And there is the trademark American response to being told no. Congratulations. We have successfully laid bare the source of Trump's recent diplomatic problems.
I'm not even being sarcastic, really. This is literally it. This is how it went down, recreated live.
Corvos
7hr ago
unless the concept of wanting to negotiate a land deal is inherently disrespectful
See? You do get it, even if you don't agree with it.
Corvos
8hr ago
Yes, but there's a time and a place. To take a deliberately extreme example, a businessman who declines to rule out raping your wife isn't keeping his options open; that's not an option you're supposed to have. Or to want, for that matter.
Corvos
9hr ago
I don't think anybody serious would propose that the Louisiana Purchase is absurd.
Did anyone ask the Cajuns? Nowadays the idea of just buying another part of a country is considered inappropriate.
Hong Kong returning to the Chinese
the reunification of East and West Germany
You are proving my point. All of your examples are the rectification of borders after an act of colonial aggression, or sorting out some weird issues where it's not clear how a border runs through a town and some buildings end up where they don't want to be.
Like it or not, that is very different from, "I have loads of money and a big stick. You have land. I think you see where this is going, but it can go easy or hard. Your choice."
Corvos
10hr ago
I actually get very tired of people claiming to take offense at fundamentally normal behavior
Alternative hypothesis: you may have a very unique idea of what constitutes normal. The modern first world has a very, very strong norm of borders not moving, for obvious reasons. What Trump has been doing with Denmark and Canada is like shitting on the pavement and then being surprised that everyone's offended or mocking: doesn't everyone shit? Yes, but in a very different place and manner.
It's not normal to spitball about annexing territory, and hasn't been normal to negotiate the possibility since the 1940s, especially when you accompany those 'negotiations' with obvious threats.
I can believe that. I guess what concerns me is that institutionally the same machinery has to apply to me and to Nutty Alice, and there seems to be a strong presumption that the role of a doctor is to constrain the patient and that a patient researching their own condition is essentially misbehaving. From there it's only a hop, skip and a jump to "people shouldn't be able to get medical advice from AI, and doctors should ignore it when they do".
Whereas instead we could work hard to make AI better at obtaining clinical histories and to make feedback loops with reality via diagnostics faster and cheaper. Maybe cutting Nutty Alice off if she exceeds some kind of monthly limit.
More broadly, and with what I hope is appropriate tact, I guess I see this as another skirmish in the long-running war over whether doctors should be respected servants or priests. It's simultaneously true that doctors have genuine expertise and it's often sensible "not to [flatter their patients' biases] due to the negative outcomes associated with that", while also being true that from the patient perspective doctors' anti-sycophancy training seems to be dialled so high that the relationship feels antagonistic. The default response to patients with their own opinions seems to be "no" rather than "yes, but".
To put it another way,
"suffering sometimes is part of life. If you have a viral illness you need to wait it out and take care of yourself most of the time, the doctor will not be able to do anything and rarely is it worth confirming which URI it is,"
is true but doesn't seem to me to be striking quite the right attitude for a relationship that I conceive of as client and service provider.
A lawyer who tells you, "mate, it's not worth suing, even if you win the damages won't be worth it" or a plumber who tells you, "plastic pipes sweat a bit in the cold, it doesn't mean there's an issue" is worth their weight in gold. A lawyer who tells you, "all landlords steal your deposit, come back when you've got real problems" or a plumber who says, "pipes do that, call me when there's an actual leak"... not so much.
With respect to viral illnesses, I might have a better opinion of anti-virals than the doctor does, or I might suspect it's actually something else and want a test to check even if the doctor thinks I'm being silly, or I might just be really really interested in URI strains. In that scenario I think it's more productive to give me access to cheap good advice and make my wishes easier to fulfil than to litigate whether or not I'm permitted to have them. If Nutty Alice needs special accommodation I'd rather we tried to lay down some rules for her specifically than constrain everyone.
Caveats: some issues genuinely need gatekeeping, such as coordination problems like antibiotics or medical interventions with genuine health risks. I'm talking about a change in the relationship during diagnosis and exploratory treatment, not opening up the medical cabinet to all comers.
Caveats the second: I have experience with the British private system but not the American one (which might be quite different).
Intuition pump: debugging is usually the slowest and most annoying part of fixing any problem. Making each debugging attempt cost hundreds of dollars and take 20 minutes max and have a 25% chance of being refused outright is very inefficient.
Yeeees, you're probably not wrong, but if you reverse the viewpoint to get the patient's experience for these examples you get:
dealing with an anxious patient who repeatedly asks the AI until they get the answer they want
The doctor repeatedly dismisses your concerns.
assholes
The doctor dislikes you.
rationing care (which the AI has no facility with)
The doctor agrees you would benefit from something but refuses to give it to you anyway
And when you put it like that you can kind of see why so many people use LLMs. I think this is one of those 'the only way out is through' situations where it would be far more useful to improve the availability of testing while also training the AI to fluidly guide people through quick home diagnostics, so they can get solid evidence. The alternative seems to be sticking with the current situation of, "pay the doctor $500 dollars for twenty minutes of thought and hope desperately he/she doesn't think you're a whiny crybaby or too convinced of your story'.
Corvos
1d ago
Handling contract negotiations with employers. It's far faster and cheaper than lawyers, more straightforward with you, and can draft replacements for contract language you don't like rather than just telling your employer you don't like it and getting back something substantively similar.
With writing the human intent is important. The point is to read and understand your thoughts, not what an AI has synthesized.
This is only one way of conceiving writing. It's equally fair to say that the point is to read something interesting, useful and thought-provoking. Personally I like films and love books but have never had the least interest in actors/directors and only the faintest interest in authors. I just like good stories. I accept that some people feel differently, but the idea that reading/writing is meant to be a kind of meeting of souls is really very foreign to me.
Corvos
2d ago
My fear is opposition to this creep is a gut-level intuition that is harder to articulate than water usage fears or job replacement, or the dignity of artists or whatever. And so it goes unarticulated
Sounds rough. You should try getting an AI to articulate it.
(I joke, of course)
Corvos
2d ago
It’s not about revealing Wormtongue (which is a nickname anyway), it’s about giving Theoden the courage to do what he already knows needs to be done. Wormtongue is providing a plausible excuse to do nothing, that’s all.
Corvos
3d ago
I don't think that you have spent any meaningful time in Europe, have you? Like it or not, Europe was profoundly shaped by post-war American ideology aided by American money and American consultancies and American foreign policy, and you can see it wherever you go.
Corvos
3d ago
We had English rioters screaming "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" in a country where the police are famously unarmed. Unconscious bias and the push for diversity were justified by reference to the Harvard Business Review.
Woke came from America.
Corvos
3d ago
We were not talking about Britain, France or Denmark. We were talking about Germany, where the history is as I've said. You're welcome to look it up.
Germany is of course the most powerful and influential country in the EU, and American woke contagion has been very influential worldwide - see the spectre of 99% white Ireland searching for some black people it could have wronged - but that does not make America responsible for all Europe's stupid decisions.
A big part of those decisions is simply management culture and the kind of tribal diplomacy that you end up doing once you have a foreigner in every conversation IMO.
Corvos
4d ago
Maybe. I still think that not wanting to look like imperial dictators who take your sovereign rights whether you want them to or not is important to the Americans, it holds together a good half of the empire that would otherwise demand a much higher level of oversight and bribery and wrangling. There's a decent amount of leverage there, but you have to show yourself willing to employ it.
In all seriousness, why not? Why is it in Denmark's interests for the US to take control of Denmark's territory and use it as a military staging ground, to do all the usual espionage and bugging and economic coercion that they do, giving nothing back, but opening those opportunities to multiple patrons and seeing what offers they get isn't in Denmark's interest?
Because the Chinese will take over their sovereign territory in exchange for $20M investment? sorry, too soon. Because the Chinese will eventually crush them with an iron fist and rule over them like they do Hong Kong? The Americans really are good guys and the Chinese really are bad guys?
I'm being snarky, but I genuinely want to know.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
Lord Palmerston
Corvos
4d ago
You don't think that having a choice of patrons is in Denmark's national interest?
Corvos
4d ago
It does seem fair to point out that America created modern Germany, in pretty much its current form. If I remember rightly, a lot of the German opposition to free speech, the censorship apparatus and one-party media was put in place by America for obvious reasons, and the CIA maintained a very strong grip over German media for decades.
Corvos
5d ago
SpO2 sensors on wearables tend to be very bad AFAIK. Check your specific sensor @thejdizzler.
Corvos
5d ago
I think changes come primarily with new startups who genuinely need to be efficient.
See, I get that, when put politely.
I think it's a bit sad, and I do think that to some degree it lines you up with "if it please you m'lud, grandpappy was a Kenyan terrorist" Obama and "did I mention I'm Irish" Biden in the queue of people happy to drop a long-term ally in the cacky for internal political reasons. (I know it looks different from the American side).
But if that is how you feel, I'd prefer America just separate. It's the current attitude of "we despise you pathetic cucks, now give us the land we want and buy our helicopters and pay us eighty bajillion dollars or we'll bump up tariffs even more and if you think of cooperating with China we'll destroy you, though even the Red Chinese are more impressive than you, cuck" I object to. I'm as pleased as anyone that woke is severely weakened, but I wish it hadn't come with all the other stuff.
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