FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Tl;dr AIs controlled by the Elite will be better than humans at everything, including being the Elite.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
We just got owned by Covid, and Covid was found by random walk.
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.)
I think you're making it a bit too easy on yourself here, though I broadly agree.
The holocaust was bad. (Galaxy brain take, I know.) It was such a humongous bad, and it existed in such a cluster of other bad things, that the entire memetic landscape around it is rightfully considered toxic forever. Nobody should be killed for genes, nobody should be sterilized for genes. But. But. Any child born with a preventable disease is still a stain on humanity's rap sheet! Any person born deaf, or born dumb, or born spastic - we say that such people not just have a right to life but exhibit their own worth, in one of the most blatant instances of sour grapes in the history of civilization. If that was true, why is nobody lining up to have their ears pierced, or their brain lobotomized? It seems obvious that if all other things were equal, you should choose for a child to be born healthy rather than sick, smart rather than stupid, capable rather than incapable. That impulse has enabled and abetted horrible crimes, and we may say that humanity is not capable of safely enacting such improvements, that it gives far too much license to sociopaths and demagogues to advocate disfigurement and naked murder - all granted. But the impulse in itself is good.
Then we can ask further: what of a woman who knowingly brings a sick child to term? Is it a moral good to bring a life into the world that is doomed to an early death? What of a child that is in continuous pain until their untimely but predictable death? If we continue along this line long enough, we either lose the ability to say that a child being born in suffering and doomed to death is morally bad, or we may end up in the bizarre position of "a significant crime is being committed, but we are bound to idly stand by." Fine, be that the case, we may know that granting ourselves license to intercede will only result in worse crimes. But I think we must hold in mind that this does not make the lesser crime a moral good.
A day may come when genetic editing becomes so cheap and widely available that any child can be easily modified before birth to exclude all of those disorders which make life not worth living, or even improve on the human template. When that day comes, I think we do not want to be ideologically committed to the idea that an act of willingly and knowingly creating beings to suffer has inherent moral worth.
What of an adult? What if you decide somebody's life is too hard and murder them? For their own good? After all, we are doing so many things to force people to behave in certain ways that they don't want to behave, for their own good. Why not make the ultimate step and murder them for their own good, since we are so smart we totally can decide for them that their lives aren't worth living?
I do think there's a fundamental difference in morality between creating life and sustaining life. I don't think that we have a moral duty, for instance, to instantiate the greatest number of barely net positive existences (the Repugnant Conclusion). But to reject it requires assigning special moral worth to beings who are currently alive, which is why there is still, IMO, a moral difference between embryo selection for trait and murder for trait.
And at any rate, if you allow a citizen to give birth to a child whose life is going to be comparatively of much less value - to themselves - than another, you have also made a choice. Inaction is not inherently morally privileged.
Again, the question is just the form and the degree. I am all for reducing the amount of suffering, but deciding for another that their life is not worth living because of the suffering is a huge step, which we should be very very very careful about.
Well, sure, I am fully on board with this. I just think that we will grow up to become worthy of this step, and when we do I would like us to have preserved that impulse to reduce suffering and multiply joy in our heart, not snuffed it out.
edit: That's overdramatic, but you know what I mean.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Ah, revealed-preference dogma. :)
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I think to make this work, you also need automated construction and maintenance, including maintenance of maintenance drones, recursively.
At which point you're not in a 1%-rulership scenario, but an ALife/digital ecosystem takeoff scenario.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Sure but it's still embarrassing to go off on a topic that it turns out later you're wrong about.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Has Trump given any indication of caring?
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
The gassing is kinda an important aspect. As a pro-lockdowner, if I thought the government would outright murder twelve million people (or, honestly, a lot less than that) in the name of a bad model of a disease, I would have had a very different reaction.
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.
I don't think the epistemic position is the same.
It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps
Okay, well, I don't believe that. In fact, I'd consider the US japanese internment camps much closer to a "serious mistake of governance" than an "act of immense evil" that I do the Holocaust. To put a number on it, I would maybe put them on the moral order of magnitude of 10-100 murders?
If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?
I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."
We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.
I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.
edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
You think we're epistemically in a 1937 position with regard to Covid camps?
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Yeah, I'm beginning to come around to the possibility that I did have a vastly different experience of the pandemic.
I mean, to my knowledge nobody actually got lynched. Of course, I don't have a control genocide to see if the actual rhetoric would be different.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
A hilarious note about Bing: When it gets a search results it disagrees with, it may straight up disregard it and just tell you "According to this page, <what Bing knows to be right rather than what it read there>".
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I don't think anybody was expecting ChatGPT to cheat the system like that. GPT-3 and GPT-4 aren't interesting because they're superintelligences, they're interesting because they seem to represent critical progress on the path to one.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I don't read this as "hey, can you relinquish your moral claim on this bike and transfer it to me" and more "hey, please relinquish your physical claim on this bike because it is immoral".
FeepingCreature
11mo 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.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
I guess this reinforces something like "seasonal industry", where you can scale your production up and down with the power price. Might take a decade to adapt to this.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
I mean, you'd want it to know where its infrastructure is so you can train it to protect that infrastructure. That does make some sense.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
Aliens make no sense because the stars still shine. I would not expect the greatest visible evidence for aliens to be on Earth, I would expect it to be humanity surrounded by Dyson spheres. (If I was a civilization that got post-singularity, I would totally eat every sun.) The idea that the strongest visible evidence for alien life is found in Earth's atmosphere simply does not pass any smell test.
Competition happens for humans because absolutely nothing you can do will buy you longer life, you biologically cannot win hard enough to succeed forever, or get a fundamentally better body, or get less susceptible to cancer than baseline, or get more intelligent. Training can get you swole, but it can't turn you into One Punch Man - human beings are harshly levelcapped. Every human who has ever lived exists inside a narrow band of capability. You can't train yourself to survive an arrow to the head, let alone a sniper bullet. Hence democracy, hence liberalism, hence charity and altruism, hence competition.
None of this applies to AI.
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