toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
11mo ago
I'm dubious, for instance, that you actually understand the moral questions posed by slavery. Can you name the two developments which most changed the moral calculus of forced labour between 1400 and the present day?
Are you then taking a relativist stance, that slavery might have been OK for them even if it isn't for us? I'm sorry that sounds like a rhetorical-gotcha question -- it's not intended as such. I'm trying to understand you.
toadworrier
11mo ago
What makes you think she's white?
Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."
toadworrier
5mo ago
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
toadworrier
6mo ago
Adversary reveals himself through his accusations
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
toadworrier
9mo ago
And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
toadworrier
10mo 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
10mo 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
Can you link to me the document you are referring to?
AFAICT the particular injunction that this article on about is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdf, and is only seven pages. But of course there are many, many other documents.
toadworrier
11mo ago
The word appears twice in the poem:
I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Clean criminal history because you think juries take that into account directly (are they always allowed to know?) or because such people behave differently in court from repeat criminals?
toadworrier
11mo 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.
toadworrier
11mo ago
I think your examples of information loss prove my point. Greeks lost writing, the world did not, and eventually the re-learned it from the east. Basic technology never had to be re-discovered in the Tasmania, the people were simply replaced by others who had not lost them. That was a big disaster for the Tasmanians, but civilisation keeps going.
You are right that moral progress is very patchy and reversible. I think (despite your choice of example) there's a rough net improvement brought on by the axial age, and another one by the Enlightenment. We can pick human sacrifice and slavery as the iconic institutions obsoleted by those revolutions. But when we zoom in to finer detail we see lots of reversals.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Makes sense for a genuine civil liberties organization, because every political faction wants to violate someone's civil rights some of the time and so the civil rights will do well to practice its independence by calling everyone out on their misbehaviour. So I would expect FIRE to do it in the modern age more than the ACLU.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Both the IRA and PLO were left-wing militias.
toadworrier
4mo ago
This is 9-0 think is actually more impressive than it sounds. The SCOTUS only wants to take a case if it needs to clean up some mess from the lower courts. So imagine you are some very high ranking appellate judge, and you make your decision only to find that every judge on the SCOTUS rules against you. You can't pretend that you made some politically controversial decision.
toadworrier
4mo ago
That's why you have to show up and play the game. "Go fuck yourself" is not a sufficiently legalistic non-answer.
BTW: A lot has happened since this original thread and it's impressive how badly this tactic went for these people. I state again however: this is the standard way to behave in front of such committees. Or at least it is here in Australia.
toadworrier
5mo ago
I wonder what the deeper implications for human cognition are. I don't think there are people who can keep 25k words in their working memory, that seems to be much smaller, but we certainly don't usually forget the start of a novella by the time we reach the end. Is there a lot of caching and summarization going on?
Yes, there is in effect a lot of "caching and summarization" going on -- although that's probably our 2023 ooga-booga, not-quite-wrong way of talking about something else. LLMs really only have their context window and it's feedback as a short-term memory. Which is fine for text translation, but is asinine if you want anything like a thinking engine. Goldfish with a notebook.
We and LLMs can both compress long stories into gists, but the LLMs just forget about it and repeat the work on every iteration. We remember the gists and use them as context on every iteration.
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
5mo ago
Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.
toadworrier
6mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits.
I agree with this, but also remember the original mission. OpenAI got it's initial dose of mind-share, talent and OPM because it was supposed to save the world from centralising AI in the hands of a winner-take-all company.
IMHO that was a dumb strategy for achieving a valid goal from the beginning, but a straight-out for-profit company would have been completely opposite to the mission.
toadworrier
6mo ago
One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.
toadworrier
6mo ago
I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.
The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Wouldn't it have been nice if all the indictments were like this.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.
Thanks, these are interesting questions. Sorry I took me two weeks to get to them (I hope you get a chance to read the article itself!).
You are right to think in terms of definitions of "progress". There can be absolute progress of moral importance towards The Good; and there can be mundane progress towards other things. I believe both kinds are real, but agree with you that they should not be conflated. 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.
I wouldn't condemn that critique. I even might join it, depending on what exactly is being critiqued. But I object to that critique being extended to a blanket claim that progress doesn't exist -- that would be to conflate absolute and mundane progress.
I think that's also what you are doing in your second question
No there doesn't have to be such a fundamental difference. Because progress!fight only differs from primitive!fight by mundane progress. Even though I believe absolute (i.e. moral) progress is real, this is not an instance of it.
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.
No I don't believe they should be out of date. Nor is it what we observe.
Is your point that, were absolute progress real, then we would have moved beyond the problems which those works grapple with? Because that is a valid point, which I'd like to tackle if that's really where you are going with this.
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