ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
Which paragraphs are these?
The first examples are the ones I already cited, with blockquotes.
Fong Yue Ting
I would definitely bin these under the category of being just, "Yeah, dude's obviously getting deported." But let's take a look at a few pieces of the opinion of the Court. The syllabus begins with a banger:
The right to exclude or to expel aliens, or any class of aliens, absolutely or upon certain conditions, in war or in peace, is an inherent and inalienable right of every sovereign nation.
The opinion basically begins by citing Nishimura Ekiu v. United States:
"It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe...
Then, citing Chae Chan Ping v. United States:
"Those laborers are not citizens of the United States; they are aliens. That the Government of the United States, through the action of the Legislative Department, can exclude aliens from its territory, is a proposition which we do not think open to controversy. Jurisdiction over its own territory to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its independence. If it could not exclude aliens, it would be, to that extent, subject to the control of another power... [emphasis added]
That is, there is actually something lost in terms of jurisdiction if they are not able to exclude aliens. That would be very strange if such individuals are "subject to the jurisdiction thereof". What about the whole hullabaloo about whether you can call it an "invasion"? The Court cites Knox v. Lee to basically say that this question doesn't matter:
If, therefore, the Government of the United States, through its Legislative Department, considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security, their exclusion is not to be stayed because at the time there are no actual hostilities with the nation of which the foreigners are subjects. The existence of war would render the necessity of the proceeding only more obvious and pressing. The same necessity, in a less pressing degree, may arise when war does not exist, and the same authority which adjudges the necessity in one case must also determine it in the other.
They cite various "commentators on the law of the nations":
"The Government of each State has always the right to compel foreigners who are found within its territory to go away, by having them taken to the frontier. This right is based on the fact that, the foreigner not making part of the nation, his individual reception into the territory is matter of pure permission, of simple tolerance, and creates no obligation... [emphasis added]
Shades of "implicit license". Again, the Congress has given no permission, no license, for them to be here at all. Actually, a bit more on licences:
Whatever license, therefore, Chinese laborers may have obtained previous to the act of October 1, 1888, to return to the United States after their departure is held at the will of the Government, revocable at any time at its pleasure...
and
In view of that decision, which, as before observed, was a unanimous judgment of the Court, and which had the concurrence of all the Justices who had delivered opinions in the cases arising under the acts of 1882 and 1884, it appears to be impossible to hold that a Chinese laborer acquired, under any of the treaties or acts of Congress, any right, as a denizen, or otherwise, to be and remain in this country except by the license, permission, and sufferance of Congress, to be withdrawn whenever, in its opinion, the public welfare might require it.
It really seems that illegal aliens simply lack any licence, implied or otherwise. Of course, if they are permitted, then they are subject to the laws:
By the law of nations, doubtless, aliens residing in a country with the intention of making it a permanent place of abode acquire, in one sense, a domicile there, and, while they are permitted by the nation to retain such a residence and domicile, are subject to its laws and may invoke its protection against other nations.
and
Chinese laborers, therefore, like all other aliens residing in the United States for a shorter or longer time, are entitled, so long as they are permitted by the Government of the United States to remain in the country, to the safeguards of the Constitution, and to the protection of the laws, in regard to their rights of person and of property, and to their civil and criminal responsibility. [emphasis added]
Again, what if they are not permitted or licenced? Are they then entitled to the safeguards of the Constitution and so forth? The implication sure seems to be no.
So yeah, my read of that opinion is that it's basically just, "Yeah, dude's obviously getting deported." And moreover, it reaffirms that aliens need some sort of permission or license to be here (implicit or otherwise), without which, it's not even clear that we can even say that they are entitled to any of the safeguards of the Constitution (much as you and I might want it to be otherwise), much less that they are considered subject to the laws or jurisdiction even if they were so entitled.
Why would the Wong Kim Ark Court even consider the question of whether blatantly illegal aliens were some special class of exemptions in a Constitutional protection when they had already linked to prior precedent that essentially said that they were categorically ineligible to appeal to any sort of Constitutional protection whatsoever?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
if that list is the list
I would add a different emphasis. If this list is the list. That's the entire question. There is no need to reason backwards. You can very easily reason forward and just observe that they very clearly had a holding concerning a legal resident, spoke about a variety of considerations that come into play (some of which cut one way, some of which cut the other way), and then made a list of the situations that they considered were clear exceptions. They even talked about the reasons why they weren't adding other exceptions... and some of those reasons cut one way, and some of them cut the other way.
19th century law is irrelevant to illegal immigration, because "illegal immigration didn't exist at the time" is ahistorical
Is there any historical evidence that the Justices in Wong Kim Ark had engaged with any case of an illegal immigrant who just flagrantly violated the law by going to the US and then just staying... that was not just, "Yeah, dude's obviously getting deported"?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
'He is none the less an alien, because of his having a commercial domicile in this country. While he lawfully remains here, he is entitled to the benefit of the guaranties of life, liberty, and property, secured by the constitution to all persons, of whatever race, within the jurisdiction of the United States. His personal rights when he is in this country, and such of his property as is here during his absence, are as fully protected by the supreme law of the land as if he were a native or naturalized citizen of the United States. But when he has voluntarily gone from the country, and is beyond its jurisdiction, being an alien, he cannot re-enter the United States in violation of the will of the government as expressed in enactments of the law-making power.'
This part is pretty operative, citing Lem Moon Sing. "While he lawfully remains here." What happens if he just blatantly "re-enters the United States in violation of the will of the government as expressed in enactments of the law-making power"? The Wong Kim Ark Court simply does not address this case at all. In such a case, is he "entitled to the benefit of the guaranties of life, liberty, and property, secured by the constitution to all persons"? The Court seems to imply some sort of "no". Again, they seem to lack an "implicit license". It is messy and not clear whether they owe or are ascribed to owe a 'temporary and local allegiance'. It is, of course, abundantly unclear how this affects any child that follows such clear lawbreaking. The Court here very directly reasoned IF A THEN B, where A is "is lawfully present". "Congress, you can keep them out, but IF you let them come in lawfully, THEN..." There is just nothing that is, "Congress, you very clearly stated that you are keeping them out, but nonetheless, they completely violated the entire premise of the argument, such that we're in NotA, and therefore..." It's just nowhere to be found. It's just an unspoken assumption that if Congress says they stay out, then they stay out, and there's not even a question to be answered. They really, actually, did not consider a legit illegal alien who plainly violates the law of entry and is not lawfully present.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I feel like I heard about a proposal that the US military radical reduce force size, essentially becoming a force of all-elite soldiers who are highly trained and highly paid. Just get rid of everything except the tip of the spear, and if shit ever hit the fan, they could rapidly train civilians like what happened in World War II.
The "tooth-to-tail ratio" has been pretty low for a long time, since the advent of mechanized warfare. There are always food fights as to what the right number "should" be, and it's unlikely that anyone is going to solve that problem in a few comments on the internet. For the purposes of this comment, I'll take it as mostly a given that, when you actually go to war, you probably need something in the historical range. The question then becomes whether you can successfully and rapidly train civilians to perform all of those other tasks. I would guess probably not. I don't have super precise reasons that I can enumerate; I'm mostly just going on a background feeling that I got from when I listened to a bunch of this podcast, which is all about one of the big training centers.
So what happens there is that they have some folks stationed there who comprise a "red force"; they play the "bad guys". Then, another group of folks (I believe brigade-sized) show up and they set up a scenario and have a big fight ("fake" fight, with equipment like this to help judge when someone is declared magically dead). The US has a lot of brigades, so it's not like they're all down there all the time. You might train and do stuff mostly at your home station, and then every few years or whatever, your brigade will get a slot to go down there and test out your training, see how you do, see what works and what doesn't work so well.
The sense that I got is that a lot of the problems are not, "We don't have enough exquisitely-trained elite soldiers." They're operational stuff. How do you actually get people and equipment to where they need to go? How do you make sure resupplies happen when needed? How do you reorient to new information/objectives? How do you handle CASEVAC so that your teeth can get back to biting? (I've heard that the expectation is that with the move to LSCO, they're expecting significantly higher casualty rates and significantly higher strain on CASEVAC operations, which have to sync well with the teeth.) How do you manage equipment breakdowns? Etc.
It's easy to think that it's easy to just train someone to plan out logistics or to just drive a pile of stuff from one place to another or to pick up a casualty and take them somewhere safe and so on and so forth, but my sense is that getting all that stuff right is actually really really hard. I'm sure they also have plenty of lessons learned and lists of things that didn't work well on the level of the small groups of elite shooters (which they probably just don't talk about on a public podcast), but my sense is that all of these other things are actually important in order for the shooters to be able to do their jobs... and that these other things are actually kind of hard, that they don't "just happen", and that there's a reason that they bring the entire brigade to these events so that they can test their training and make sure the tail is well-oiled enough that the teeth can bite.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
And it’s not as though the Court wasn’t thinking about non-residents and illegal immigrants. On the subject of non-residents, the Court approvingly quotes the common-law rule that birthright citizenship applies “whether the parents were settled, or merely temporarily sojourning, in the country, was an English subject.” The dissent is even clearer about this:
The English common-law rule recognized no exception in the instance of birth during the mere temporary or accidental sojourn of the parents. As allegiance sprang from the place of birth regardless of parentage, and supervened at the moment of birth, the inquiry whether the parents were permanently or only temporarily within the realm was wholly immaterial.
Correct that they acknowledged temporary folks could count, but why? What was the Court thinking about? And yes, what were they not thinking about? The Court (not the dissent, which the linked author cites) actually helpfully asks this question in considering whether there are other exceptions. They cite The Schooner Exchange v. M’Faddon:
The reasons for not allowing to other aliens exemption “from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found” were stated as follows:
When private individuals of one nation spread themselves through another as business or caprice may direct, mingling indiscriminately with the inhabitants of that other, or when merchant vessels enter for the purposes of trade, it would be obviously inconvenient and dangerous to society, and would subject the laws to continual infraction and the government to degradation, if such individuals or merchants did not owe temporary and local allegiance, and were not amenable to the jurisdiction of the country. Nor can the foreign sovereign have any motive for wishing such exemption. His subjects thus passing into foreign counties are not employed by him, nor are they engaged in national pursuits. Consequently there are powerful motives for not exempting persons of this description from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found, and no one motive for requiring it. The implied license, therefore, under which they enter can never be construed to grant such exemption.
So, uh, what is the implied license under which illegal immigrants enter? Clearly, this decision was at a time where people could just enter as a temporary or accidental sojourn. They didn't have to climb over a wall or anything. "They just let you do it," as they say, and there was nothing illicit about it. Thus, the Court in The Exchange found that their entry was governed by an implied license. What is the implied license by which a modern day illegal immigrant enters? Do they owe temporary and local allegiance? What does that look like? What do we do with a situation where the laws of the United States expressly say that they do not have any license to enter, implied or otherwise? The Court in Wong Kim Ark really, actually, was not thinking about such a case in any way; it was not possible for them to even conceive of it! It is messy; it's very messy.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
If you want to fail to recognize real distinctions, there's not much I can do about it.
Then by all means, make a real distinction.
But my point is that it is impossible to tell from the funding agency reaction whether the cuts are not enough, enough, or too much.
Perhaps from your position. I have a bit more of an inside scoop. A bit of a grapevine, yes, but more specifics rather than just general complaints. In any event, I'm glad that you seem to be in agreement that just complete, indiscriminate, chemotherapy shutting down of everything would be bad; at this point, it sort of boils down to an estimation problem, which sort of boils down to one's sources of data signals.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Yes, I would oppose banning difficult-to-crack encryption even if that made it harder to get at the wokies.
That's how we know that we need to kill you and yours indiscriminately. You're not celebrating or showing any relief. Obviously, you have pledged fealty to the wokies.
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now.
But they'd probably act that way if $1 was being cut, or they weren't getting an accustomed-to increase.
No, that is not at all what I've been hearing. Do you think the reality of the situation is that $1 is being cut or that they're just not getting an accustomed-to increase?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
My image of you is as a guy with a lot of red tribe values who lives in a deep blue tribe situation.
Nah. I have lived in more blue tribe situations (not coincidentally and most prominently at university), but I've got a nice red tribe situation going on these days.
but when they tried to compromise they kept getting shafted. Imperfect action is preferable to indefinite wheel spinning, and we have been spinning our wheels for decades.
I'm not asking for compromise. I'm not asking for nothing but perfect action. I'm asking for methods that are actually going to accomplish the goals rather than indiscriminate chemo that will only destroy stuff and be ineffective in actually changing behavior. And if you're someone who's in it for the brutality of hurting your ideological opponents, my suggestions will bring far more pain to their bad goals.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
because the fighters would immediately stop using that tactic as soon as the Americans started killing the fighters by shooting them through the human shields
...
refraining from shooting at an enemy soldier because he uses innocent (or maybe not) civilians as shields rewards and thereby encourages the use of human shields
The absolute key question here is to what extent the applied effects change behavior. It is good that you have found an example where shooting particular hostages (those directly attached to an enemy fighter as a shield) provides game theoretic incentives to change behavior and get to a better outcome. Certainly, there are other situations where shooting hostages randomly is not likely to have a similar effect. So, the question we have to answer is what methods actually affect the game theory such that they are likely to affect change and accomplish our goals. I comment on that here.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
You're buying into it being lazily-indiscriminate
The prevailing sentiment of the comments here are calling for it to be intentionally indiscriminate. This is a clear motte-and-bailey. The motte is, "We can stop some of the most egregious wokeness going on, including outright discrimination on the basis of race/gender," and the bailey is, "We've completely lost the ability to extend a single shred of trust or faith, so we're going to indiscriminately shut it all down, like we're performing chemotherapy."
FWIW, I proposed pretty damn harsh coercive measures to force universities to fix shit a while back. It would cause them vastly more pain at an organizational level, with almost no need to interrogate individual grants much. One might even say that the stick behind such coercion would be 'indiscriminate' (why should someone who is researching the material properties of some new alloy structure or whatever lose their funding because the fru-frus on the other side of campus are discriminating based on race/gender?), but it would be applying significant leverage with a clear demand. It would be vastly more effective at driving plenary change, with clear game theory involved. Rather than random, indiscriminate shutting down of everything, such that no one has any idea how they can change behavior in order to benefit, it would be clear that institutions which manage to clean house are going to make bank, especially since those institutions which can't manage to clean house are going to be shut out entirely. Moreover, it also changes the individual incentives. If you're a hard sciencer who doesn't give a shit about wokeness, you might still find yourself accepting a job at a woke-ass uni, because that might be the place that really enables you to get grants, have equipment/space, top students, whatever. If suddenly, it doesn't matter what you personally do/don't do in your research, but staying at a woke uni means you're forbidden from getting grants, while moving to a cleaned up uni means gravy train, the unis that manage to clean house are going to get showered in top tier talent. No more unis managing to somehow attract some set of possibly politically-neutral, bank-making talent that they skim from to fund their crazy wokies.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I oppose the position of banning difficult-to-crack encryption for government convenience
Even to get at the wokies?! I oppose ridding ourselves of all research, even to get at the wokies.
I do think that's a lot of what's going on with the objections to the science stuff
Please speak to me as a person.
it's not indiscriminate
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now. And people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate. If you disagree with them, then you agree with me.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
we don't trust you
I don't know who you think I am, so I don't know why you would or would not trust me.
I'm not sure what else to make of your comment. You think people are just being hyperbolic and angry, and that they're just saying dumb stuff that doesn't make sense? Uh, okay? Then why is all the research getting stopped/slashed?
is there anyone saying "we need to straight up ban tertiary education!"
Nah. Honestly, even that would be better tailoring. Plenty of chunks of those research dollars go to corporate research. There are sooooo many better things you could do if you're just pissed at the stupidity in academia.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Anti-inductive system. You don't know where the developments are going to go. It's great the SV is doing a good job ATM. Their efforts are within the house of "trudging along", not a replacement for it.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I don't think you know who my "ilk" is.
Nor do you know who the hard sciencers are.
If you mean things like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative
Way beyond that. Let's go with an analogy. Instead of it being the UK gov't coming in and telling Apple that they've gotta shut down ADP, suppose that was one of the Trump administration's first moves. (It might still happen!) They've gotta get at those horrible wokies who are now using encryption to #resist against the true and proper administration. They just start slashing out at everything. Signal, Telegram, etc. It's all gotta go. Are you going to be first in line to celebrate... or at least show some relief? Glad that the President is taking the chemotherapy approach, so his FBI can go after all the wokies tryna hide their nefarious #resistance?
If the US is to fund telescopes in Chile, that money needs to go to telescopes in Chile.
I haven't looked at that grant, but I'm pretty confident that the vastly most probable reality is that it did exactly that. Again, look, I'm on board with taking away stupid throwaway sentences; I'm on board with way way way more than that! I'd be perfectly happy with what I mentioned in my previously-linked comment; you could conditional all federal funding on them not discriminating on the basis of race/gender... at the institutional level. This would be a huge huge thing, and it would hit everything that universities do, not even just what they put as a throwaway sentence in a grant application. This would actually be focused on the problem. Not just stopping everything, slashing all the funding agencies indiscriminately, and giving the chemo treatment. The prevailing opinion here is that it should all just be shut down, because "universities bad". And, frankly, I am super sympathetic, because there is so much of the universities that I hate. Not even just the wokeness; I complain about their gov't-enforced perfect price discrimination and their stranglehold on accreditation/certification and more. I would love to have so many things change in the intersection between gov't/academia. But, "We can't tell what's good encrypted communication research and bad encrypted communication research, so maybe we just shouldn't have any encrypted communication research," is not the way, in my opinion.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I believe so. I don't see what the relevance of that really is, though? Is your point that now we should be more suspicious of what they're saying, because they have skin in the military funding game?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Computer science is mathematics
Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.
we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief.
I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
The most important question for any such categorization system is where you put the 75% of spending that is the major entitlement programs. There is almost no point in even discussing whether one should approach the problem with fast, indiscriminate, chemotherapy-like measures or not without at least putting that one in a category.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
@jeroboam (Not at'ing you, bro. Just want to give props for a good comment.)
In 1913, the federal budget was only about 2-3% of GDP. It was funded almost entirely by tariffs.
Today, the federal budget is about 25% of GDP, funded mostly by taxes of individuals.
I missed this comment the first time 'round, and it's a great reminder of the scale of things. I'd like to add another observation. 75% of that current spending is the big entitlements (SS,Medicare,Health,Income Security) and interest on the debt, all things that were adopted post-WWI, which explains the lion's share of what is now a completely different beast of a federal government. If you killed everything other than current defense spending, you're still at 3.5% of GDP. This beast is not something that you can trim around the edges, maybe find some fraud or waste here and there, maybe fire a few bureaucrats, and call it a day. It's something completely different. It's not even about the government actively doing stuff for the most part. For the most part, it's just taking your money, putting it under some shells, mixing it around (sneaking a little out the back for the host), and giving it back to either you or other people who they prefer.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Most of them [hard sciencers] are believers.
I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.
The particular thing starting this thread is complaining about impacts to an internship program designed to discriminate against white and Asian men.
That's still not all that it is.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I am heavily sympathetic to your concern, but research, especially military-related research (which is 40% of federal basic research), is not an area where we have much of an alternate mechanism, for reasons I outlined here. It's not like business, where a dispassionate economist can sit back and confidently believe that the market will appropriately determine winners/losers with showers of cash/bankruptcy, depending on whether they ultimately provide value to the market, in this case comforted by the fact that they are putting their own skin in the game.
Instead, we have a situation where your military is very very rarely 'tested' (in fact, ideally it is very rare). You very rarely get actual feedback. When you do, you do not have access to the counterfactual of what would have happened if you had invested differently. Yet, you almost certainly have to invest in this in the modern world. Your adversaries are investing, and from what I've read, the adversaries of the US are investing very specifically to counter existing US systems (and near-term planned systems they they've learned about via espionage). If you simply stop and they do not, it is highly likely that they will counter your systems, push further to develop overmatch systems, and proceed to be able to conquer you and yours.
As such, your problem is to determine how to invest. This is a wicked problem. As I said in the linked comment:
Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money?
Those experts will have skin in the game. The general who thinks airplanes will change the nature of warfare? Probably part of whatever cluster of folks who became the Army Air Force. They were probably personally invested in aircraft. If their ideas were embraced, they were likely to be the people leading those efforts, in charge of said investments. If their ideas were not embraced, they were likely to be sidelined, a bit player in comparison to whoever else's theory of military progression was embraced. Those other people, with other beliefs, telling you that airplanes are just toys? Yeah, they have skin in the game, too. They think that there's some other thing (probably in their portfolio) that is going to be dominant in the next fight. Who do you believe? How do you invest? Do you just cut them all off because they have skin in the game? As discussed, that's probably not going to lead to better results, and you probably couldn't measure it with respect to the counterfactual even if it did.
It is fundamentally a wicked hard problem, especially because the nature of warfare is anti-inductive (as soon as you find and exploit something that seems to work, your adversaries notice and respond accordingly). Trudging along and trying to just make the best decisions for your research investments at each point in time, knowing that everyone who is trying to convince you of their vision of the future probably has skin in the game, is probably the best you can do. At least, I don't really see a better way to proceed. I also don't think the right response to realizing that there doesn't seem to be any good options other than trudging is to just give up and quit, either. I think that probably leads to China just countering all US systems and dominating militarily.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Alternatively, as @jeroboam said in a follow-up to one of my prior comments, there were probably boomercons who just read it in BusinessWeek and actually believed that there was some untapped source of talent that was falling through some magical cracks or something. Over time, more and more people have wizened up, realizing that the magical gainz predicted simply have not occurred. It does take a little time for that realization to cascade (related?). Like, yes, congratulations to you, The_Nybbler, for realizing it earlier (as did I), but it's pretty insane to think that even the most milquetoast versions, at all time points in the cascade, were fealty pledges.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
All this is, is taking away the grants which include the praise of Stalin.
If that were all that it was, we would be in a good place. I think a majority of hard sciencers would be completely fine with that. Maybe some small set of gatekeepers at some set of institutions would be unhappy, but kinda who cares? But yeah, that's not all that it is.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I didn't view my comment as a counter to yours. Just that it's something to keep in mind about the inherent difficulty of evaluating whether a system has achieved the goal of, "healthcare is very available and almost everyone can afford it".
Is your point that since caviar is expensive, poor people should starve?
Absolutely not. I don't see how that would make any sense.
Or that you don't want caviar to become cheap because then poor people could eat it and somehow that makes you lose?
This would also make no sense.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
healthcare is very available and almost everyone can afford it
Regular reminder that "healthcare" is not a monolithic thing. It's usually a question of "how much healthcare". Bandaids and aspirin are "healthcare". So is a novel $1M treatment. There is a huge, huge spectrum in between. One could have access to and be able to afford vast swaths of types of healthcare, but some folks want to say, "...yeah, but if they don't also have this, then they don't have 'access to healthcare'." One simply cannot put everything in a single bucket and then make a judgment as to whether people have 'access' to that entire bucket. One must necessarily start thinking about types and gradations of healthcare.
One example I like to give is what the medical response "should" be to someone who has a bit of soreness in their wrist. Something feels "not quite right", but it doesn't necessarily have any other significant indications of anything major going on. For the vast majority of people, the answer should probably be some form of, "Maybe heat/ice/whatever (I don't actually know or care what details), maybe an OTC painkiller if you want. Come back if it gets worse or doesn't get any better after X weeks." But if you're an MVP quarterback and you're nearing the playoffs, they might want to do an MRI and this and that and this and that (again, don't know, don't care about the details). Determining any information about the likely progression, whether it's likely to get worse if they play in the next non-playoff game, maybe tailoring what you do in hopes to shave even a week or two off of the full recovery time is immensely valuable to them. What is the One Monolithic "Healthcare" in this situation, such that we should ask whether it is very available and almost everyone can afford it? There is no such thing.
My reaction was that this is just about like most other advances in ML - simultaneously really cool/impressive and hilariously bad. It is genuinely really cool and impressive that it's done as well as it has. Someone on YouTube took a more pure RL approach a few years back, and it failed suuuuuper hilariously badly (in beautifully hilarious ways). Claude has definitely done better, and that's pretty legit, given that the core of it was trained to be an LLM, not to play video games. But one of the most true statements about ML still seems to hold true: "It's great when you want to model something where you don't know how to describe the underlying structure... and you're okay with it being hilariously wrong some percentage of the time." Some might think that the percentage of time that it's hilariously wrong is just a little bit too high, and it won't even need to drop that much before it works out pretty decently.
It's not surprising that it needs some scaffolding. The Bitter Lesson Believers will always believe in their hearts that they can eventually drop the scaffolding, and maybe they'll be able to, sometimes. But most of the big advances we've had in ML are because we've exploited some sort of structure in the world. And the most killer applications are where we have very good feedback in a very structured fashion (e.g., tree structures in board games, math/coding engines, etc.).
It definitely puts a damper on any predictions that AI is going to ingeniously conquer the world later this year, but as you project further and further into the future, it's always a matter of, "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
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