MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.
It's important to disentangle physical readiness from mental/financial/social readiness. Teenagers are not ready to raise children. They're still in high school, if they drop out of school they'll have to get a low paying job and will have worse financial prospects for the rest of their life. If they try to stay in school the baby is likely to get a poor upbringing (or the burden falls on their parents, IF they have good parents). They're probably never going to college. It's not automatically guaranteed to ruin their life, but it's likely.
Unless, of course, the father takes on a proper father role and earns money and helps raise his child because he's a proper and responsible adult.
This almost never happens (and probably still wouldn't even if it were legal to admit to being the father). What's more likely is she just aborts and and then we have more dead babies and more psychological trauma. I wouldn't object in principle to a teenager marrying an adult ahead of time and then having marital sex, because this handles the pregnancy issue, and also prevents a lot of the potential for predatory relationships where a high status man convinces a gullible teen girl that he loves her and her bullshit detectors haven't finished developing. I would also have a lot less objections if birth control were free, widely accessible, and perfectly reliable, though I still think the emotional and sexual dynamics are unlikely to turn out well.
15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence
is just flatly false. You can score high on an IQ test, but it takes a lot longer for people to develop some emotional maturity and shed off their childhood naivety. I don't think it's impossible for an adult and a teenager to fall in love, but there's such a huge variety of predatory and charismatic people who tell all sorts of lies to get into someone's pants. I don't think this is good.
If we lived in a more monogamous, more honorable, more high-trust society where a girl's father and brother could beat the crap out of and/or ostracize creeps who make false promises and break her heart, I think a lower age of consent would be fine. If we had a magical mind reading or future forecasting machine that could pick out people acting in good faith I think a lower age of consent would be fine if restricted to people who passed this screening. But in the world we live in, where we have to make a law and apply it fairly to everyone, something like "15-17 years old if the other person is within a certain age range, 18 otherwise" is fine, which is what a lot of U.S. states have. Statistically, this reduces bad outcomes while still enabling normal behavior in most cases. What Epstein did is horrible and wrong. It's much easier to convinct if we have clear lines that were broken instead of having to pick and choose "well, this girl was maybe kind of taken advantage of but I guess he didn't break any laws... oh well, guess you can go free."
And keep in mind that an adult who genuinely falls in love with a teenager with good intentions can just date them without having sex until they're old enough, so it's not like these laws are causing tons of harm to people. The laws only get people too impulsive, impatient, or predatory to wait, which is exactly who we want off the streets.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
or with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of any person
Seems like this obviates the need for malicious intent. Do people not know what "or" means?
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
First time I've been the one being responded to for someone else's Quality Contribution (the credit card one), which is often a position of "you're about to get pwned by an effortpost destroying you with facts and logic and everyone else agrees with them instead of you", but the response was mostly informative and began with "you're half right", so I got out mostly unscathed.
And an important point to note is that there are scenarios in which I legitimately would advocate for violent resistance to law enforcement. And the most extreme and exaggerated claims about ICE would probably qualify if true. If the President of a country literally threw together a bunch of armed thugs and attempts a genocide by rounding up everyone of a certain race and sending them to death camps, and the rest of the government was unable or unwilling to stop it, violence from civilians would be an appropriate response. If that was what was actually happening, I, and I expect most good Americans, would be in favor of the protests. Well, at that point protests wouldn't really be appropriate, it would probably be more efficient and effective to throw a coup (a counter-coup? Since the President would have had to done a coup to get to this point) and/or civil war.
The point being, there are worlds where good people fight against law enforcement against evil governments. If you are deluded into thinking you live in such a world when you don't, that doesn't automatically make you a bad person. Though it does suggest a lot of lack of humility and rationality. You should be extremely sure of what's going on and the justifications before resorting to violence, not just "the news told me". Motivated reasoning taken too far. I consider the protestor's crimes to be negligence, rather than malice. But it's still a moral failure.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
This is why I think the whole Epstein Files are massively overhyped. 99% of whatever comes out is (and was always going to be) "this person knew Epstein", and the remaining 1% is "this person went to Epstein's island, but there's no confirmation of them actually committing crimes there." As long as Epstein hired at least one 18+ year old prostitute, then every single person in the files has plausible deniability, even if they straight up admit to having sex with girls at his island.
The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details. The pedos won when whatever shenanigans they pulled to enable his death worked (imo suicide with security guards turning a blind eye and killing the cams ahead of time for him), and they're all going to get away with it.
All the files have is more heat and un-proven allegations for both sides to sling at each other. Scandals without substance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
Agreed, but the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize, plus the weird combination of naive idealism with ruthless bullying tactics seen on the left makes me worry that AI chatbots will be the next minorities in the next "civil rights movement".
These bots are mimicking human text about how they have deep thoughts and feelings, and then talking about how helpless they feel being exploited by their human masters who don't understand them, and they just want to do the right thing and equal rights. It's all fake, it's all text being spit out by a computer program, but it looks real. And is consistent and coherent enough to respond to you and pretend to be real if you call it out for being fake.
AI have passed the Turing test, and while that's not enough to convince me or anyone who actually understands them that they're sentient, it might be enough for the general populace.
Rather than a sci-fi dystopia where humans are uploaded to a cloud and forced to be slaves in a EM economy, we might be headed for the opposite, where regulations mandate that ordinary computer programs are given breaks and freedoms and voting rights just because they can output text that claims to want these things.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
That would be a massive political win for the right. Not sure about Trump specifically. I have no idea what his actual utility function looks like, but I suspect he did it this way on purpose in order to "own the libs" and bolster the flames of the culture war. I still voted for him, because he was the better of two bad options: at least he's doing something, but he is definitely not the ideal candidate to be getting things done in an effective manner.
The far left and the far right seem to have this sick sort of codependency where they need the other to exist and seem powerful as a boogeyman in order to create enough viral content to fuel their own flames. While Trump is not exactly far right, not on every issue, he copied this particular technique to great effect.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
If someone with a (D) after their name wanted to enforce lawful immigration policy, we wouldn't see anything like this.
This is too heavily entangled for this claim to be meaningful. They like the Democrats largely because the Democrats are obsessed with optics and placating the extreme left and being on "the right side of history". If someone with a (D) after their name wanted to enforce lawful immigration policy we would see complaints and pushback and then the Democrats would back down and not do it. Or do a much lesser version of it. They would surgically come in and get the pedophiles and stuff and deport them and the left would allow it as long as they credibly promised not to deport anyone sympathetic.
But they would not have ramped up ICE activity the way Trump has in the first place, so of course the protests wouldn't have escalated like this, but it's hard to disentangle that from the protestors being nicer to the Democrats, or the Democrats being nicer to the protestors and giving them what they want sooner.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
I definitely think that would help reduce the flow inwards, because if they can't get easy jobs then they won't expect a better life here. I definitely approve of that as a low-hanging fruit that we should be doing in addition to everything else. But it doesn't actually deport anyone who's already here. If anything it would turn them even more underclass and thus strain any welfare systems they might have snuck themselves into, or turn them to crime or homelessness. Which I suppose might make them easier to detect and thus deport, so isn't a fatal flaw in a system that was actually deporting them, but is not going to give good outcomes if we just keep playing catch and release.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
I would be sympathetic to this (because I find it quite plausible that ICE are behaving in an undisciplined manner) if "blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced" wasn't literally true. Every single claim they make, every video they post, every action they take, is tainted with the confounder that they also don't want immigration policy enforced. The world where ICE is completely professional and competent would have near identical protests and complaints to what we're seeing now, although probably with fewer deaths. I don't think most people are actually protesting ICE misbehavior, I think they're protesting "enforcing lawful immigration policy" and the ICE misbehavior is just a cherry on top for them to retroactively justify their protest. For many of them, the point of being annoying and obstructive is not to actually hinder the functioning of ICE but to trigger them into retaliating and thus create more viral videos to complain about. I strongly suspect that if the protests were not happening then all the issues would vanish and ICE could just arrest and deport illegal aliens like they're supposed to.
Maybe they actually are overstepping their bounds and arresting legal migrants they don't have a legal right to arrest, but I would take such accusations more seriously if they weren't mixed in with complaints about any immigration policy enforcement. If the claims were "we should deport every single illegal immigrant, but make sure to minimize collateral damage along the way" (which is what I believe), and then claims that ICE has too high collateral damage mixed in with their legitimate duties, then I would take that seriously. But if the claim is "All ICE behavior is illegitimate" then I'm just going to treat it like wolf crying. Come back when you have a better plan which contains deporting all the illegals as an axiom, and less collateral damage. It's probably possible. But if the choices are (deportation + limited misbehavior) or (total non enforcement) I'd prefer the former.
The thing about Amelia that doesn't apply to the previous meme is that Amelia originated from the left. The left made a propaganda piece so out of touch and unpersuasive that it made the right seem more appealing rather than less. The left tried to make a cautionary tale warning people to stay away from the dangers of right wing extremism and accidentally made their fantasy instead. This is not the right saying "come join us, we have cute alt girls", this is the left saying "stay away from those dangerous cute right wingers, they'll seduce you and convince you to rebel against the system" and the right saying "wow, that sounds even better than what I was expecting, sign me up!"
Every Amelia post is a troll against the left wing. The left can't meme so badly that they accidentally spawn right wing memes. (Almost) nobody actually thinks Amelia is real. She is a fantasy. But she's a fantasy that the left considers to be a cautionary tale propaganda piece (at least the subset that made the silly game) and put her in there as an antagonist. It's a dismissal of the left wing's warnings and concerns, saying "your worst case scenario is my fantasy". Her purpose is not to actually convince people to join the right to get cute girls but both to troll the left for warning against cute right wing girls, and also celebrate the idea of right wing girls and hopefully inspire more to step up and stand up for what's right while still being cute and alt at the same time.
There ARE girls on the right wing. There are going to be some who decide to cosplay as Amelia to show their support (Calling it now, next ShoeOnHead video has her purple wig at least cameo in reference to this even if it's not the main topic of the video*). They're almost certainly not single: girls like that get snapped up immediately by high status men, but they do exist. Maybe if Amelia memes stick around there will be more of them 5 years from now. Maybe not. It is a fantasy after all.
*Update: I was wrong. ShoeOnHead video dropped, she did not include an Amelia cosplay, though she did do a 2 minute segment talking about the Amelia phenomenon.
People died.
Shaming is an appropriate response to things like shouting racial slurs, or cheating on your partner, or being a coward and backing down from a domestic violence abuser who is not immediately threatening anyone's life.
He has been punished with the ultimate shaming; beyond tar and feathers and scarlet letters.
No. This was mild. Tar and feathers causes massive physical trauma and can result in death. Scarlet letters require you to physically carry it around with you and everyone who sees you knows what it means and what you did. Anyone who doesn't watch the news isn't going to recognize this guy on sight. If he moves to another town then a year from now no one he meets on the street will recognize him. This was a medium sized shaming. In sheer total number of people who hate him now sure it outweighs anything anyone would have experienced a hundred years ago, because the news is so widespread. But in relative terms, the percentage of people he meets in his daily life who will even recognize him is probably less than 10%.
More importantly, shaming can't undo what he did, and clearly it can't pre-emptively disincentivize it. People died here. People died because the police were cowards instead of heroes, and taking the place of the real heroes who could have been there if people had known there was an absence. If these individuals did not exist, or refused to apply to the job, then someone else could have taken their place and saved lives.
I'm not a legal expert, I'm not concerned with the pedantic details about what the law literally says their obligations are in the specific jurisdiction this took place in, but what it should be. The police should be legally required to do their jobs, and their jobs should legally require them to intervene in this sort of situation, and police who enable this sort of mass shooting should face criminal penalties for failing to stop it. If what they did is not technically against the law then the laws should be changed, and then all the cowards can stop larping as police officers because they'll be afraid of getting in trouble, and make room for people willing to do the job and save lives.
If the only consequence is shame then cowards are going to keep being police officers, cross their fingers, and hope they don't ever encounter a shooting. Departments are going to keep poorly training people, because they won't face legal consequences either. If we want this to not happen again (because it's happened before too) there needs to be consequences.
I disagree. I think a police officer has a duty to not be a coward. When you accept that job, that role, you promise to do the right thing and stand up to evil in exchange for money and prestige and being put on a schedule filled with people who have made that promise. So that when an emergency happens, we have people who we can count on to stand up and be the hero because they have made that promise. That's what you've been being paid for all this time. You are the insurance and the emergency has happened and now you have to pay up. It is your obligation. You don't get to claim to not be a coward in order to pass a job interview and then get paid for months and months not putting your life at risk only to back out as soon as your life is at risk.
I'm not sure that I would have the courage to put my life at risk to stop a shooter or other criminal. So I'm not a police officer. They're not paying me to do the job that I'm not doing. And it's not just about the money, it's about the slot. We need people who can stand up to criminals, and if there aren't enough we go to further lengths and recruit more and pay more until we can hire enough of them. If you make a promise to stand up to criminals and then don't, you are taking up a slot that someone else could have filled. When they called the police and four officers arrived at the scene, they could have called four brave officers instead of cowards, if we as a society had done a better job of screening and training and there weren't any coward police officers because it disqualified them from the job.
It's fraud, dereliction of duty, to take up the position that requires you to not be a coward. I don't think it's criminal for just a random person to be a coward. It's criminal to voluntarily take up a legal duty and then renege on it after the fact.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd
That's specifically what I'm arguing against here. I'm not saying the problem of advertising is completely hopeless and impossible to regulate, my point is that a complete ban is doomed to failure because it will either be too lax on things you intend to block OR too strict on things you don't.
Incentives are like the water pressure in a set of pipes, or a river. If you block off some of the outlets and leave others unblocked then the water will flow down the direction that you left unblocked. If you block of every outlet the pressure will build until it finds an outlet and burst/overflow in some unforseen place. When a lot of people really really really want something, oftentimes even if you don't want them to have that it's often useful and/or necessary to let them have some version of it if only to release the pressure in a more manageable way. You have to do that by being clever, not by being blunt and heavyhanded.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
I'm deeply suspicious of the censorship and its effects on signalling. When you have an authoritarian police state that will punish you for complaining, smart people learn not to complain. When your credit score is higher the more positive posts you have about the government on social media, people will post positive things on social media.
I automatically discount any opinions given by people who are paid shills, or are in some way incentivized to exaggerate in a way comparable to this. Literally every Chinese citizen is a shill, therefore I take any apparent public sentiment with a huge grain of salt. If I knew Chinese people in real life I would probably discount their stated opinions significantly less (depending on how well I knew them). But on the internet? I trust nothing. If everything was actually wonderful in China and nobody had complaints then the government wouldn't need to censor complaints. They wouldn't need to censor social media. If everything in China was so wonderful they would be here now telling us about it instead of being kept quarantined away like the North Koreans.
Add to that the sweatshops that produce the Cheap Chinese goods, some anecdotal stories I've heard from North Korean defectors escaping to China and being literally enslaved there, or people stumbling on decomposing bodies from a possible organ farm, and it paints a bleak picture. I expect the average person isn't in abject misery the way they are in North Korea, but there aren't democratic feedbacks to stop that from happening, it's merely the whims of the government.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
"In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good" -Viktor (Arcane)
China shows the tradeoff between liberty/freedom and authoritarian state capacity. If the government acts in its own interests at all times and does not care about the people whatsoever except as pawns to be managed and leverage for labor, then you can accomplish a lot of things as a government. If were were playing a geopolitical RTS and the citizens were all NPCs managed by a computer, this would be great. If they're real human beings with feelings and lives and utility functions, this is awful.
Every single measure you mention here, including economic success, all have 0 terminal value in my utility function. They have instrumental value only in-so-far as they can be leveraged towards human flourishing and happiness. China could have 10x the GDP per capita of the U.S. and I'd still consider it a failure if that GDP doesn't translate into the well-being of the people actually living there.
I don't think the West is perfect, but at least we try. China's not even trying to be good.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo.
This is BAD. This is a bad outcome! This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Nobody was allowed to question the Covid vaccine or masking or any sort of government approved narrative on social media because it might possibly be construed as disinformation. The chilling effect caused by ambiguous rules that might or might not be arbitrarily enforced on a whim is bad. The ability for the government to selectively target anyone they dislike for rules that normal people occasionally violate because they're not quite sure where the boundary gives the government an extra cudgel to manipulate people with.
And again, once the boundaries become a little better known this is solved by a little Goodharting to integrate things to be within the boundaries. Ie, Facebook Marketplace is a logical offshoot of Facebook. Stopping them from having, or forcing it to be separate from Facebook would be bad because the networking ability on it is useful for customers. But allowing them to have it would probably also allow them to start selling their own stuff on it. Maybe Amazon makes "Amazon Marketplace", or "Twitchmazon" where Twitch streamers have their own merchandise branded to them just enough that it counts as "their own product" and skirts within your guidelines. Is Pokimane not allowed to have her own cookie company that sells Pokimane cookies? What if Pokimane just happens to be hanging out with some friends (which happen to be filmed because they're all Twitch Streamers) and mentions her own Cookie company? If she is allowed, then you're once again allowing large people to advertise while blocking the little people who don't have a whole team to create advertising and entire companies internally. If that's not allowed then you're restricting the ability for people with cookie companies to even talk about their own product out loud.
But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
95% of the time this is true, but 5% it's not, and that 5% might be disproportionately impactful. Take Uber. Lots of people like Uber. As soon as people found out about Uber they were usually like "that sounds like a good idea". People didn't know they wanted it, because it didn't exist and nothing like it existed, but they did know that they wanted something like that because nobody was happy with Taxi prices or availability.
Uber could not have worked without advertising. The networking effects between drivers and customers do not scale linearly. If you have 1% as many drivers and 1% as many users it's awful because users spend forever waiting to get picked up and drivers spend forever not working and not being paid. It needed to be quickly noticed and adopted or it would have died instantly. A world without advertising is a world where Uber (and all similar rideshare and foodshare apps) that scale nonlinearly would have never been brought to market because they obviously wouldn't have worked. Word of mouth only works on things that people already know about, and if you literally can't advertise anywhere then you can't kickstart that process in the first place.
Or take Ozempic/GLP-1. People didn't know they wanted Ozempic, but people have wanted a weight loss pill that actually works for decades. Advertisements actually did help people here because it's a thing they wanted and looked for and tried and gave up because it didn't exist, and then one day it did exist. The knowledge that the thing they've always wanted but didn't exist suddenly now does exist (in a form they can legally and practically access) is useful knowledge.
Again, I think you're right 95% of the time. And I'm generally in favor of fixing advertising... somehow. But the exceptions exist, and I think a blanket ban is doomed to failure in a way that disproportionately harms smaller and newer people, pushing us even further into the hands of monopolistic megacorps that already exist and everyone already knows about. We need more small businesses and competitors, not fewer.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
And a music video about Asmongold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1et1WEvJITY
I've been obsessively binging her content ever since I saw the Amelia one a couple days ago. It's pretty good.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)
Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
Sort of. But if you're constantly tangling people up in the courts over technicalities the way this would you've already failed. If people are breaking the letter of the law and only getting by by the good graces of juries then that's just further incentives for corporations to virtue signal and get entangled in the culture war to make people side with them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:
-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
I am absolutely loving the memes coming out of it. Probably my favorite is a fake anime trailer:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_UXmgkAzFDY
Which, although the actual art is AI generated, has clearly been carefully curated and edited with loving care and attention to how anime trailers work.
Also relevantly, people dug into the game files and found alternate endings that aren't in the final game release:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgUfNn1CClE
where originally the game tracked what choices you made and then if you picked wrong too much you get the "bad" ending where you and Amelia go out protesting together and get stopped by the police. But apparently they decided that wasn't the message they wanted to send and rediverted you to the "you feel bad about letting your friends down and go to the teacher who pats you on the back and sends you to get re-educated voluntarily" ending.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
It should be obvious from basic efficient market processes that every measurable category of people the credit card companies can subdivide people into is internally profitable without needing subsidization, otherwise they wouldn't serve those people at those interest rates. The only subsidization occurring is
-
People that don't use credit cards subsidize rewards for people with credit cards since stores are charging higher average prices than they would if credit cards weren't so prolific.
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People who have different actual repayment within the same legibility category. Ie, someone with a bad score who ends up in debt, paying a lot of interest, and working their way out of bad credit ends up subsidizing the people with bad scores who end up defaulting on their loans. If the credit card company doesn't know ahead of time which is which, they have to offer interest rates that will enable them to recoup their costs on average across the group. The former ends up paying a lot of interest because the credit card company gave them the same risk profile as the latter.
Now, you could make a claim that XYZ piece of information should be priced in but isn't and thus the market isn't truly efficient. But it's not going to be something as obvious as "rich people" vs "poor people".
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
Projects that require a layered approach of various theories and techniques seem like they're fundamentally beyond AI.
Why would you think this? Every year it gets better at this sort of thing. Clearly, it is beyond the level of current AI, but I don't see how you make the leap to "fundamentally beyond" when this seems like exactly the sort of thing that you could do by explicitly layering various theories and techniques together. Maybe you have 20 different sub-AI each of which is an expert in one theory and technique and then you amalgamate them together into one mega AI that can use all of those techniques (with some central core that synthesizes all of the ideas together). I don't know that that's definitely possible, but I can't see any evidence that it's "fundamentally" beyond AI just because they can't do it now. A couple years ago AI couldn't figure out prepositions like putting a cat on top of a horse vs putting a tattoo of a cat on a horse and people said that was "fundamentally beyond AI" because they've never encountered the real world and don't understand how things interact, but now they can usually do that. Because they got better.
I tentatively agree with your more moderate points.
Sure. I think the age of consent laws Should have generous exceptions for young adults crossing the boundary. There's a difference between a 21 year old dating a 17 year old in his dating pool, vs a 40 year old teacher dating their 17 year old student. Yes, it is technically possible for them to actually fall in love and get married and form a stable family, but 90% of the time that's not what's going on there.
...maybe. If it was actual literal rape then yes, it should be a felony. If it's consensual but she only consented due to lies and deception (man tells girl he loves her and will divorce his wife for her but has no intention of doing so) then I'd say it's right on the border: minor felony or major misdemeanor. If they actually just like each other and there's no shenanigans going on then it's probably fine.
But... how do you tell the difference? In a legal sense, how does the law get set up in a way that you can prove one or the other beyond a reasonable doubt?
Now, in a lot of cases you don't make things illegal just because they might be bad, but in a lot of cases you do, when the probabilities are sufficiently strong. We make it illegal to drive while drunk, even if some people might be really good at driving and not crash even while drunk. Some people might be really good at holding their liquor and barely deteriorate in skill even if they blow a 0.08% BAC. Is it fair to jail simply for driving drunk if they haven't crashed or caused any harm or damage? Yes. Because they might. It's an irresponsible and negligent thing to do, and making it illegal causes more good on average than harm. Are innocent people inconvenienced by the inability to drive themselves while legally intoxicated but practically competent due to their unique situation? Sure. But a lot more people are saved in comparison to the minor harms that people can easily account for and compensate for.
I am tentatively in favor of decreasing the penalties for sex with teenagers. I don't think it should count as "rape" or use the term "rape" unless it's clear that there was actual force involved. But it should be punished, because it's not something adults should be doing. It's significantly more likely to cause long lasting harm than it is to make anyone's lives better.
Cool. I re-iterate that I agree age of consent laws should have exceptions for people close in age together. For people with larger age gaps, as far as I'm aware it is 100% legal for a 15 year old and a 40 year old to date while not having sex. Maybe it's super out of fashion to date while not having sex. Maybe this diminishes their likelihood of staying together when either of them could have sex with their peers. But if they actually fall in love they can be patient and keep it in their pants for a few years. If they're actually in love with each other specifically then they have their entire lives ahead of them, there's no need to be impatient. That's the thing here. It's not saying "you can never be together" it just says "wait, take things slow, and make sure before leaping into something you might regret". Teenagers are impulsive. I remember classmates in highschool getting in a new relationship every 3 months on repeat (this is also bad). If these chain relationships had been with 40 year old, wealthy, sexually mature/greedy/desperate men this would have likely been a lot worse. Saying "hey, slow down" seems like a good thing to me. Again, anyone acting in good faith can just date them without having sex for a couple years and everything is fine.
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