magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
· Edited 24d ago
Being charitable, I'm guessing you have a legitimate confusion as to what "necessary" means.
No, I was just reading the word "whatever" literally. If you would escape if not shot dead, "whatever amount of force is necessary [...] to get you in handcuffs and into custody" is by construction "shoot you, and then handcuff the corpse".
I was reading that sentence as speaking normatively, as it was responding to a pair of normative statements*; you seem to be reading it descriptively. Normatively, it's objectionably bloodthirsty, which is why (as you say) it's descriptively false in most (all?) of the Western world (for the record, I'm Australian).
The word "whatever" is a very strong word, and frequently produces overbroad statements if used without qualification (a relevant qualification in this case would have been "sublethal"). It appears that @StableOutshoot did not intend to say what he said, and he has implicitly retracted it, resolving the issue.
*Notably, one of these was "fleeing police shouldn't be a death sentence"; hence, the escape scenario was already under discussion and I assumed he meant to address it.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
And then an explicit recommendation against due process. Huh.
No? I said that capture (for trial) is better than death, and it's usually feasible.
No one is making this argument. Not even implicitly. This is strawman and conflation dialed up to 10.
StableOutlook made a very sweeping statement that we seem to agree was not literally true in all cases. I pulled him up on it. You don't want me to point out where there need to be asterisks, add the asterisks, or even an IOU for asterisks like "(mostly)", yourself.
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
Pretending that she was shot for merely escaping is also peak strawman.
I did no such thing. You made a broad statement that covered much-less-defensible cases, and I pulled you up on overbreadth (which I even called "slight"), while clarifying that serious injury of a policeman warrants deadly force.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
When the police decide to arrest you, they are now allowed to use whatever amount of force is necessary (but not more) to get you in handcuffs and into custody.
I think this is a slight overreach. Let's take the time I ran from police IRL.
A week prior, I'd tried to kill myself with a knife. I got chucked in the looney bin, because that's what you do when someone's interrupted in a suicide attempt. I stopped being suicidal within days, but this meant I had another problem i.e. the fact that the looney bin had terrible security, and one of the other patients kept talking about how he was going to murder all the staff. I complained about the awful security, got brushed off, and successfully escaped all the way back to the house where I lived. 24 hours later, the police showed up, intending to return me; I ran, but was unable to outrun them and gave up. (After they hauled me all the way back - which was over 100km - I got released after 2 hours, because I pointed out to the psychiatrist that if I were still suicidal I'd had plenty of opportunity in the 24 hours I'd been loose; you'd think they'd have realised that without having to drag me all the way back there, but apparently boxes needed to be ticked or something.)
So, okay. Take that situation and make me a better runner, so that I could outrun the police. Is it warranted for the police to shoot me?
I'd say no, because there's literally nothing plausibly gained by doing so. I hadn't committed any crimes, or posed any threat to anyone besides myself - and shooting me would of course have put my life in much greater jeopardy than letting me escape. Assuming I was considered a suicide risk (leaving aside the reasonableness of that determination), I'd say the outcomes should be preferred in the order capture > escape > death, not capture > death > escape.
I think this extends up into some of the more minor crimes. If someone parks in a 2-hour parking zone for 3 hours, and drives away in a normal, non-dangerous fashion when an on-foot policeman approaches, I think it's not good for the policeman to pull out a gun and shoot him. Parking violations are not very serious, and the expense in money and lives of shooting the criminal (notably including innocents, because shooting the driver of a moving vehicle typically results in a crash) far exceeds the benefit of preventing him from possibly escaping justice, or even the deterrence value of getting X amount of other people to not park longer than permitted.
Certainly, for serious crimes like murder or even robbery, there's enough of a problem with a successful escape that the outcome preference should be capture > death > escape. And of course, the death or serious injury of a policeman or innocent ranks below any of these. But yeah, I'd call this sentence a bit stronger than warranted.
EDIT: Realised this was non-obvious, so: I was running into a public forest, hence "follow in car until exhausted" wouldn't have worked.
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.
The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.
The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:
“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”
The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.
(AP, emphasis mine)
I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful.
but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures.
Note that these are useful if you share the Yudkowskian view of neural nets. Specifically, the view that it is impossible to align a neural net smarter than you; "a technique, inventable before the Singularity, that will allow us to make neural-net ASI and not die" is a contradiction in terms. There are thus no "useful" answers, if you define "useful" as "works on neural nets".
In this paradigm, 100% of surviving worlds follow this two-point plan:
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Neural nets are totally and permanently abandoned until after the Singularity; they are banned in all countries (convincing everyone is hard; easier is convincing enough nuclear powers, hard enough, that the holdout countries are either occupied or obliterated).
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Non-doomed versions of AI research (e.g. GOFAI, uploads) continue.
The reason you need #1 is that #2 is going to take at least 50 years to hit the Singularity. The reason you need #2 is that #1 is only metastable, not actually stable; sooner or later, in a hundred years or a million, the Butlerian Jihad will break down, at which point everybody dies unless we've hit the Singularity in the meantime.
And hence, work on how to make non-neural-net AI work is necessary (if less urgent than stopping neural nets, on which point Yudkowsky is indeed currently focusing).
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
"Dutch"/"Deutsch" are actually the same word whose spelling was standardised a slightly-different way; the Netherlands was part of the Holy Roman Empire and is thus part of Germany in the broad sense. Same reason there are "Pennsylvania Dutch" (who are German).
It's basically the same issue as the ambiguity of "Congolese" or "Korean", just old enough to predate spelling standardisation.
magic9mushroom
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29d ago
I must confess that I've never really understood the US habit of self-censoring profanities. You are allowed to say "fuck" here - there is no word filter - and implying you said "fuck" is approximately as discourteous as actually saying it. So, what is gained by censoring yourself?
The lack of internal hard borders is a major part of the draw of federation in the first place, and the USA's Constitution is broadly set up to prevent them (states are not allowed to refuse entry to citizens of other states). At the point where you're proposing bringing in internal hard borders, you're in practice talking about dissolving the USA along partisan lines (and possibly annexing the blue chunk to Canada, so that it's contiguous again). This is a colourable position, and one @FCfromSSC has been spruiking here for a while, but it's a rather-big ask; I would remind you of what happened the last time a chunk of the USA decided to secede.
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