omw_68
24d ago
In the case of black hate crimes against the alphabet soup, these are mostly not actual hate crimes-
FWIW I was referring to actual hate crimes in the sense that the victim genuinely is being targeted due to their being gay, trans etc.
omw_68
24d ago
This in particular sounds like the whole thing rests on "the experts" having 20-30 IQ points on the people they're investigating, and being reasonably confident they'll be doing the manipulating, rather than being manipulated. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption here, and I'm really not seeing anything that's supposed to catch this case in particular.
I tend to agree with this, but I would worry there's another issue in play, which is that some of these "experts" may have political beliefs and/or tribal alliances which color their judgment. For example, a lot of women with advanced degrees in the social sciences are feminists, i.e. they subscribe to an ideology with a strong tendency to see men as the source of all evil and women as innocent victims. If she were evaluating another woman accused of wrongdoing, I would not trust such a woman to act in an unbiased way.
omw_68
24d ago
Yeah I get why there's a need for a 'not guilty by reason of insanity' verdict as a general social phenomenon, but it feels like as the modern mental health military-industrial complex has grown and grown and grown that it's far more likely to produce socially deleterious outcomes where people who are unfit to be members of polite society are given soft sentences as opposed to ensuring leniency for what I'd consider legitimate cases. Social programs that were originally predicated on 'Bob is injured down at the mines and lost his leg, give him a pension' are struggling to catch up with a world where you can just obtain diagnoses which, whilst I'm sure are serious and there are legitimate cases, are a lot harder to disprove as a third party.
Yes, in general there is a societal issue with handing out privileges based on conditions which are difficult or impossible to verify. Resulting in what seems like abuse. Evidently, this can run the gamut from bringing one's pet dog into a grocery store all the way up to (arguably) getting away with murder. I am pretty sure this is a central part of conservatives' objections to trans rights. To a conservative, it's pretty obviously a problem if any man can unilaterally decide that he's a woman and enjoy various privileges as a result of having done so.
And what about the progressive view on the subject? In general, it seems like progressives favor handing out privileges liberally based on self-identification. But I strongly suspect that this liberalism is limited to progressives and their perceived allies.
There are countless cases of walking garbage getting acquitted for the worst crimes possible.
In your view, roughly what percentage of the total is represented by such cases?
omw_68
24d ago
Massachusetts specifically having the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove that the defendant is sane, rather than the defense having to prove the defendant is insane, seems backwards to me. The downstream implications of this seems disastrous to me?
I would guess that in practice, this principle of law is simply ignored most of the time. So for example, suppose some drug addict with a long history of psychiatric treatment robs a convenience store while high on 3 different drugs, shoots and kills the cashier, and gets charged with murder. If you were the defense attorney, you might have the clever idea of asking for jury charges on the sanity issue. But one way or another, I doubt you would accomplish anything. Because at the end of the day, the only question that really matters to the judge and jury is what would be a just result in this case. And absent any culture war issues or extenuating circumstances, they will all agree that justice requires your client to go to prison.
I think that at the heart of the Clancy case lies a similar question: What's a just result? People start with the answer to that question and then work backwards to justify it. And that's where the culture war comes in to play.
What is interesting is how an such an event is absolutely not making any news. I know that this is extremely contested match in the oppression Olympics - but it seems to me that the mainstream media has decided to bury such stories, even though they happen way more often.
Yeah, from what I understand, hate crime attacks against gay and trans people tend to be perpetrated by blacks and/or Muslims. In fact I am a little surprised that the Guardian provided the name of the alleged shooter and didn't simply refer to him as an "Arizona man."
But anyway, I tend to go with Steve Sailer's idea that there is a "coalition of the fringes" and these types of incidents need to be downplayed (or deflected) in order to keep the coalition together.
omw_68
25d ago
This is just installment #9000 in ‘democracy means thé center-left gets its way on all the important issues and wins most of the elections’.
I more or less agree with this. I argued in another post that it's similar to the phrase "Our Democracy" which was bandied about after the first time Trump was elected. The claim was, in substance, that Trump and his supporters were a threat to "Our Democracy." Which doesn't make literal sense, since Trump was elected democratically.
But yeah, once you realize that "democracy" means that a certain set of liberal people and values get to set public policy, things kind of fall into place.
omw_68
25d ago
That's a surprise to me, I would have guessed that the holdouts were a small number of women who are regularly online and exposed to all the pro-Clancy agitation. Perhaps I have been getting too much of my information from Matt Walsh.
but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
Yeah, for me that's pretty much the issue. There's this feminist notion that women should never be held accountable for their wrongdoing (that indeed, wrongdoing is something men do, not women) and it's annoying to say the least. (Of course they'll never come out and say it, but when a woman publicly misbehaves, it's pretty normal for feminists to come forward, minimize things, and blame the misbehavior on some man or a stand-in for men.)
I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder.
I don't have a strong opinion about this. In fact, the just result might very well be for her to be acquitted. Unfortunately the case has become a culture war issue; if she's acquitted it's a victory for feminists so part of me was hoping for a conviction, although I try to resist such feelings.
omw_68
25d ago
The Bulverist take is just the occlusion of small-d democracy-as-a-voting-thing, and large-D Democratic as a member of the Democratic Party
FWIW my take is pretty similar. When tech leaders are accused of opposing "democracy," it's basically the same meaning as when anti-Trump types used to use the phrase "Our Democracy."
Obviously those people weren't referring to actual democracy. After all, Trump was democratically elected. Rather, they are referring the idea that a certain group of people and set of values should run the country. That public policy on things like abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. should be determined according to these people and values. That's what they meant by "Democracy."
Someone once observed that the phrase "Our Democracy" is better interpreted as "Our Bureaucracy." In the same way, I think that the actual argument being made here is that these tech leaders are opposing Our Bureaucracy.
omw_68
27d ago
The risk is that giant fields of GPUs and ungodly amounts of data are not known to be inherent requirements for learning. As an existence proof, human brains are far more sample efficient than current architectures.
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's worth noting that -- in effect -- the human brain has been trained on oodles of data over millions of years.
It would be interesting to calculate what the equivalent amount of compute (I really dislike that noun btw) would be for a modern neural network type system.
omw_68
27d ago
That doesn't mean that the tradeoff is never worth it,
Agreed. To be clear, I am not arguing that there should or shouldn't be AI regulation. My position in this discussion is simply that it's reasonable to hypothesize that leaders in the AI field support regulation, in whole or in part, for selfish reasons, namely that it will hinder potential competition.
omw_68
27d ago
None of the proposed regulations apply to small companies.
I looked at just one proposed law and based on that I disagree with this claim, since the threshold includes affiliates. So for example, if Google acquires a substantial share of your AI startup, you're covered. Given that people create and invest in startups with the hope of being acquired, that's a significant issue. Of course that's looking at just one proposed law.
If people are doing frontier training runs we indeed want to see them regulated, that's the point. Of course we should not do the regulation badly so that legitimate runs take months or years to get approved but you're just making a general argument against all regulation.
If being investigated scares you off from being involved in building the kind of thing that has nation state hacking capabilities then I would call that mission accomplished.
The thing is, I'm not making an argument for or against regulation. And in fact it might very well make sense to have these sorts of obstacles in place.
In substance, you asked what direct incentive the current leaders in the AI field would have to support these sorts of obstacles. And I answered that question. Whether certain obstacles would make for good public policy is an entirely different question, in my opinion.
It seems like you are addressing a different issue than what I am addressing, and for that reason it seems like it would be counterproductive to have further discussion.
omw_68
27d ago
There are already multi-billion dollar hurdles for new players in the industry to put together enough compute to train a frontier model
As was pointed out by @confidentcrescent big companies typically start as small companies. And there are billions of dollars of capital potentially available to the right company (or wrong company) which shows promise. That's how the current frontrunners got there.
the idea that having a legal department is going to be the difference is absurd.
Not all hurdles can be solved by having a legal department. For example, suppose a license is required to buy more than a modest amount of computing power. And that license requires a background check and investigation of a company's investors and senior officers which takes 6 months or even a year. The delay and prospect of being investigated could easily scare off a lot of potential investors and/or founders.
omw_68
28d ago
Progressivism makes a lot more sense when you model it as basically a game.
I basically agree, which is part of the reason why -- in my opinion -- it's impossible to come up with a set of core principles of progressivism. Because it's not an ideology but rather a process by which people compete for social status.
In my view it's roughly analogous to fashion in clothing. The basic rules are (1) to be safe, copy what most other people are doing; (2) if you want to get ahead, you need to go a little further than what other people are doing; and (3) sometimes it's worth the risk to try to be a trend setter. If you don't follow the rules, you can expect to be ostracized.
omw_68
28d ago
I have seen exactly 0 people convinced anytime anywhere by an argument via someone else saying they are committing a psychological fallacy. It's nice to have them labeled but I'd put the real world impact as pretty de minimis
Even that might be overly charitable. If you start with someone who is arrogant and partisan and teach that person various fallacies, quite possibly he will become more arrogant, more confident in his partisan opinions, and less willing to consider contradictory information (because he is better at spotting arguable weaknesses in his opponents' arguments).
omw_68
28d ago
Why would the current winners of the race want this?
Perhaps because they anticipate or hope that the applicable regulations would impose a lot of bureaucratic hurdles and red tape on new players in the industry.
omw_68
28d ago
Perhaps I am too cynical but the call for government coordination seems like an obvious attempt to build themselves a moat in a largely moatless space.
I tend to agree with this. Quite possibly the company that revolutionizes AI hasn't even been founded yet and surely the current big players are aware of this type of vulnerability. That they will end up being the Yahoo and AskJeeves of AI. It's hard to imagine that this isn't informing their thinking.
omw_68
29d ago
But at the same time I don't think those industries are particularly worse than other sectors
My intuition is that people and entities that make a show of moral superiority behave morally worse, generally speaking, than others, in situations where they perceive they are not being scrutinized. I have basically no evidence to support this claim, it's just my intuition about human nature -- that bad people have more incentive to don a halo and also that people who have paid lip service to some Just Cause are more likely to feel they have permission to step out of line. Oh, and also my many observations of hypocrisy among celebrities, politicians, activists, and so on.
omw_68
29d ago
But I agree with you that a lot of the characters end up sounding exactly the same.
Some critics hold that stories can be divided into two types: plot-driven and character-driven. In my view, the Foundation stories, especially the early ones were way on the plot-driven side of the spectrum. The characters weren't that interesting, and that's fine. I think science fiction fans tend to be more interested in plot-driven stories, especially world-building.
I do think there's a bit of a contradiction built into them. The whole premise is that humans, at the large scale, are ultimately predictable: individual decisions don't matter, and there are no great men of history. But the entire plot depends heavily on the actions of Hari Seldon, and a few other great men who think and act just like him. So... what's up with that?
For what it may be worth, I had kind of assumed that this was an intentional and unspoken irony in the story. That notwithstanding his theories, Hari Seldon had a massive impact, as an individual, on the history of the Galaxy. But in hindsight, maybe it was just the fact that regardless of whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven, the story is going to be much more compelling and interesting if the actions of individual characters have an impact on the outcome.
I haven't really heard the phrase since I quit an industry organization which had a lot of vocal liberal members.
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