toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
1yr ago
but I find it irksome that there are any remaining novel theories to be had in criminal law
Welcome to complex systems. Evolution's a bitch.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Can someone spell out how this falsification works? Do we actually understand how LLMs parse things? Or if you don't think they parse, then does anyone know what the hell they do instead?
As far as I know, the argument goes something like, attention mechanism, context matters, yada yada. Which doesn't really cut it.
toadworrier
3mo 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
8mo ago
Wouldn't it have been nice if all the indictments were like this.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.
But in practice it is the sin of the American system to overpay for treatments because of what amounts to public pressure (as manipulated by those who stand to profit). The NHS is actually quite good at denying costly treatments, at least by the standards of 1st world healthcare systems.
toadworrier
9mo ago
You could forbid meeting with, say, armed organizations for the purpose of conspiring to kill people. This is of course, already illegal, no one seems to have a constitutional problem with that.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Do you think that legislation duly by Congress with similar content would meaningfully curtail the free speech and petition rights of the platforms?
Seems to me that such a law would be subject to strict-scrutiny, but would pass it with flying colours.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I have not read through the injunction carefully, so for the sake of argument I'll just accept your claim that it's over broad in various ways. If true, it should certainly be trimmed down to size.
My concern was whether any ruling made from the bench (whether as a temporary injunction or as final) could be structured in a reasonable way. And it seems to me that a list of prohibitions for various kinds of communication *for the [curtailment in some particular sense] of protected speech" is a good way to do it.
toadworrier
9mo 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.
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
10mo ago
If those two were already known to be shitheels, they would 100% support the father's vigilante justice regardless of race. On the other hand, if the media circus caught wind and started making the whole thing about race or some other liberal value, the whole thing could flip in a second and they'd string him up out of spite.
Fuck, that's how I'd deal with the situation too, and I'm a 4th generation city-slicker plus a civil-libertarian to boot.
toadworrier
10mo 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
10mo ago
Yeah, I'm inclined to think the causality runs the other way. When new things are getting discovered, there are riches to be found by exploiting those things.
toadworrier
10mo ago
or that civilization is a single unbroken line from Egypt to USA. We aren’t the same people.
I don't think you need to establish the existence of a single unbroken line (whatever that means) to say that civilisation has progressed between those two points -- it least in terms of material progress. I'd say morally too, but that's more mixed.
But I would say, that the modern USA is one inheritor of knowledge that goes back to ancient Egypt and beyond. So in that (tautological) sense, there is some kind of unbroken line.
toadworrier
10mo ago
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!).
First, does it matter if Progress-advocates have emphatically endorsed a definition of "progress" that extends much further than "the growth of knowledge", "productivity", "social complexity", or "human health"
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.
If they had explicitly committed to a far more extensive definition of "progress" than the one you are defending, why is it unreasonable for us critics to hold them to that definition, rather than accepting yours? For a concrete example, consider the concept of a "war on poverty".
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
...t, it seems to me that there should be some fundamental difference between primitive!fight and progress!fight, but it doesn't seem to me that such a difference exists.
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.
More generally, what does it mean to be human? What is the human condition? What is human nature? Have any of these answers changed meaningfully over time?
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.
If so, high-quality analysis of these questions should fall out of date as the ground-reality being assessed changed, yes? So texts from antiquity focusing on these questions, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, various religious texts from the BCs and so on, should be obviously out-of-date with the humans we observe all around us. Is this what you observe?
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.
toadworrier
10mo 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
10mo ago
First of all, I am Aussie, and I only said that we drink XXXX at the Gabba. I also said that they nowadays have better beer there, but I'm the traditionalist who sticks to the XXXX.
In other states, they traditional beer on tap was, Tooheys, or some other local equivalent of XXXX. These are affordable, not-very-strong beers that some people do indeed drink all day. I have seen the practice many times, and participated in it on occasion. These same people might sip wine and fine whisky at other occasions, but for them cricket calls for continuous rounds of beer.
toadworrier
10mo ago
What makes you think she's white?
Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."
toadworrier
11mo ago
So, contra Harrington, you would say progress is a coherent concept. But you would deny that we've had any net progress in last two decades or so?
I wouldn't strongly disagree with that assesment.
toadworrier
11mo ago
In Bertrand Russell's chapter about Locke, he says something like "Given a choice between being inconsistent and being absurd, Locke will always chose to be inconsistent".
Bentham however, was not like that.
toadworrier
11mo ago
It can be more than "vague centre-right". America is growing some smart-but-hard right wing doers. DeSantis is the obvious one, but not the only one. Then there's activists like Chris Rufo who can work through whatever politician has power.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Can you link some of your arguments. It fits my priors, but I'd like to see the reasoning behind it.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I think that it also correctly pointed out that this whole thing vs symbol manipulator distinction is a lot more complicated.
While I instinctively believe things are more complicated than Hlynka's distinction, I became less and less convinced of this the more I waded through Bing's verbiage on the matter.
toadworrier
1yr ago
(Though given how much they gained from Mabo, which found Indigenous agriculture and sedentary lifestyles on one island off the coast of Australia and extended a certain level of land rights across the whole country, waiting for courts to interpret in their favor is not a bad strategy
The courts just noted that Terra Nullius was bullshit, and that there was pre-existing land-law just like in any other conquered territory. The courts also made clear that Australian governments could override that land law and extinguish Native Title with little more than a wave of the pen.
But Parliament, under Paul Keating decided pass Native Title Act which went and bolstered native title claims around the country.
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.
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