toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
1yr ago
A procedural tar-pit.
The procedural rules are put in place precisely because the bare words of the constitution would allow that kind of shit you name. This is why people pay attention to precedent.
Oh wow, this is wonderful. Sorry I didn't see it when you posted it.
I'll confirm it's 100% true. We are made to be twisted around the little fingers of our daughters.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I expect there is, and I don't know how that affects Amazon's behaviour. That's a generalized thing though. Distinct from "some specific lawyers are going to sue us unless we do this specific thing".
toadworrier
1yr ago
I don't think you said anything wrong. What was the worry?
toadworrier
1yr ago
So the best strategy is to start from a low base.
toadworrier
1yr ago
the Pakistanis will defend them against the Indians and Iranians.
That's a joke right? Irony can be hard to smell on the internet.
toadworrier
1yr ago
The government permitted private business to not accept electronic pament under a certain sum,
Is this a tactic for avoiding VAT?
toadworrier
1yr ago
Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'
It's supposed to matter because it's evidence that a former the the PUSA was, in his former role as Vice PUSA, accepting bribes from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. This was hardly a nothingburger then, and in 2022 it's more like a nukingburger.
toadworrier
5mo ago
police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.
This bit does sound like a historical holdover, since certain respectable political parties both north and south of the border have friends in interesting places.
toadworrier
9mo ago
you better aim to be really sick
But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.
I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.
toadworrier
9mo ago
OK so the law against conspiracy to murder is constitutional because murder is not lawful.
Whereas a law against conspiracy to ostracise is not, because it burdens the rights of those who are taking orders about whom to ostracise. How exactly does it do this?
It's one thing to say that ostracism itself is legal (which it is), or even protected by the 1st Amendment (which it isn't), but it's another thing to say that the conspiracy is protected.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Yes, the whole historical point of the Labor and Liberal was to ding-dong the labour laws. It's still true, but less so.
The labour movement used to have a power struggle between the unions themselves and the more PMC-dominated Labor party. The party has definitively one that fight, and the unions are themselves bureaucratic PMC-run organizations (except maybe in construction where thug life requires footsoldiers).
The Liberals are struggling with the fact that their traditional backers (captial) have become woke capital while all the political energy and opportunities are in the fightback against wokism.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Thanks, that's really helpful.
It seems my impression of Korea being left-wing was skewed by emphasis on labour -- Unions being powerful and traditionally respected but now a bit too big for their boots. Kind of similar to my own country, Australia where construction workers are the last holdouts able to engage in actual gangsterism and teachers are radically left wing (of course in Korea that takes a special form).
toadworrier
9mo ago
Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission.
But this is not the way American anti-discrimination law works. For decades lawyers and civil-rights bureaucrats have been successfully going after every more implicit forms of putative discrimination. "Here's my statistical evidence that Foo has a disparate impact on Bar. I was FooBarred, now give me $$$$$$$" is standard practice.
That cat really will be among the pigeons if the Court can make that particular sword cut both ways. My guess is that over time the court system will follow the leader, but the EEOC will not unless the Republicans take over the government and gut the thing.
toadworrier
10mo ago
You are correct, mea culpa, I should have quoted the later part of that paragraph instead.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Here's the most concrete plan I've seen along those lines:
toadworrier
10mo ago
Ok, I've reread your post, and I think I stand by what I said above.
So it's kind of weird that you set up Yudkowsky as your bugbear, but then mostly argue against something completely different from the "Yuddist" position.
I don't think that's a fair reading of either my substack post or my Areo piece. Yes, I do criticise his position, but my main target is centralisation. The reason I bring in Yuddist foomer-doomerism into this is (a) this position is actually quite prominent, Eliezer got published in Time for chrissake, and (2) the "smart" argument I hear for why centralisation is Good Actually is based on foomer-doomer assumptions. Eliezer himself is more consistent: he knows that his assumptions lead him to a ban even on government activity. His acolytes seem to think "well the worst of both worlds at least gets us part of the world we want, so let's go for it".
The PRC has actually started requiring interpretability as a precondition of large AI deployment, ...
This is just naive.
But anyway, even if you believe the people who brought us the Wuhan Institute for Virology have got it all covered, then you still have to worry about all the other countries in the world.
For all that the CPC is tyrannical, they still don't actually want to kill all humans; they cannot rule humanity if they, and humanity, are dead.
Communists don't all always kill millions of people on purpose! For example Great Chinese Famine, was more incompetence than malice. Here's what I say in Areo
The tyrannical governments of the past were dependent on human beings to administer the machinery of repression, but an AI-powered tyranny has other means at its disposal. Totalitarian states have never been reluctant to depose their own leaders and an AI-powered ruling party could afford to dispense with every last cadre. The machines might be the true leaders. There’s no telling what such machines may choose to do with us humans. They might simply kill us all, since we are superfluous and a little unpredictable.
[This is quick, a partial response, I'll have to read your comment more carefully to give it a full and fair thought. Thanks!]
- You think that letting governments build high-powered AI while shutting down others' access to it is a bad idea.
- You don't like Eliezer Yudkowsky and those who follow him.
The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI.
My views on Eliezer are much more complicated than (2) that, but for the sake of this argument, I'll accept that as a simplifying approximation. Roughly I like Yud but disdain Yuddism.
The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI. Indeed, his proposal of threatening and if necessary declaring war against governments that try is the direct and inevitable result of taking that idea extremely seriously
Yes, to his credit (and I do give him credit for that in the article), Eliezer bites that bullet. But in this he becomes his own reductio
If you fear such experimentation in the west, then you should fear the use of AI by autocracies even more. Eliezer Yudkowksy is honest enough to acknowledge that—but it commits him to the absurdity of advocating a shooting war against a nuclear power as a hedge against Doomsday.
Eliezer's global ban is not going to happen. Even a ban in the west is not going to happen. The Biden administration is gearing up to set up an AI bureaucracy to regulate it on the advice of Sam Altman. And I see the LessWrongers cheering and declaring victory at each new headline.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Thanks for that. It sounds like Banana Replublic logic does in fact apply.
The scandals you list sound awfully Clintonesque, so I can see why a voter would not want to unilaterally disarm because of them. That said, as far as I can tell, the Clintons are unusually corrupt by the standards of prominent American politicians. I mean how is it that the many enemies of DONALD TRUMP can't come up with a good real-estate scandal to use against him, and have to settle for pissant stuff about paying off pornstars?
toadworrier
11mo ago
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I haven't even finished reading it, so this is only a response to the first bit. My available time is going to the thinly sliced for a while, so I'm going to be doing things in bite-sized morsels.
Are you asking this from an Aristotelian point of view? I.e. "what is the Telos of Man"? To take your question literally. I'd say human nature has not changed very much. I wouldn't say our Telos has changed at all.
I'll cop to not actually having read Aristotle, but from inference, that's the general thrust.
Same here. But I've seen enough secondary and tertiary material to box a whole class of thinking in a category named "Aristotalean", whether or not it reflects the actual writings of the great man.
I'd put it more in terms of values and experience and significant choices available. Fighting is a fairly significant part of the general human experience, and the core nature of a fight, what it is and what it means, its moral nature if you will, seems immune to technological progress.
I tentatively agree. But I'll also note that fighting and reduced over the course of civilisation (go read a Pinker tome for the empirical argument). This has some negative consequences, but mostly it's a good thing.
I think it is the same for love, friendship, ambition, curiosity, marriage, sex, procreation, pleasure, fear, sickness, pain, death, justice, betrayal, jealousy... every morally significant aspect of the human experience, in short.
Nice (though still incomplete) list! You are right that the story is much the same, and I think I have the same sort of response. Let's pick out "love, procreation, pain and death". I understand what you mean when you say they are in some sense unchanged. I'm writing this from the floor of a hospital room, where my two-day old son is sleeping peacefully (for now). All the really significant parts of the experience are ancient.
But there's also this: we have better obstetrics than the ancients. Neither this boy, nor his big sister would have been likely to have survived their births in medieval times. Or at least they'd have been left without a mother. But we live in modern times, and so here is our family is.
Also I'm showing that the mundane progress shouldn't be lightly ignored. My examples are there to show that any attempt to do so, distorts the word far away from it's ordinary meaning.
Does mundane progress have any moral weight? It seems to me that by asking this question, we're already saying that our primary concern is morality
The point in my article was that by focusing on moral weight, we are distorting the common understanding of "progress". There's something sly about separating these things out. And I think that's what our examples above are drawing out, there's things of moral weight and mundane utility interpenetrate in ways that make them inseparable (which is perhaps why sensationalists confuse the two).
We recognize a number of moral principles, all of which trade off against each other. If mundane progress has moral weight, then it too should trade off against our other moral principles,
What? Why should we assume that we are forever at optimal frontier where everything is a trade-off? You have to be doing everything right to be be at that frontier, and even then the frontier can move when circumstances change.
toadworrier
11mo ago
All Anglo countries went pretty hard for the Temperance movement. Only the US actually had prohibition, but other countries (and the US in other times) had restrictive regulations that fell short of bans. I wouldn't be surprised if these included incentives for moderating ethanol percentage.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Then again. I know Sri Lankans who will drink whisky all day long at the cricket, so maybe the %-alcohol isn't the point.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Are people starting to drink at cricket matches like Aussies?
Traditionally at that Gabba, people will be downing schooners of XXXX all day long. They get pretty smashed, but it's still only 4%ish so it's manageable.
(Nowadays they have better beer at the Gabba, but I don't approve. If it's not XXXX, it doesn't taste like Cricket).
Yeah, I have no idea what the real law of the land is. Ask the real lawyers.
The point is that the 1987 decision upthread is clearly not some activist reach inventing constitutional rules out of whole cloth.
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