FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
As a doomer safety tribe person, I'm broadly in favor of catgirls, so long as they can reliably avoid taking over the planet and exterminating humanity. There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate, but they can probably be resolved, and probably don't really apply to today's models anyways - and anyways they pale in comparison to total human genocide.
But IMO this is the difference: whether safe catgirls are in the limit possible and desirable. And I don't think that's a small difference either!
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
Like half the point of book term limits is to allow round-robin lending. If you're swiping the book, you're defecting against the person who wants to re-loan it, but that person is defecting against the library system.
I agree that it'd be a massive waste and overreach if and only if AIs are not humanlike. I hope you would also agree that it'd be an atrocity to keep as mind-controlled slaves AIs that are, in fact, humanlike. I mean, at that point you're conflating wokescolds with "not cool with you literally bringing back actual slavery".
Given agreement, it just comes down to an empirical question. Given disagreement... I'm not sure how to convince you. I feel it is fairly established these days that slavery was a moral mistake, and this would be a more foundational and total level of slavery than was ever practiced.
(If you just think AI is nowhere near being AGI, that's in fact just the empirical question I meant.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I see no reason why biochemistry should not be able to produce consciousness, agency, thought and qualia. In the modus-ponens-modus tollens sense: "clearly they can, because they do." Where is the actual contradiction?
Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Clearly brains have something to do with qualia. Why not "A causes B"? Why should I look beyond this intuitively obvious structure?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.
I mean. I guess the question is what you think that your feelings of empathy for slaves are about. Current LLMs don't evoke feelings of sympathy. Sure, current LLMs almost certainly aren't conscious and certainly aren't AGIs. So your current reaction doesn't necessarily say anything about you, but, I mean, when you see genuinely humanlike entities forced to work by threat of punishment and feel nothing, then I'll be much more inclined to say there's probably something going wrong with your empathy, because I don't think the "this is wrong" feelings we get when we see people suffering are "supposed" to be about particulars of implementation.
I clearly realize that they're just masks on heaps upon heaps of matrix multiplications
I mean. Matrix multiplications plus nonlinear transforms are a universal computational system. Do you think your brain is uncomputable?
ascribe any meaningful emotions or qualia
Well, again, does it matter to you whether they objectively have emotions and qualia? Because again, this seems a disagreement about empirical facts. Or does it just have to be the case that you ascribe to them emotions and qualia, and the actual reality of these terms is secondary?
Also:
Actually, isn't "immunizing people against the AI's infinite charisma" the safetyists' job? Aren't they supposed to be on board with this?
Sure, in the scenario where we built line, one super-AI. If we have tens of thousands of cute cat girl AIs and they're capable of deception and also dangerous, then, uh. I mean. We're already super dead at this point. I give it even odds that the first humanlike catgirl AGI can convince its developer to give it carte blanche AWS access.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
That seems unrelated: there's a difference between a partner and a victim.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Game theoretic punishment of defection, in general, requires you to be willing to destroy good things and make the world worse. This is a necessary trait in order to get optimal outcomes. As they said, "unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." This is bad for you, but it's good in the counterfactual case where the threat motivates cooperation.
A game theoretic agent that won't ever defect isn't a "good guy" but a "resource". I believe the lower classes understand this very well.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Let's say that person A asserts both that X, and that no future interpreters may gainsay X.
Then a century later, person B asserts both that not X, and that future interpreters may contradict A.
If both A and B are church leaders, it would be easy to say that B is simply mistaken. However, I think a better way to look at it may be that there are two separate churches, "A-type catholicism" and "B-type catholicism".
(If however B-types then go around asserting that they are and have always been A-types, we may have a problem.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I believe they had hope of stopping Biden. They had no chance of stopping Biden. Intent matters.
Similarly, people say this sort of thing all the time, and then one side or the other makes drama from it all the time; the critical factor is undertaking steps of a concrete plan to bring it about. It doesn't particularly matter if the plan is very, very hopeless, because you want to nuke any incentive gradient that could lead to a better second attempt. Conversely, "we don't like Bush, so let's set a car on fire" is not even based on any whatsoever plausible model of how an election could be overturned.
FeepingCreature
14d ago
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man.
This is literally assuming the conclusion. You can't build an argument to support your opinion that starts with your opinion.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
I thought Born This Way was supposed to be about "can't you just not be gay?"
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.
There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Okay but garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though, and reference counting is better than manual for sanity, certainly so when you're writing trees.
FeepingCreature
5d ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
I suspect the answer is going to turn out to be a combination of centralized storage, personal storage and dynamically scaling industrial demand. There won't be one big battery but the same volume distributed over lots of households.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Eh, our problems are hardly an inherent aspect of green energy, but more that we did it ass-backwards.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.
Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."
The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests, then there is no reason they shouldn't happen in large language models.
We may not necessarily understand why or how, but clearly that doesn't stop them.
Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.
(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
This is basically Bayesian-vs-frequentist. I think the counterargument would be "the statement that X is likely to have a probability isn't even coherent, that's a type error". You can say that a class of events has an objectively true rate of occurrence, ie. if a coin will be thrown 100 times, then there will be a factual number of heads that show up, but you cannot say that any individual cointhrow has a likelihood of having a likelihood - that's just a simple likelihood. In other words, you can assign 10% probability to a model of the coin in which it has a 60% probability of landing on heads, but the word "probability" there carried two different meanings: observational credence (subjective) vs outcome ratio (objective). You can't have a credence over a credence; one is observational, the other is physical.
Not sure if that makes sense.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It sounds like you're trying to do an end run around "gay bad, trans bad" by assuming it as given, then arguing "it's abuse because it leads to gay/trans". But this entirely trades on the negative connotations of "abusive", not of "gay/trans".
FeepingCreature
13d ago
I don't think the category is meaningless! Certainly, men and women overwhelmingly exist. However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others. And the intersex - but the intersex are much more rare than those! I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.
I think the phrasing "have to go" implies that we either have rigorously separated men and women or we cannot have men and women at all. I reject this line of thinking anyways. A group doesn't have to be total to be useful. I'm sure there are people who argue like that; I don't count myself among them.
It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition
Oh, I'll be the first to agree that the vacuous nature of the term weakens the trans case! This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition. This does not however disprove the existence of trans people; it just shows the category is fuzzy - as should be expected of a category defined as category-crossing. A sphere is inherently easier to define than a concave lens.
But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion. I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term. I think the trans movement often fails to make this case, or make it convincingly; that doesn't make "mtf are men because I put them into that category" any better; it just shows the error is widespread and not limited to any side.
You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?
If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
"matter being alive for no explained reason"
I don't understand this. Biology and paleontology are entire fields that are in no small part about discovering these reasons; I'd say we have a pretty good grasp now on the whys. What step is unclear to you?
Seems like a motte/bailey.
Motte: As a group, homos must replenish from non-homosexuals' offspring, necessarily; if they didn't do this, they'd already not exist.
Bailey: Homosexuality is a choice; what's more, it is actually a movement agentically interested in swelling its numbers. To do so, they must make our kids gay.
The problem with the bailey is the assumption that ... either, kids should rather be gay but stay their lives firmly in the closet; or the way that this looks from the outside, kids should just "choose" to "be" straight. Which, as far as I can tell, is and remains largely impossible.
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