toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
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.
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.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Drive-by tangent.
The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined ...
Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job. It's probably the least-worst tactic given the situation, and it prevents you getting actually skewered.
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
11mo ago
and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud.
What's the dynamic here?
In a Banana Republic, voters tolerate this sort of thing because they know that corruption investigations only happen because of political will. So even if your man is corrupt, caring about it would be unilateral disarmement. In the US, this is more or less the situation already with Trump, but I'd imagine Texas politics is too one sided for that to be the issue.
One-party states can easily be corrupt -- after all there's no effective opposition. But what leads to voters shrugging it off like that? Why are they so desperate to elect this particular man?
toadworrier
6mo ago
recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.
As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.
Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.
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
10mo ago
DeSantis has done lots to hobble woke indoctrination in education and also to energise citizens against it. That's been his most powerful point of leverage as as a state governor. The Presidency has different points of leverage.
Ironically Hanania has done more than anyone (except maybe Chris Rufo) to document how much of the modern woke-imperium is upheld by American law, especially civil rights law. Hanania is also the one who pointed out how much of that is actually done through executive orders. Any republican could deal a big blow to that, and their respective track records show DeSantis is likely to actually do it while Trump is not.
toadworrier
1yr ago
So I don't think things will change.
Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.
Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.
toadworrier
9mo 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
9mo ago
So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped
I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.
The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.
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
9mo ago
The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).
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).
toadworrier
1yr 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
1yr ago
In one of history's little winks almost the first book this happened to was 1984.
Some copyright SNAFU meant that Amazon had distributed the thing when it wasn't allowed to, so they disappeared it off people's Kindles. This wasn't an attempt at censorship, other editions were readily available, but it was a clear case of memory-holing.
toadworrier
1yr 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
9mo ago
I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"
This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.
The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly
They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.
But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.
toadworrier
10mo ago
while roughly zero Americans can pronounce (or know about) "Tadeusz Kościuszko.")
Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
...
[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
1yr ago
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
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
1yr 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.
The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her. (Eli Lake @Tablet).
The gist is in the title, a longer gist is:
I urge you to read the article itself, as it's about details and evidence for the claim above. It did also finally clue me in about why the secret services might be supporting the left. Before Trump was elected they were:
[EDIT: _I wrongly thought my original referred to the FBI. That confused reading did in fact solve the puzzle that I had been wondering about, but is nonethless confused. I should have quoted: _]
This is very plausible. I hail from a longstanding 3rd wold democracy, and this is pretty typical behaviour. None of the elections are fair because the authorities tip them in favour of whichever side looks more likely to win. Usually this is the government of the day, but not always. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch behaved this way too with his media coverage.
Once Trump was elected, you would expect the FBI to quietly switch sides. But they might have accidentally burned their bridges. Or you might blame Trump for being too volatile and sour-minded to be worth sucking up to.
The other angle is topical: is prosecuting Trump and not Clinton a double standard? There's an argument (ping @ymeskhout) that the difference is that Trump has so brazzenly admitted guilt. Well if there's videotape Clinton also bragging about how her sever was illegal but she's above the law, then we are less likely to know about it because she really is above the law.
If the Tablet article is accurate, this casts light on this and every other putative distinction between the Trump and Hillary cases. Whatever distinction there is, it has (at least if the article is accurate) been brought out under circumstances where investigating authorities have bent over backwards to find ways to protect Hillary.
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