymen, because the only people who will try to self-host are technically proficient (others will just make a community on your or another host).
the Foundation
Ultimately, communities succeed or fail by their culture, dictated by moderators and members, more than technology. The "Foundation" you have on this site can be the default for new communities, but trying to force their moderators to adhere to it is pointless at best, because if the moderators suck the community will fail.
You already proposed what I think is the proper solution to bad moderators: give admins (yourself) the power to rename a community to something niche and create a new community with the old name and new moderators. I'd recommend letting moderators police their own communities mostly hands-off, with three exceptions: 1) obviously if they do illegal stuff remove them, 2) handle moderator disputes like "rouge moderator removes everyone else before they can remove him" however you feel is best, and 3) if it's a community you really care about, make yourself a moderator (which tells members that you will interfere and enforce your Foundation, and if they don't like it they can create their own spin-off).
Brainwavez
24d ago
I don’t understand the point of banning and distributing physical books when books are obsoleted by technology.
I agree, and Clavicular. The problems are 1) being promoted to people, especially kids, over more "normal" celebrities; and 2) being motivated to push beyond where they'd naturally stop, in ways they end up regretting. Both mainly caused by social media.
What is normal? What is the ideal path for each individual? I don't think either of these influencers are normal, but neither do I think the ideas of anyone I've seen promote censorship. Even good-intentioned censors: determining what is best for others is hard, hence why I think softer methods are better (for starters, not promoting these influencers to children against the wishes of their own parents; censoring them from children is OK, but shouldn't be necessary).
Intentionally and knowingly allowing yourself to be harmed should not bar others from action
I would caveat, only when it is beyond reasonable doubt against your sane interests, because what defines harm? For example, suicide treatment that someone may enter initially voluntarily is OK, because the people who it saved believe so, but people who diligently consistently want to die should be entitled to MAID. Or in this case, both trans and looksmaxxing adults should be allowed gender-affirming care, with a bit of friction to ensure it's what they really want (unless obvious); because it's their choice, and there's a not-insignificant chance they won't regret it.
Brainwavez
25d ago
Time is money. Consider a low software dev salary of $24/hr: if asking the LLM saves 20 minutes, that’s $8, while the cost of a small script or image (using the API, not subsidized subscription) is under $1.
Brainwavez
25d ago
What makes a collection of atoms one object or multiple?
Is a building an object? Forest? Planet? Galaxy?
Then why would a group of people and technology not be an object? It could be a temporary physical space when they're together, like an occupied lab.
Brainwavez
26d ago
But why is the brand “80-90 years old”? If the job is simply to press the red or blue button, why not hire someone charismatic? It’s embarrassing, even for the politicians themselves.
Brainwavez
26d ago
Term limits are OK but maybe a band-aid. Why do both parties endorse geriatrics in the first place?
UPDATE: McConnel is alive, so US politicians are still literally brain dead but only in the figurative sense.
I wish him many more healthy years outside US government, fortunately he announced last February his retirement after midterms.
Our (US) politicians are literally brain dead
Ok, technically we don't know Mitch McConnel is dead, but he's not been seen for 4 weeks since being hospitalized. Especially with what's (not) happening in Congress, I honestly don't see any significant difference whatsoever. And he's still getting paid ($174,000/yr).
This isn't the first time. Kay Granger disappeared for months (still getting paid) until someone discovered she was in a memory care home. It's bipartisan: Diane Feinstein died in office, 90 years young, shortly after she kept missing votes for health issues. The two most recent presidents are over 80 and seem to be having memory issues in office, and 1/3 of Senators are over 70.
And maybe you disagree, but I think it reflects how out-of-touch the US government is. I feel that most of today's politicians aren't qualified to serve in a retirement home committee, yet they're serving in the grand Retirement Home that's in charge of a country with about 350 million people and $32 trillion GDP.
What's actually happening
Allegedly the people in charge of McConnel won't declare him dead because that would trigger a special election, where he could be replaced by Democrat Charles Booker. Except Thomas Massie, a Republican-turned-independent, would almost certainly win if the party endorsed him. My admittedly poor understanding is that the party doesn't like Massie because he doesn't always support Trump and has principles; this is definitely a weakman, but does anyone have a steelman for why a brain-dead (or at best, long-term hospitalized) man is better? I mean, it's not like Congress is doing anything anyways.
Why Congress looking utterly incompetent matters
The United States government is at least supposed to appear to the median idiot to run the United States. What are children supposed to think when they see their 90 year old "representatives" literally die in office? Gen Z is not optimistic (even about their own party, and these are the Gen Z who still respond to polls).
I believe that ordinary citizens consciously and subconsciously look at their leaders for how to act, so leaders' shamelessness trickles down and causes low-level institutions to decay. This isn't a new theory. Why work hard when your politician gets paid more to, let alone adequately represent you, not even show up (or show up last Thursday for 30 seconds)?
And old politicians in general can't really understand young people concerns like AI, social fragmentation, and the HR-ificiation of jobs. I'm not asking for every politician to be young, but for example, more than 2% of the senate to be under 40 and more than 0(%) under 30.
How to fix?
Elect younger politicians.
I don't know what we can do beyond passive, mostly ineffective support. But even party insiders, I don't understand why they don't back younger candidates. They obviously must eventually back newer generations.
Is every potential young candidate as problematic as Graham Platner? 26-year old Davig Hogg could've been the DNC vice chair but was replaced, unofficially for criticizing established (older) candidates for being "asleep at the wheel" (sound familiar?), officially (not a Republican cariature, this was the actual reason) to maintain a diversity quota.
Other countries
Although political disillusionnment seems to be nearly global, other countries have less old politicians. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are a youthful 73, EU leader Ursula Von Der Leyen 67, Argentina's Javier Milei 55, and the 9 youngest current leaders are under 40 (the 10 youngest since 1795 are...too young).
I'm not sure why the US is so overtly dysfunctional in this area, or if other countries are more visibly dysfunctional in other areas. I'm curious if there have been very young politicians anywhere, and whether or not they've been popular or successful.
Brainwavez
26d ago
I program and would be surprised if LLMs haven't increased my productivity. Although maybe they atrophy skills, I'm still working myself at the high level, the LLMs help with boilerplate and bug fixes. They also answer questions that are too complex for a search engine, faster than I could on my own (and provide sources so I know they're accurate).
Brainwavez
26d ago
how is the human artist to make a living, between the…Charybdis of stupid anons
This is already a problem, has been before AI, and can become much worse without AI: companies overwork and underpay artists because otherwise they can find a faster, cheaper, sloppier-but-still-adequate replacement.
To fund and help artists, I believe it’s more productive to increase welfare, grants, or easy side-jobs, while reducing necessary effort and increasing background encouragement to create art, than attack AI which may replace them.
…Scylla of stupid experts…
But not all experts are stupid. If the majority who are awarding grants or otherwise funding artists select AI work, that’s a problem, but I think even if they preferred AI they’d try to select humans.
Brainwavez
26d ago
work that's obviously heavily AI written has already won at least two significant literary awards
Especially since it was “obvious” I’m skeptical those specific awards were ever worth taking seriously.
Likewise, obviously AI-generated blog posts frequently make the Hacker News frontpage, but I feel that reflects the declining quality of its userbase: the topic is actually often good, but the entire article is basically the title and maybe one or two details AI-expanded, a human-written article would’ve been better.
I have a simple test: AI can create art that is human-level to me when I like some work that is revealed to be AI (obviously or later). So far I have seen decent AI technical writing. I actually saw good pixel art I initially suspected was partly AI, but then I saw the artist livestreams so now I’m convinced it’s 100% human.
Why not?
The question that spawned this thread
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
is much less important if AI can’t, but a single human-AI hybrid can. For example
Radiologists continue to do just fine for themselves despite repeated promises of doom.
Some radiologists would always be employed, but much less who work much more efficiently.
We could even get exponentially increasing intelligence, although only by directly linking an AI chip to a human brain.
Brainwavez
26d ago
I’m sure AI already has some value with the amount of time it saves researchers and developers, and this is economic value because I’m sure these groups would pay above inference costs to keep using it. My understanding is that the vast majority of big AI companies’ massive debt is from training, and even the current inference costs may be profitable, but if they’re not and most customers had to they’d pay more.
Jobs are something I worry about, but as long as there are other decent jobs or something like UBI:
I don’t think devaluing (logical) intelligence really matters, because it’s like how strength has been devalued. It would still be far from useless, just not as important (and if you’re smart enough, in most cases already wasn’t as charisma): like people still want to be strong, want strong partners, strength helps in everyday situations.
And although today’s full curriculum may not be mandatory tomorrow (I think we already teach some generally unnecessary concepts), people will still go to school, like how we still exercise: at minimum for mental health and basic functioning (e.g. exercise for ability to walk without being out of breath, school for common sense); then some will do more because they intrinsically like to, or want a still-remaining benefit of innate knowledge.
People demand real art made by humans? Humans say they're making real art, but use AI to create it: human washing
I don’t predict a demand for real art as much as 1) artists prefer full control over their work and 2) AI art is generally mediocre, so the subjective best art to most people will be human.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” vaguely captures the problem: generating just the right image and editing it to be correct will be harder than creating the image from scratch. Generating a random mediocre image that matches a paragraph description is easy, but not worth much: 1) artists want to express themselves and 2) people with taste want something beyond mediocre.
If AI becomes hyper-competent 2) won’t be an issue, but then the AI should be able to make a tool that lets artists express themselves very easy and quickly, so most won’t bother automating it further.
Lawyers and doctors offering human accountability? Sure, but they'll still delegate all non-customer facing functionality to AIs: human washing.
I expect them to use AI and provide at minimum only humanity, but they’ll still be hired by people with more money than they can spend just for that. People waste money on handcrafted furniture and cookware when (unlike art) what’s made in the factory is functionally strictly better.
I predict (although I may be very wrong) in the near-medium term, no ASI but some very useful advancements. We didn’t get room temperature superconductors and cold fusion; but in the 1990s-2010s, we got expanded internet, improved technology by orders of magnitude (to the point we have things like hyperrealistic graphics that were probably hard to imagine before 2000), and less noticeable but significant advancements in medicine, food preservation etc. Likewise since 2020, we already have a chatbot that can research and explain niche knowledge across multiple domains, implement and debug code mostly correct up to a high level of abstraction, generate unrealistic images and video (although you can usually tell they’re generated if you look close), and even just basic actions are impressive, because everything is through natural conversation.
And there are drawbacks, like how society in 2010 gradually declined probably partly because of centralized internet services (enshittification) and general social media, and now AI is making people lazier and has reduced jobs in some fields. But I predict (again maybe optimistically) AI won’t destroy humanity or massively reduce jobs without generally-regarded-as-better replacements.
I don’t think it’s uncharitable, but I do believe the prominent rationalists are altruists (or less kindly, quokkas) who genuinely want regulation to save humanity and/or are using the threat for attention and funding.
It doesn’t matter, because the people implementing the regulation would almost certainly corrupt it for power and personal gain, including undermining it for themselves or their friends, unless it was designed so that corruption and undermining are almost impossible. If ASI needs much more chips than already exist, that may actually be feasible (because a defector must run many fabs, which takes a while and can’t be easy to hide).
Sure, people constantly make up words and abstractions to over-extend their argument. I accept that stochastic terrorism is just a broad form of incitement that can be applied to the most mundane rhetoric, that only a crazy person would interpret as an order to commit violence, because among >8 billion there are crazy people who will interpret mundane rhetoric as violence. And your examples demonstrate this: regardless of anyone's views on immigrants, saying they are dangerous and untrustworthy does not imply they should be brutalized or executed. And that there are only a couple instances of most of these, always by insane people who may have commit violence regardless, demonstrate that a significant effort to police mundane rhetoric isn't worth it.
Labels are intrinsically meaningless. I can invent a term "akjsdha terrorism" and classify anything I want, it doesn't make whatever I classify any more or less moral. And morality only matters for policy: are you deciding whether to commit "stochastic terrorism", how will you act and how will you advocate others to act against it?
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