Jiro
1yr ago
Politicians aside, that at least seems to show that the AI is good with actually matching the adjective or adjectival phrase with the corresponding noun. I've found that AIs tend to get this sort of thing wrong a lot of the time; there'd be a good chance that the couch, bra, and panties would be given to random people in the image.
Jiro
1yr ago
25 mph speed limits in your local area don't lead to 25 mph speed limits on the freeway because there's no mechanism by which the former makes the latter easier, so slippery slopes are only weak ones like "someone who wants to restrict one thing might have more desire to restrict another".
Having computer-controlled cars that phone home makes it easier to have cars that the government can turn off because the computer phoning home is a part of the mechanism that the government would use to turn the car off.
"No longer prolong" compared to "intentionally ending" is a fuzzy distinction. Which one is removing a feeding tube?
And even if that counts as "no longer prolong", that still means people have to die in agony instead of peacefully.
Jiro
1yr ago
Mental illness is one of the ways we get the homeless who are particularly likely to cause problems (the other is drugs). So I wouldn't call that a noncentral example.
Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them?
I think that's the wrong question. There's a difference between "not verified as well as the New York Times should be able to verify" and "not verified at all". It's possible to believe that LoTT verifies well enough to not get very many fakes of the conventional kind (by people who intend for the fake to be believed by the audience) even if Trace managed to sneak something through.
But even then, the harm done isn't to that group. The harm done is that now every time someone brings up LoTT, they face a barrage of complaints "look what Trace did, LoTT never verifies", etc. even if those complaints are exaggerated or mistaken. Just in this thread we've seen someone not understand that Trace had to fake a second round of evidence. Trace's role in creating such misconceptions and forcing LoTT supporters to dispel them is harm.
Jiro
1yr ago
I view it as a -- correct! -- suspicion that she was being presented with a "gotcha!" question, and decided it was better for her to avoid the question
It's not a gotcha question because the questioner is trying to trick her into saying something. It's a gotcha question because the position that she wishes to promote is incoherent and having to answer the question exposes this. The problem is with the underlying position, not with the question, and the fact that this position is vulnerable to gotchas is entirely of her own making. As such, it isn't an excuse.
Jiro
1yr ago
No, their goals were reached independently of anything they did. They didn't accomplish anything.
Jiro
1yr ago
The whole reason the hoax tarnished their reputation is that
According to JulianRota above, the hoax caused them no harm whatsoever. Maybe you should argue with him.
Jiro
1yr ago
Also, "How do you know other cases LOTT highlighted as real weren't fake"? Because this fake didn't need to be believed for more than a few days. And getting away with that is much easier than getting away with a fake that's meant to be permanently taken as real.
If a right-winger had sent in the exact same fake and she had published it, leftists would have outed it as a fake within a couple of days. We'd know it was fake, and that assumes the right-winger wouldn't have figured this out and not bothered in the first place.
Jiro
1yr ago
In combination with JR, this amounts to "they weren't harmed, and besides, they deserved it".
They do those things, but they don't do them in the proportions that you imply. Someone insincerely arguing for a position is much more likely to be telling you BS, even if every human will probably be telling you some BS.
Jiro
1yr ago
First of all, this is only true if the argument includes no personal observations or other claims that might be false. Second, this is only true if you're an ideal perfect arguer who notices BS 100% of the time and can never be fooled by it. If you're an actual human, you don't want to bother with someone who's likely to make a lot of invalid arguments, because you might fail to notice some of them because you're an actual human.
Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit.
Government happens on such a large scale that anything nontrivial which is less than perfect will lead to people dying. Never mind hospitals, you can calculate statistical loss of lives just based on the economic impact. And then you can follow up by calculating statistical loss of lives based on something that has only economic impact. If we don't allow for mistakes resulting in deaths, we can't have government at all.
Our personal intuitions don't scale up here. You on your own can only cause deaths by being malicious or by being so careless that you could reasonably be expected to not be so. But if something is large scale enough, even ordinary human imperfection is enough to cause deaths. A standard which says that you should never cause deaths there is unworkable; causing deaths is inevitable.
Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else".
This doesn't work when the chance of the negative externality happening is small. Past a certain point, increasing the punishment won't cause any more deterrence.
Jiro
1yr ago
If he wants to play devil's advocate, he could say he's playing devil's advocate, not pretend he actually believes what he's saying.
Jiro
1yr ago
I am one of the Elect and fully in favor of crushing the white peasants" is not a forbidden opinion
Honestly saying "I am one of the Elect and fully in favor of crushing the white peasants" may be stupid, but it isn't a forbidden opinion.
Dishonestly saying it to deliberately provoke backlash in favor of the white peasants (or to just provoke reactions, period) violates several rules, including the one about speaking plainly.
Jiro
1yr ago
But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it.
It's very difficult to measure how much someone is harmed by things of this sort. It was clearly used by TracingWoodgrains to discredit LoTT. I think I should not need to do some kind of media reputation analysis to calculate how much LoTT was discredited so I can say that LoTT was "harmed".
Was Scott harmed by Cade Metz? If yes, could you prove it?
Jiro
1yr ago
No, it isn't; adults that are stupider than the average teenager (including the mentally handicapped and the senile) have more rights than them, so that claim it's cognitive is incoherent.
It's cognitive, but imperfectly.
Jiro
1yr ago
If she had said 0.1 percent, it would have probably failed to inspire the same reaction.
Jiro
1yr ago
In this case, sure. But as a general rule, that doesn't work as well as you imply.
First of all, it's a matter of framing. People are likely to assume that having committed a crime predicts someone's future behavior a lot more than it actually does, particularly if the crime is described in general terms. This won't matter much if it's 19 versus 12 which is pretty bad regardless, but suppose the government lumped together some things of different severity? You're a sex criminal if you have sex with a 12 year old, but you're also a sex criminal if you accidentally expose yourself if there's no bathroom and you try to take a leak behind a building. And all that the general public sees in the criminal history is "sex criminal". The public will treat the latter guy as badly as the former. In theory they could look him up in further detail, say "well, he just took a leak behind a building", and discount their judgment appropriately, but many people will take shortcuts and not do this.
Second, it's a moral hazard if you assume an imperfect justice system. It's true that a conviction predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. It's also true that an accusation without a conviction or any evidence predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. By the same reasoning that applies to convictions, we should pay attention to accusations made without evidence. But the danger of this is obvious: it's a market for lemons situation. You don't know whether the accusation is baseless or not, but the person "selling" the accusation does, and therefore has an incentive to "sell" baseless accusations. An imperfect justice system that occasionally convicts disliked people on a three-felonies-a-day basis will face the same incentives as the person making baseless accusations.
Applying these to Trump's conviction is an exercise for the reader.
Jiro
1yr ago
Sports illustrated swimsuit models are wearing swimsuits. They're not strippers.
If you generalize it a little to "taking away drivers licenses for disfavored things that have nothing to do with driving", yes. They already take drivers licenses away for failure to pay child support.
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