gattsuru
1yr ago
One would think, but there's a lot of public comments going around, either through things like the AP news report I linked above, or the lengthy messages sent to the town or to its police. Perhaps more seriously, whether for good or ill local officials had applied in early June for destruction of all biological materials on-site, and had completed that destruction by mid-August. While the CDC did show up for two days in the initial search in May, while accompanied by state officials, none of the court documents discuss the CDC even taking samples to test, nevermind actually returning the results of those tests. The congressional investigation summarizes this as :
The CDC’s refusal to test any potential pathogens with the understanding that local officials would otherwise have to destroy the samples through an abatement process makes it impossible for the Select Committee to fully assess the potential risks that this specific facility posed to the community. It is possible that there were other highly dangerous pathogens that were in the coded vials or otherwise unlabeled. Due to government failures, we simply cannot know.
In its refusal to test, the CDC likewise did not offer to connect local officials with any other federal agency or authorized lab that may be able to test the samples. Based on statements from local officials and briefings the Select Committee received from the CDC, the CDC did not contact the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, the government biodefense laboratory located in Fort Dietrich, Maryland that could potentially have provided greater assistance.
According to local official accounts, in a subsequent conversation with the CDC in early September 2023, local officials again pressed the CDC on why they refused to test any potential pathogens. A CDC official informed the local officials that it was illegal for the CDC to test any samples that were not expressly labeled as a Select Agent. City Manager Nicole Zieba expressed shock at this fact. She asked whether, if that were the case, the CDC had any authority to stop a terrorist in the United States who simply removed the label off a vial of a deadly virus. The CDC official said that the CDC had no authority to test the deadly virus in that hypothetical and that it was a noted gap in its authority. This characterization of the CDC’s authority appears to be false.
Which doesn't prove that they're not investigating further, but it does wink and point suggestively that at least they're not investigating usefully.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Well, I'm more convinced that it's probably not a CCP bioweapons lab, to be specific, given the weird combination of weirdly ineffective and highly visible. Playing games with FDA authorization isn't the single fastest way to get annoying investigators, but short of flipping the EPA and the DEA and a local zoning board the finger at the same time, it's pretty close.
Whether Zhu is CCP is... complicated, and not exactly a yes-no question. The congressional investigation claims that :
While living in the PRC in the early 2000s, Zhu served as the Vice Chairman of a PRC state-controlled enterprise based in Xinjiang, Henan Pioneer Aide Biological Engineering Company Limited (“Pioneer Aide China”). PRC government entities exercised a controlling interest in Pioneer Aide China as beneficial owners and shareholders through a series of passthrough joint venture companies, including Henan Investment Group Company Limited, a company involved in military-civil fusion for the PRC.
Zhu also served as Chairman of the Board and General Manager of Aide Modern Cattle Industry (China) Company Limited (“Aide Cattle China”), a company whose directors included an executive for a PRC defense firm and a company on the U.S. Entity List. Shareholders in Aide Cattle China include PRC state-controlled entities and individuals who have invested in other PRC state-controlled entities. Through Aide Cattle China, Zhu was the primary shareholder of 11 PRC cattle companies.
Merely being an employee or upper management of a government-controlled (or military-civil fusion) company isn't the same thing as, say, directly taking orders as a soldier or direct government employee. At the same time, doing these things for a government-controlled company is... what, a deniable asset? A patriot that's just doing things that benefit his country of his own initiative? Those are different things, but they're not exactly no, either.
This is further complicated by the faked IDs, and the CCP's extraterritorial enforcement arms.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's true, though not the most cheerful a thought. There's a possibility that they were marked this way as 'chaff' -- no sane person is going to sniff these things, or check if they contain some rando more prosaic biomedical IP -- which seems the most plausible answer.
But then you'd hope that the CDC would be willing to prove it, in either case, even as disillusioned as COVID has made me for them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, the limited quantity and type A rules seem a little awkwardly designed, either to prevent shipping accidents, shipping theft, or radioactive boyscout incidents. At the same time, the thresholds for serious levels of radioactive material seem more sufficient... if they're obeyed religiously by people who often have little or no ability to verify or validate them. And while most orphan source incidents have occurred outside of the United States, there have been incidents within the US, including relatively recent ones.
That said, the concern here is less someone porch-pirating vials of virulent disease shipped to a legitimate user, and more someone that (given the variety of materials!) probably didn't steal them from a nearby lab. If you go to Sigma-Aldrich as a rando and try to over a ton of uranium, they'll not only say no, they might send your info to the feds. Same for even small amounts of red phosphorus, which was actually a nontrivial problem for the LK99 replication crews.
I'd assumed that was the case for a lot of biologicals, but perhaps not. Unreported mass thefts of infectious agents would be bad, but even if Zhu had ordered them through a cooperative mainstream lab which did have conventional uses and then passed it on to Prestige, it seems like the sort of thing that the feds should be kinda interested in at least tracking down.
Prestige Biotech
TIME reported:
Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.
This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:
On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.
and quickly turns to :
Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...
The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.
The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.
There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".
And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :
Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.
... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.
And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.
... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?
That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Non-profit boards tend to attract a certain sort of personality, so it's always possible that their heads just did that (aka e/acc v LW), but I don't really see a clear way for there to be an obvious e/acc v LW trigger point to cause the doorslam so quickly, and the new CEO claims it wasn't over a specific (presumably AI) safety concern. Some alternative possibilities:
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Backroom geopolitics. Altman had been a big name and leader for non-nVidia non-Taiwan silicon development and cooperation with other countries to develop that, including the Saudis and China. There are a lot of reasons that might be Against <Domain> Interest here, including domains that can leverage extreme threats to OpenAI/MSFT that can't be discussed publicly without those threats activating, eg ITAR declarations or EU regulations specifically fucking your company over. Short of that, there's also just a lot of sub-LW concerns about these specific countries having unfetterable access to NMUs; I'll point to the Saga Of YOLOv1 as the prototype for that.
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Corporate 'bad behavior', regardless of its legal or moral valence. Someone gave an offer the company 'couldn't' refuse, and Altman either didn't present discuss it with the board or didn't accept it (some overlap here with the above: eg a gov said to enforce certain RLHF into the GPTs or they'll encourage copyright lawsuits). Training data came from a source that wasn't disclosed or technically legally-available (eg, Google Books data dump). Employees have been allowed to cart home copies of the newest models on thumb drive, which sometimes gets lost. Basically just some variant of 'CEO did something that could fuck over the bottom line, without permission'.
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Just as keku. OpenAI-the-business and OpenAI-the-non-profit are at (intentionally) cross purposes: the business wants to sell services for money, the non-profit wants to limit specific services sold. While most of that disagreement is mutualishly compatible, since Altman doesn't want to sell ClippyGod, there's an unavoidable disagreement where the business wants to sell its own control and the non-profit would rather burn it down than do so. And there's further the CEO (who wants to get paid a lot to do nothing and maybe present a Vision) and the employees (who want to be paid, and in this sorta field paid in a giant IPO-stock-mess). If Altman presented or pushed for a deal with Microsoft that benefited the CEOs, employees, and business at the cost of the board's interests, I don't think he's complain if they took it. But if he got fired in a way that had most of OpenAI's employee assets moved to MSFT directly, he'd cry all the way to the bank.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, there's a lot of space for horror stories here: the contractor-friend doesn't even have to be intentionally screwing you over. Just getting pushed out of their comfort zone or area of expertise to help can lead even good contractors into deep fuckery.
If a contractor fuck you over, is there any recourse?
I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
It's very difficult to bring serious punishment to a contractor. There are exceptions -- if someone just doesn't do anything, or completely destroys an area, or literally seriously injures or kills someone -- you can sometimes get criminal charges or a contractor's license revoked, but there's a big emphasis on 'sometimes', here. Merely shoddy or below-code work will almost never hit that bar.
Meanwhile, refusing to pay for contracted work that was partially- or incompetently-completed work will almost always result in a construction lien against your property. It's possible to clear this up in court if the work is clearly incomplete or dangerous, but if it's merely incompetent this can be much more complicated and dependent on the whims of a judge, and while active will prevent most loans using or sales of the property.
Mediation is usually the first recourse, if the problem is merely scale rather than scam. If the fault is just doing a bad job for the price, but all the rough parts are kinda in place if you squint, you'll often have no recourse but to badmouth the contractor. Assuming scam...
At least in the United States (and Canada) your main option is court. Below a certain (state-specific) threshold, that will be in small claims court -- good in the sense that it's not very expensive (or slow) to bring suit, bad in the sense that you'll have very limited recourse and if you win will almost always get a (capped) compensatory damages. Having clear contractual obligations (don't just write "follow code": mandate materials and specific tasks) and documenting the full scope of both the damages and before the work can make it easier to win; longer delays before filing suit or having work where it's difficult to find an expert to document problems will be harder (or, worse, if you let a contractor tell you that it 'won't need a permit or inspections' and you believed them). Larger (>5k-10k USD, though again this varies by state) stuff will have to go to conventional civil courts and is almost always going to need lawyers involved to some extent.
Note that just winning in court and demonstrating the damages to the court doesn't necessarily mean you'll get your cash back: a lot of scuzzier contractors are fly-by-night operations that can be extremely difficult to recover damages from, either being conventionally judgement proof by not having a lot of recoverable assets, or by just being too obnoxious to recover them.
The typical advice is prevention. You can't avoid every scammer, but a lot of them have a number of red flags. Most reputable contractors for major projects will have past projects they can point you toward as references, will have enough capital that you can contract most payment to occur after major milestones or project completion, and will not try to skimp on permitting and inspections, because that's how you become a reputable contractor. Most scammy contractors won't put off payment and accept specific contractual requirements that they can't meet, because that's the fastest way for a scammer to not get paid and the contractor's lien to get thrown out. If you get multiple estimates, someone offering an order-of-magnitude lower prices than the average without offering a different scope of work is probably not gonna be able to get the job done.
But those won't help if the contractor just plain lies, or if the inspectors are morons or felons/demented, or if a scammer has hollowed out a once-reputable company or the 'reputable company' was really just a gateway to a roulette of sometimes-reputable subcontractors.
The best prevention has to involve using your own evaluation, whether that be to check yourself or to evaluate specific experts, and to do so throughout the process.
gattsuru
1yr ago
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates.
I think this is very insufficiently cynical. There are absolutely so many worse options from the perspective of AI boosters that it's hard to overstate the significance, here, and a large portion of the employees are (or were) boosters. Not that Altman is or was good: he definitely wants to have One OpenAI Closed Model/Service and no one else on the planet doing serious work at the edge of development, in an absolute parody of the company's very name, along with his general race-to-the-profit-max perspective.
But he'd at least want to keep developing that model or service. Which is obviously important for all the employees pulling paychecks at the end of the month (or who have a lot of compensation in the form of stocks), but philosophically it's also a big deal for someone who wants new tech in this field developed at scale. There an absolute ton of CEOs that would shy away any non-trivial development once they've gotten a strangehold in the field, or bow to externally-driven regulatory pressures, or avoid exploring outside of their central competencies, not because of LessWrong or Luddist philosophy, but simply out of risk aversion (or... even less charitably, so b/c they want to spend the capital on Important Things like fancy new offices and international conferences rather than training costs).
gattsuru
1yr ago
but this is Bloomberg we're talking about here that got immensely suckered. people pay them lots and lots of money for this high quality info.
I'm salty because I've been on the pointy end from them before, but I'll point out that Bloomberg Media also has someone paying a lot of money to formalize and present his specific viewpoint to the public.
gattsuru
1yr ago
In addition to teenagers delaying driver's licenses and jobs, those that do try both are trading their time against extracurricular that can be marked on a FAFSA or CommonApp, and it's extremely unlikely any entry-level job will be as remunerative in the long run, especially with how scholarship-focused a lot of programs have gotten.
I think there's also been improved outreach from blue collar work to skilled- or smart-but-not-college-bound students, which on the upside means that they're getting pulled into more serious careers instead of spending a few years at McDonalds before seeing something more serious, but it does mean you're not seeing the sort of person you'd trust to reassemble a car engine doing customer service.
But more morbidly, the educational system has also just very strongly moved away from practical skills. I see it more clearly in STEM outreach, where it's now typical to see students who've never handled a wrench (and sometimes not even a screwdriver!) nor had a serious long-term project to manage, but almost all of the nearby schools have completely closed down their shop classes, and classical reading-writing-math has moved away from larger-scale or longer-term projects without immediate oversight.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I thought the procedure in California had the arrest warrants include bail? I guess that'd be magistrate rather than judge, though.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think it's less the risk itself, and more that we (pretend) we do not allow certain invasions of autonomy. If the narcolepsy or epilepsy rule required, as hypotheticals, that you get a 'smart' pillbox showing your compliance with a prescription program, than I'd be outraged by that as well even knowing that there's a pretty significant risk to both. But at least for epilepsy, the rule is to self-report seizures.
And this norm can go to fairly minimal levels of invasiveness: I have to report use of glasses as part of my Driver's License, and it's illegal for me to drive without them, but if I had to get my car outfitted with a camera and a power interrupt that would turn off the engine should I take my glasses that's absolutely be an illegitimate law. See the recent controversies over the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act anti-"impaired driving" tech.
Once someone's broken the law or otherwise had public problems, the state has more authority to move in: requiring a habitual drunk driver to use a breathalyzer interlock doesn't break this norm even if they weren't that drunk when driving. But this reporting requirement does not do that.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Part of my post and point was that Kessler was a Blue Triber, and the extent the incident was so concerning was that this was a Blue-on-Blue incident. To whatever limited extent the "progressive stack" makes sense when talking about social dynamics or minor crimes (a la the inevitable bike comic) applying it wholesale to a case where someone died struck me as a pretty serious escalation. And even for minor crimes, I'm not sure the "progressive stack" is a great model.
Here, if he's found guilty (or demonstrated innocent or not-likely-guilty at trial), it shouldn't surprise you. That's what people were highlighting at length as what death demanded during the Rittenhouse or Gardner catastrophes. It was something to update on when Dolloff wasn't prosecuted; you can't be shocked both ways at once.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but I think it's high.
Ventura County's presumptive bail schedule is here. While that schedule is for initial arrests without a warrant, before seeing a judge, the 192(b) presumptive bail of 50,000 USD isn't meaningless as a motion around the typical case. By contrast, it's comparable to the original bail for the guy charged for the Ghost Ship fire (later reduced further between the first and second trial), and that was for three-dozen counts of involuntary manslaughter (albeit with an even less clear responsibility). There's been cases so clear-cut that judges just refuse to issue bail for involuntary manslaughter, but release on recognisance can be an option too.
There's a few different allowed reasons to upgrade bail, but most of them revolve around either ensuring the safety of the public, threats to witnesses, seriousness of the offense, or risk of flight. The combination of an older victim and further charges down the road would be the first place my mind would go.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Thanks, fixed.
No one says you have to do a deep statistical analysis of every possible homicide, but how about something more than n=2?
I've got a few others in that FCFromSSC link, and I can do a broader list on both fatal or nearly-fatal incidents from several of my past posts, but the sample size is (thankfully, currently!) small; any N I can list will be a significant portion of all incidents. And people made the opposite insistence on theMotte's reddit during the Rittenhouse era or when more broadly speaking about police violence, where just one unprosecuted case, even if marginal, was unacceptable.
That said:
Lack of arrest yet.
To be fair, he has been arrested today
gattsuru
1yr ago
Jefferson County is basically Louisville, and it's a major transportation nexus in a particularly fucked-up bit of geography, so it's not surprising for it to be a bit higher, plus I think there's a couple big companies like Humana that show up under Louisville but aren't really spent in or on that location. Even with that, these numbers look jank, as does the extent it's all set as "multiple recipients" under mostly HHS funding -- there's reasons to suspect older and unhealthier populace there, but not that unusually so.
Sorting awards by Direct Payment in Jefferson County for FY2023 and 2024 shows a lot of Medicaid awards in the 1b-9.5b range, nearly 90b of them. By place of performance, Jefferson County (112.2b) is literally orders of magnitude higher than any other county (and an order of magnitude higher by congressional district), in the state. The only nearby comparable countries in total spending are Marion County Illinois (ok, Chicago I can believe), Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (wtf?), and Richmond County, South Carolina (Prisma and Blue Cross / Blue Shield), which points away from a particularly sick local population.
My guess is that there's a number of companies headquartered or having technical place-of-performance in those counties, but with the effects of that spending (and likely the actual anything-but-paper spending) occurring in a far more distributed manner.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Huh. The underlying link is this Atlantic piece, though it may be paywalled.
It's Blackman, so take it with a grain of salt, but it claims that the ABA's rating for Lawrence VanDyke was heavily biased: selecting many claims for generic ill behaviors without citing a specific example, giving only short and perfunctory interviews to anyone who liked VanDyke without asking about any of them about VanDyke's alleged bad traits, made questionable claims about a private interview that VanDyke denied publicly, and most critically violated its normal procedural rules giving those with a Not Qualified result after initial interview a secondary interview with a different evaluator (which did not happen) and to give the final letter to the judiciary committee at least 48 hours before the final hearing (instead giving well under 24 hours).
(I can't steelman the ABA position; this seems the strongest attempt, and that's damning with faint praise. See Grasz for another example from the same group.)
gattsuru
1yr ago
VanDerStock's case path is weird. SCOTUS has already issued a stay on the district court's vacateur of the law until the case reaches SCOTUS again or is denied, which makes pretty explicit what the expected long-term conclusion is. I don't think there was any reasonably optimistic perspective that would have any of the progressive branch notice the various due process and vagueness concerns here, but having both Barret and Roberts agree to leave the regulation in place for what's likely to be years is... disappointing, if not necessarily surprising.
The appeals court sending the case back down to the district for a new remedy... I dunno what they'd even do, here. The standard behavior, as both the appeals opinion here and the lower court both spelled out, is normally vacateur. And a separate injunction pending appeal tied to the same rule was likewise overturned. What's next: a permanent injunction against enforcement of a regulation, which SCOTUS will then stay too? A declaratory judgement that any enforcement of the regulation would be unlawful, which will only bind a tiny part of Texas?
There's a lot of options, but they're all going to make the extent courts treat the second amendment like a red-headed stepchild apparent, and it's not like the district judge has any reason to back down: the chickens are coming home to roost.
The first is that it's only the second time I've ever seen SSC referenced in "normie" spaces: the first being the NYT hit-piece from a few years back.
There's been a limited tendency toward snarky writers reaching out for outre citations, with perhaps one of the best-known being Scalia's citation to Vonnegut as a closing point for his PGA Tour v. Martin dissent. I've got mixed feelings on the practice, and it could mean something deeper, but it could just as well be a one-off.
That said, if you want to try to pull out some insight, the process does feel a bit like part of the response to @TracingWoodgrain's political collapse of public institutions. Oldham could have linked to a Cardiff Professor of Philosophy (that's what Scott did himself!), among other options, but there's reason he found a random blogger with a good point more persuasive than a PhD or a hundred-year-old-dictionary ipse dixiting it. The institutions going bad Left doesn't unavoidably give the progressive movement an unshakable control over systems of information or administration; it just invites alternative proofs. In the short term and in the specific context of judges, conservatives can now take some public institutions simply by the opposite of their word (VanDyke's "arrogant, lazy, [and] an ideologue”; “lacks humility”; and “has an ‘entitlement’ temperament" in particular are not benefits!), but over the longer term some other metastable point will come up. PoC || GTFO is a hacker ethos, but it also applies to pondering whether the exhibitionist furry mechanist-chemist or systems designer or rocket company is doing good work or not.
Deeper than that, I think there's some broader collapse of public authority. Not necessarily that our public authorities have gotten worse -- much of the collapse in trust reflects a lot of big names from the 90s and 00s making absolutely boneheaded behaviors common knowledge in ways that once coudl be papered over -- but that it's become common knowledge not just that it happens, but that no one in authority is even interested in trying to persuade watchers it doesn't. And this is bigger than the Red Tribe noticing its small remainder of public authorities can and do change their positions on a dime, and sometimes in bizarre ways. I can point to Toobin jerking it during a Zoom call while burnishing his feminist bonafides, but I can also point to a pro-sexuality Big Name who was a founding member of the Burned Furs and pretty clearly never wants to face or apologize for the contradictions.
There's problems to that! The conservative movement's difficulty with 'alternate paths of knowing' including grifters, charlatans, and outright nutjobs as often as merely radical-but-genuine actors predates the internet; the progressive movement's failure points are not as well-repeated, but just as present. But listing off the problems is misunderstanding my description: this is a process in the sense that gravity or crowd flow is a process, rather than the way microcontroller power staging is a process.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Nobody got shot, and no one's going to come forward with a civil lawsuit so they can get slapped with a bunch of criminal charges, so I don't think it's going to go anywhere far enough to be messy. It's just really embarrassing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd... not want to place bets on the state of the law, here. @Gdanning is probably more familiar with the matter than I am, but at least in gunnie circles the reference for law enforcement is Tennessee v Garner, and while it's a muddled mess of Totality of The Circumstances, the federal DoJ rules are not very permissive.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The flip side to that by focusing on holding up a generic fence, you undermine the strength of the stronger taboos where there are arguments better than holding back bulldozers. There were a lot of other problems in the early 1970s-era gay rights movement that allowed NAMLBA-types to get a foothold, but one of them was that California law brought a number of extremely sympathetic cases of seventeen-year-olds boinking each other.
@Meriadoc has a post here that's very interesting, but it's also quite plausible to read it as using the same principles to prohibit daikamura (pillows) and sex robots by its text, and there are other people using the same principles to argue against porn or sex toys. I think there's a way to square the circle, here, and actually find that bad things are bad without finding good or at least boring things bad too, but if you don't do so quite a large portion of the voting populace with reasonably expect you to be coming after them, eventually.
gattsuru
1yr ago
So, is this emotional explosiveness truly representative of the general populace, or is it just that on Twitter, the most extreme views gain the most traction? Moreover, how can we, as individuals seeking constructive dialogue, navigate this landscape without succumbing to frustration or misanthropy?
At least for this specific topic, part of the problem is that any serious engagement with the deeper questions at best imply a fascination with the material, and more often a desire, even for people who argue against it. That was true even for necrobestialitygate in the tumblr ratsphere, a lengthy discussion on the Haidt 'disgust' moral foundations theory, where Haidt used as one 'disgust' reaction the question of a man using chicken meat to jerk it.
Thinking about questions like "what are you going to do when your 'sex partner' of ten years has crippling health problems, and you're 30, and the next animal you adopt is going to have crippling health problems when you're 40" or "if you get hit by a truck, who's going to own your 'sex partner' after you're gone, and what are the odds that this makes the animal unadoptable" are relevant and have pretty serious impact on how the utilitarian viewpoint of the argument should look, but they're also absolutely not the sort of question you should ask under your real name, or under anything that might eventually get doxxed into your real name, or without carefully evaluating their impact on the reputation of the community where you ask them.
No such luck on that one.
I think the broader question of what happens if someone lets an particularly powerful/intelligent AI try to persuade someone with actual ability to interact with the world is interesting in ways that saying "just don't do that" aren't very interesting answers for, especially now that we're seeing people hook stupid AIs up to everything from unbounded internet access to 3d printers to literal biochem facilities.
A ... stronger version of that argument is that AI with certain unbounded drives, specifically self-improvement and resource acquisition, could possibly be so much more powerful than a system which avoids such drives, that they will be extremely tempting. This is easiest to see in the framework of the utilitarian Goal Function machine versus a deontological Asimov's Three Laws machine, but it's by no means limited to it.
But we've at least started this conversation before, so I dunno if you're interested in continuing it.
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