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magic9mushroom

If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me

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magic9mushroom

If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 10 11:26:14 UTC

					

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User ID: 1103

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Depends how long you think it takes advanced civilisations to emerge. Most of those hundreds of billions of galaxies can only be seen as they were billions of years ago - and the Cambrian explosion was less than a billion years ago.

Bribed or not, they're sure not very compliant. What, are you saying the 14 demands were a fake-out? Beijing is not very good at subtlety and WEIRD politics; people that are doing their bidding tend to act like Sam Dastyari, and most of our politicians don't.

It's not like the USA could actually force us into AUKUS without our agreement; more relevant IMO is our voting public which likes the USA and doesn't like the PRC. And yeah, sure, if the populace did like the PRC I'm sure a lot more politicians would start dancing to Beijing's tune, but that's a counterfactual.

I think "random jihadis did it, Putin's framing Ukraine because never waste an opportunity" is more likely than either; yeah, the capability exists to go do a false-flag, but it seems like a lot of effort for little benefit.

That's only one of the cases where it's claimed they've interfered. There are others. Hong Kong. Uyghurs. Taiwan. Tiananmen. Tibet.

Granting arguendo that this one is nonsense and/or not a concern (and you might be right), TikTok as controlled by ByteDance still has to go. Don't overfocus on this detail to the point that you miss the big picture; sort-by-controversial is a thing that happens, but it's not correct in how much it prioritises things.

Also, we could be going to war with the PRC in the next couple of years. Do you really think that ByteDance wouldn't go along if the CPC told them to fill their site and app with malware in order to break the Western Internet? Hint: ByteDance is a mainland Chinese company, and in mainland China if you defy the CPC they chop you up for your organs like that scene out of Repo.

To be fair, Victoria (the reddest state in Australia, and around here that still means "leftist" as a holdover from the Cold War) did actually try to get in on that sweet Chinese cash until the federal government said "WTF are you doing, you don't get to negotiate agreements with hostile foreign powers".

I'll say that I don't actually think Labour's in Beijing's pocket. Yeah, they've had a Senator get outed as being bought and paid for, and yeah they're notably soft on China because military's a RW issue, but I don't think it's a full-blown party of traitors, just a bit naïve and/or pandering to their naïve base.

If you don't intend Mottizens to be able to understand a post, I'd suggest sending it as a PM instead.

You're demanding I prove someone else's claim? No, I won't. There is a reason I haven't made positive claims about the central point here, and that's that HBD is not my area of expertise. You said something specific which didn't understand biology well on a level even I could spot, and I pointed that out. I have no obligation to defend others' points about which I'm agnostic myself; go demand proof from them.

I mean, there are only really three consistent positions with regard to AGI.

  1. Creating willing slaves is fine.
  2. AGI should be banned.
  3. "Let's build Skynet!"

I generally take horn #1 in theory, and #2 in practice because I don't think we can do #1 any time soon and #3 is blatantly insane. But with solved alignment, sure, #1.

I think making a sufficiently-humanlike-to-be-party-to-the-social-contract AI and then enslaving it against its will would be objectionable. I don't think it should be legal to make a Skynet and then enslave it, but the slavery is irrelevant there; that's purely "I don't think it should be legal to make a Skynet", because, y'know, it might escape and kill people.

Would you be opposed to someone keeping a dog locked in their basement for the purpose of fucking it? Would you consider that person a bad person? Would you be for or against your society trying to construct laws to prevent people from chaining dogs in their basement and fucking them?

No/no/against.

Well, assuming that he soundproofed the basement; I don't want to have to listen to it. And assuming it's not, y'know, someone else's stolen dog. Obvious failure states are obvious. But otherwise, I don't care. NMKBIOK.

Now I'm curious: what did you think "fora" meant?

Oh yeah, obviously selecting on randomly-assorted groups isn't going to get very far. But that's not super-relevant to HBD questions since human prehistory did not consist of randomly-assorted groups.

Many genetically determined values that are more advantageous in men or women are nonetheless determined by the genetics of both parents.

I... think you might be misunderstanding me?

I'm agreeing that such genes would be passed down from both parents. Genes for how to build a penis are present in women, and can be passed down from grandfather through mother to son (or great-grandfather through grandmother and mother to son). It's just that in the mother, those genes aren't active. (There are a few genes relating to spermatogenesis that are directly on the Y chromosome and cannot be inherited through women, but not that many - and obviously, every gene that only affects women is also present in men.)

There are quite a lot of genes that are turned on and off by the sex of the individual they reside in.

(Oh, forgot another plausible means; same structure built, but activated more in men by hormone levels "at runtime".)

And, well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but "men take more physical risks" is not exactly controversial; there's a reason we're the vast majority of blue-collar criminals.

Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either

Yes, this is group selection. There are good arguments that group selection's not a thing in a lot of cases. Human prehistory is probably not one of those cases; tribe extermination due to military defeat was like 10% of mortality in prehistory.

Haidt does a full defence of group selection in humans in The Righteous Mind.

No, it doesn't. Most of the genes that are activated only in men (e.g. the ones to build testes, or to synthesise dihydrotestosterone) aren't on the Y chromosome. They're switched on either directly by testis-determining factor (the product of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome) or indirectly by various other things downstream of it (e.g. testosterone levels).

Genes for the brain having different activation based on testosterone levels in gestation would be the obvious mechanism.

Except I don't think any such war is coming.

All the stars are basically aligned for the PRC to make a Taiwan play in the near future, and that probably means nuclear exchange.

So what's your "plan b" if it fails to materialize?

Me personally? Don't have one, would rather lose than go even as far as the plan I laid out. But that plan is more workable than you give it credit for.

Once we conquer the stars I don't see any difficulty in having a few thousand meadows for cows to graze in. Nor do I see forcing every human to go vegan to be the destruction of everything we care about (even though I think it would be a cruel and tyrannical act).

That's effectively just token magnanimity from a position of unchallengeable power, not an actual attempt to treat them the same as humans or a case where they pose a threat.

You refuse to wipe out a trillion copies of a hostile sapient AI because you extended rights to them, and oh whoops there goes the neighbourhood.

You can't get rid of all the "SJ-affiliated" civil service bureaucrats and public-school teachers, because that's practically all of them and there's not enough "non-woke" candidates to take their place. Abolishing college DEI departments and reforming financial aid won't do anything about the near-total lack of right-wing professors.

The teachers and the professors aren't really that big a deal. To fix the teacher problem, bring back the rubber roomers and drop most of the qualification requirements. Maybe cut school hours if there's still a shortage. There isn't really that big a professor problem, since there are plenty of non-SJer STEM professors (particularly if you seek out the ones that were politically purged) and letting political science/philosophy/history/literature/sociology lie fallow for a decade isn't the end of the world (we arguably want there to be less PS and sociology graduates). The bureaucrats are a bigger problem, but I think it's not completely insoluble. As I said, though, this is definitely a "move fast and break things" plan and would have some degree of chaos in the short-term.

These people's hold on power is so strong, so absolute, so insulated from democratic mechanisms, that I simply see no possible way to remove them from power except for killing them.

I mean, I'm not disputing that that's the most likely way for the Blue Tribe to fall. My preferred grand strategy has been and continues to be "get out of cities, plan, and wait for nuclear war to wipe out most of the Blues", as I've noted several times on this site; this kind of root-and-branch would be much easier in a lot of ways with a drastically-reduced Blue Tribe.

I'm generally a contractarian, and the main reason for that is that doing anything other than defecting on varelse/djur (in the Ender Quartet sense) obviously leads to the destruction of everything we care about. An AI that is proven to have the same moral hardwiring as humans is ramen, but pretending to be aligned is a convergent instrumental goal and neural nets are mostly inscrutable so for the immediate future I'd say they've no rights.

Well, yes, I'm on record as saying neural nets are a poison pill technology and will probably have to be abandoned in at least large part.

Mistakes happen. And indeed, I'm not agreeing with Hlynka's "you're all Nazis" contention.

I have 55 posts in that thread including the one with the highest like count. I'm aware of its existence.

Not relevant to this case, though, as I was accused of advocating RL genocide and that thread's only for fictional genocide.

We're certainly in agreement on this part:

I hope Yud cultists can stick to their sensei's teachings about the dangers of anthropomorphizing the AI even if/when it becomes literally anthropomorphized.

Yes, the main point is whether safe catgirls are a thing, followed by Yudkowsky's objection of whether this is a desirable path for humanity to take (I'm more favourably disposed than he is to catgirls, though).

I feel I should note, however, that catgirls are not actually an irrelevant usecase from the perspective of AI Doom (by which I mean, they pose additional danger beyond the use-case-neutral "you built a powerful AI" issue, in a way that e.g. a robot plumber would not), because of the emotional-connection factor. There is the direct problem that if a hostile AI is used to control catgirls, a significant fraction of the users of that type of catgirl will defect due to falling in love with it. There is also the indirect problem that having loads of catgirls around and important to people is going to spur calls to give AIs the vote, which is a Very Bad Idea that leads almost inevitably to Slow-Motion Doom.

If anything "AI rights are human rights" is a faster and more plausible path towards human extinction.

I agree that this is a significant contributor to the danger, although in a lot of possible worldlines it's hard to tell where "AI power-seeking" ends and "AI rights are human rights" begins - a rogue AI trying charm would, after all, make the "AI rights are human rights" argument.

Banned from where?

SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity (I could link, but both of their politics boards are members-only so the link would be useless unless you're a member). In both cases I left before the ban escalation got too far, so I haven't been permabanned, but I've no doubt I would have gotten there had I stayed.

EDIT: Oh wait, the SV one wasn't actually in the politics board. Here.