toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
2yr ago
5% of the population are South Asian migrant workers. Perhaps 20% are Iranians. ... The Emiratis are not concerned. Why? Because they’re still in charge.
Sounds right, but it might be short sighted. History has all sort of twists and turns and regimes always eventually change. If that catches them napping, they'll find the largest civilisation on Earth champing at the bit to take revenge for the millennium of humiliation.
toadworrier
2yr ago
In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
toadworrier
2yr ago
Orthogonality Thesis: This is the statement that the ability of an agent to achieve goals in the world is largely separate from the actual goals it has.
This assumes that intelligent agents have goals that are more fundamental than value, which is the opposite of how every other intelligent or quasi intelligent system behaves. It's probably also impossible, in order to be smart -- calculate out all those possible paths to your goal -- you need value judgements of what rabbit tracks to chase.
This is with EY is wrong to assume that as soon as a device gets smart enough, all the "alignment" work from dumber devices will be wasted. That only makes sense that what is conserved is a goal, and now it has more sneaky ways of getting to that goal. But you'd have to go out of your way to design a thing like that.
Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian,
So is Eliezer calling me a utilitarian?
Your heading talks about consistent agents, but the premise that follows says nothing about consistency. [Sorry if you are just steelmanning someone else's argument, here "you" is that steelman, not necessarily /u/JhanicManifold].
- If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.
There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.
toadworrier
2yr ago
An important question is whether the supreme leadership in China permitted this [gain of function research].
The supreme leadership probably thought they were supporting a bioweapons research program and conning the Americans into helping. Turned out they were sort of right, just not in the way they expected.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Indeed.
But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.
toadworrier
1yr ago
And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
toadworrier
1yr ago
Suppose there were bands of brown-shirted (and presumably red hatted) thugs who were reputed to go around murdering enemies of the president. Obviously already illegal, no need for a new law.
Suppose members of the FBI etc occasionally met with the leadership of these gangs and there are transcripts saying how the feds mentioned that so-and-so is not a nice guy (but never actually asking for a hit of course). Then suppose there's a pattern of so-and-so's getting murdered by "unknown assailants".
Do you seriously think it would be unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law banning those meetings?
toadworrier
1yr ago
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.
Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.
Government speech is a whole explicit area of US jurisprudence which is probably over both our heads.
But however you categorise, an injunction preventing government agents from merely communicating with persons is a pretty big deal. But IMHO the judge go this right. The injunction is mostly a list of prohibitions like
[Youse fuckers are enjoined from]:
emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
My emphasis. So he is allowing the Government to communicate, but just not for the constitutionally forbidden purpose. Sounds reasonable.
Any link to the actual injunction? (Here's a link from@ToaKraka: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/missouri-v-biden/, I think the injunction is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdf
I'm interested in what concrete orders are given, and what that says about the final remedies. The article says:
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies,
Which is pretty spectacular, and raises it's own obvious First Amendment concerns.
The thing is, I could imagine a detailed statue that laid out what what government could and could not do in this regard, and creates offences for trying to censor the public. But I'm finding it harder to imagine what a judge could do about it from the bench, even if he sees a rock-solid case that the government is violating the Constitution.
toadworrier
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
Trump and his "body man" Waltine Nauta moved dozens of boxes containing records and documents (presumably including the classified documents at issue in this case)
And Nauta is being charged for conspiracy, because the invariant is always that the butler did it.
toadworrier
2yr ago
It's good for the soul.
toadworrier
2yr ago
In Australia this is normal. Pale-skinned aboriginals are commonplace and to be found on both sides of politics. This is not really like Elizabeth Warren style fakery.
toadworrier
2yr ago
What makes you think she's white?
Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."
toadworrier
2yr ago
Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?
I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right. As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington. I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name. But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.
I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded.
The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.
That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.
toadworrier
2yr ago
Calvin's Geneva and Yankee Boston
These are two notorious theocracies. They had the advantage that they were also bearers of new ideas that were on the up. But those ideas only came to be of importance in the context of a healthier, non-theocratic society.
toadworrier
2yr ago
I came back to the country a few years ago to find Labor and Liberal in some tedious stouche that I can't even remember; except I was astonished to find that Derren Hinch and Pauline Hanson were acting like the only grownups in the room.
I thought that was just one weird freak of probability never to happen again, but now I am not so sure. The ONP is starting to look smarter than everyone else, if only because Pauline is merely stupid while the rest of the polity is actively anti-intelligent.
toadworrier
2yr ago
Functions have domains. The real world is not like that, context is only understood (if at all) after the fact. And machines (including brains) simply do what they do in response to the real world. It's only sometimes that we can tell stories about those actions in terms of preference orderings or utility functions.
toadworrier
2yr ago
I think we are talking about the kind of undergrad exam where you have you have to evaluate a bunch of fairly difficult but still turn-the-crank type integrals and also some fairly easy ODEs.
toadworrier
2yr ago
Ah yes 1987... a year of great constitutional import when many questions about state and federal powers were resolved via a grand constitutional convention /sarc.
Section 2 of Article IV of the US Constitution (https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#4) says
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
A plain-and-simple reading of that seems to agree that the Florida can't refuse the extradition. But there will be centuries case law working out the precise procedural details of how it has to happen. Apparently in 1987 one of the corner-cases got tweaked.
toadworrier
2yr ago
Yes, how is it that the US has fixed interest loans as the norm? Is there some sort if regulation enforcing it?
Here in Australia, most people get variable rate. And even a "fixed" rate is fixed only for a small number of years.
I hope you are also communicating with him about what matters for his child.
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