vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
8hr ago
Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.
(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)
This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.
Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.
However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.
The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.
To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.
Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.
For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.
Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.
However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?
Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.
As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.
I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
For me it, it is more about pragmatism. Most court-mandated expansions of civil rights in the United States started underwater with the public, and got more popular over time. Roe v Wade did not, and instead it created a wedge issue that made the quality and tenor of American politics worse over the affected period. I actually think politics (narrowly considered) has gotten slightly better since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, because the abortion debate has cooled down as a national issue, and become a state-level one.
Based on the review you linked, it sounds like the book was written by someone who used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and it draws on her experiences from that time (even if she adds supernatural elements.) While it is still probably crap (since 90% of everything is crap), that at least feels like a book that could have some interesting roman à clef-style presentations of real experiences the author had, if it was in the hands of a competent writer.
There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water.
There definitely seems to be a one reality, two screens effect here.
Pro-life people like you get to claim that the battle is lost, and abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right. While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.
I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.
We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".
While I'm sure much of the grey tribe are more "blue" when it comes to the abortion debate, I actually don't think that the combination of positions you outlined here is a very common one overall.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I believe humans can walk untrodden ground, that we have the ability to do things that are not causal mechanistically related to external stimuli in a way that an LLM currently does not. If you want to profer that you are just a flesh-bag robot with no free will, that is a belief system, but I'm not sure you'd like the ramifications of essentially being an object.
My feeling has always been that free will of this style is undesirable.
Consider something I do every day, like drive to and from work. I want my actions to be causally determined by my character, my memories and experiences and the kind of person I am, because I would never just decide to randomly swerve my car and hit the concrete barrier between the lanes at max speed.
But if I have the kind of radical free will that you propose, then there's always a possibility that, in spite of my upbringing, and the moral character I have spent my whole life cultivating and inhabiting, I could just make the random decision, causally unburdened by anything that has come before, to slam into the concrete divider head on at max speed in my car. I don't want the free will to "walk untrodden ground" that you propose. In a very real sense, it seems to me that whatever a-causal "decider" there is in me in such a situation, must not be me, since I would never have chosen to do the things a truly free version of myself would have chosen.
On the other hand, if I inhabit a deterministic universe, then I at least can know that whatever I do, it will be causally downstream of the person that I am, and that is comforting, regardless of whatever my ultimate fate will be. At least, on some level, I can say that I am truly the agent acting in the world, and reaping the consequences of my actions.
If we can't test it, it may as well not exist. Having feelings, alone and distinct from all outcomes and outputs, is not a test.
This feels like the same kind of overly simplistic reductionism that the behaviorists engaged in.
I think internal mental states are a sensible thing to talk about. There are chatbots we can be very sure have no internal mental states: The very simple ones (like Eliza), but also the ones that would take more space than the entire universe like Ned Block's Blockhead thought experiment of a chatbot consisting of a giant lookup table of every possible sentence of some arbitrary length.
But for entities between those two extremes, we have to learn more about how they're actually working in order to say whether they have internal mental states or not.
While it is far from definitive, I remember the interpretability research on ChessGPT (an LLM trained only on chess games in chess notation), found that there was representation of the state of the chess board inside the LLM, because it turns out that the best way to predict the next move in a game of chess is to realize that there is a chess board with pieces on it, and particular moves are legal for certain pieces. That is, you must be able to reverse engineer chess to predict the next token in chess notation.
I wonder what the implications of that are for LLMs that do a reasonable job of replicating the emotional arc of a conversation with a person? I don't actually think it is totally implausible that the best way to predict what a human will say next is to essentially reverse engineer human cognition. Maybe what an LLM is doing when it plays the part of helpful assistant is that it is actually doing something very analogous to what a helpful human assistant's brain would be doing under the same circumstances?
We evolved to have a constant experience-reaction feedback loop. If a bee stings me, the signal takes time to travel up my arm, get to my brain, and then be processed into action on my part.
If we imagine alien anthropologists who move and react to things in femtoseconds, they might look at humans staying still for eons as a bee lands on them, stings them, and then just let the bee stay there for millions of femtoseconds before slapping it and conclude that we're not truly conscious. We're constantly "starting and stopping" actions when nothing is going on, even if we have a relatively continuous, rolling awareness.
I don't see how it is that different from LLM's in principle, except that because we're designing them, we have to be the ones to put them into an agentic loop to accomplish things.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Basically, it comes across as "Who are you going to believe? My heckin' sciencerino and philosophy, or your own lying brain?"
I mean, to be fair, the reality of the universe revealed by science and philosophy is extremely unintuitive to humans.
To pick just one example, atoms or subatomic particles are the foundational material of reality, and yet in everyday life we basically never perceive ourselves as interacting with such tiny objects. We only don't perceive their reality as weird because we're educated from a relatively young age to understand atoms and the consequences of their existence.
The subjective experiences of humankind have been wrong about the nature of reality on question after question, but you think we can still trust those subjective experiences to justify belief in free will, or a basis for morality grounded in something other than human well-being and suffering?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Right, but if you believe the brain has functional modules that serve relatively discrete functions, that might also be how human brains and memory work (at least at a very high level of abstraction.)
I'm a fan of something like global workspace theory in human consciousness, and I find it extremely plausible that if we "plug together" the right kinds of functional systems in the right way, we could reproduce by artifice what evolution produced naturally, and make an artificial consciousness.
We already have reason to believe that, for example, recognizing faces is a relatively discrete function in the brain, and a person can suffer localized brain damage that robs them of that capability while they retain all of the other functions we consider essential to conscious human existence. If we just keep giving LLM's more tools, better memory management, and create feedback loops to let them introspect, I don't see any reason in principle they couldn't become truly conscious (assuming, of course, they're not already.)
One problem with both LLMs and sapient aliens, is that the intuitive leap to their consciousness is always going to be bigger than the intuitive leap to other humans being conscious. I just have to think other humans are probably the same kind of thing I am to believe they are conscious. For LLMs or sapient aliens, I have to believe that a completely different architecture that developed under very different conditions is conscious in a way somewhat similar to me. In this respect, consciousness is always going to be more fraught than "easier" questions, like "does it behave in rational, goal-oriented ways?" or something.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Planes also exist, if one is not truly destitute.
I assume there exists some pro-choice charity that would pay for plane tickets, even if one was destitute.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
I actually don't agree with that.
This is on the level of criticizing anti-abortion advocates for being insincere because they don't blow up abortion clinics anymore.
It is possible to believe someone or something is a great moral evil, to say so in the public square and to honestly believe that either morally or tactically it would be a mistake to do something norm-violating to stop that evil.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated." Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism.
I guess part of my problem here is how broad should I consider my "we/us"?
I'm broadly anti-Trump, but I'm also an independent who didn't vote for either of the major parties in the last presidential election. Do I have some responsibility to reign in the other anti-Trump people, even if they would hate my guts if they knew all the things I believe?
Realistically, what power do I have over anyone in the anti-Trump movement? And in the case of lone autistic weirdos, who realistically could have intervened to stop this specific would-be assassin?
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
I mean the Unabomber was quite smart, and also opted for bombs over guns.
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
I'm not sure how wise it is to be giving such recipes on this forum either. I doubt you'll direct the Eye of Sauron our way, but it never hurts to be safe, especially when your point could have just as easily have been made by simply saying something like, "You can make homemade C4 out of materials that are freely available in the US, and then delivering it via a drone would be trivial" or something like that.
Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I do think it is lucky that people who want to hurt others are mostly uncreative. I have definitely come up with ways of doing mass damage that I'm surprised have never actually happened in the United States, since I wasn't thinking particularly hard about the problem. It just seems like we are lucky that when humans are high in the desire to do mass violence, they mostly tend to be low in traits like intelligence that correlate with successfully perpetrating the most harmful kinds of mass violence.
That's one of the worrying things about AI for me. While I know all of the big AI labs test for this, and have their own systems in place to detect users trying to use LLMs in this way, I really worry about what will happen if someone is able to manufacture a bioweapon they otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture thanks to an LLM.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
So it seems like the only way that the shipment of oil can return to a normal state is if Iran is backed into a corner and is forced to stop what they are doing.
So, your offer is to spend more money and resources (and potentially American lives) to get us close to the status quo antebellum?
I don't see how it is hard to think that the US just shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place, and should have kept Israel on a leash and told them to play nice. But having gotten ourselves into this mess, it is only a good idea to stay in it if we have both clear goals for the political outcome we want, and a realistic path to achieving that. Do we have either of those things?
It seems like the Trump administration is holding out for nuclear concessions, but are they going to get them for a cost that is acceptable to American voters? I suppose we shall see.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
An effect being irreducibly uncertain for particular models or measurements isn't the same as it not happening. You just need some other way of measuring and modelling what you care about that isn't irreducibly uncertain, or lots of weaker methods that can add up to a more powerful method.
I so happy that when I was ~12, my teachers thought it was wise to teach me and my entire class the world was doomed.
That was irresponsible of them. Unless there's unexpected feedback loops, there was always the possibility of humanity just spending more to deal with the effects of climate change. We don't even need sci fi technology, the Netherlands has been below sea level for its entire existence. It's just expensive, but in a rich world with the energy of fossil fuels it was always plausible that we would have the energy to deal with it long term.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Sure, but the speed was almost certainly slower and easier to keep up with without making it your full time job. My concern is that the speed at which LLMs can ape us will make it a losing proposition to try and avoid all "LLM tells" in human writing in the long term.
Don't get me wrong. People are anti-AI enough that there are going to be lots of people trying to make their writing sound as un-LLM-like as possible. I just don't want to play that game.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.
Part of me almost wants to stand on principle and just refuse the start of the treadmill. I was here first. Obviously, I don't want people to think my human-made writing is actually LLM writing and dismiss it without actually engaging with the content, but I've already had my human-made writing dismissed this way on Reddit and in that very thread most of the comments agreed that I didn't actually have much of an LLM voice. Might as well just write how I write, and perhaps if everyone else does the treadmill my writing will start sounding human again without me having to change.
I am talking about Lockean liberalism, which was not "secular", even if its teachings differ from the Catholic church's.
Surely, "free speech" or "right to property" implies that at least some actors in society have positive duties to act a particular way? Otherwise, how does a Lockean Liberal defend these rights in practice?
Absolutely not. The fundamental basis of libertarian view of right is that of self-ownership,
There is more than one construction of libertarianism. I tend to fall more in the consequentialist/utilitarian foundation for libertarianism, though I do have a lot of sympathy for the side that starts with freedom as their starting point.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
Not because Trump wouldn’t have sex with an escort in a Russian hotel room, but because wanting to be peed on is a weird fetish thing, and for the kind of person who whose idea of good sex is fucking his friends’ wives to get off on being ‘the man’, that is the fetish, the woman and what you do with or to her or what she does to you aren’t, except in the most perfunctory way to say that you did. Okay, I’m explaining this badly, but I mean that this is someone for whom sex is about what it means, about power, about who and whom. What simply isn’t important to that kind of thing.
While I agree with you that the pee tape stuff is almost certainly fake, I don't think your argument here actually does a good job dismissing it.
Five minutes on the right part of Deviant Art will show that many seemingly unrelated fetishes can all be enjoyed by the same person. Sure, most people gravitate to just one or two, but some "lucky" people seem to be interested in a wide variety of fetishes. Cucking other guys, and watersports can all be enjoyed by the same person.
The better argument is just that the "pee tape" was salacious nonsense from the Steele Dossier, and people have always loved salacious rumors about the rich and powerful, from Justinian and his wife, to Elagabalus, Nero or Caligula. Some of those rumors might have actually been true, but the fact that humanity seems to love such rumors so much they made it into the historical record should make us highly suspicious of whether they are true or false whenever we hear a new claim in that style.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
If we are talking about duties, we now have collectivist category sometimes encompassing the whole humanity. For libertarian right to life to fully exist, everybody on Earth has to acknowledge and follow up on 6th commandment and duty not to murder.
I am not sure that that follows.
Wouldn't the Lockean Liberal view be something more like: mankind is created in the image and likeness of God. Yes, man is sinful, and fallen, but as a result of being made in the image of God, mankind is endowed with dignity which it is sinful to violate.
The set of principles surrounding this inviolable dignity, we call "rights" and it is the duty of us as individuals and as a society to set up governments which do not violate these rights.
The liberal or libertarian view seems to be that the individual is always correct and entitled to rights, but society is oppressive and sinful not to provide for such enlightened individual to exist.
I don't think this is quite correct. I actually think the liberal/libertarian view is closer to Jesus' teaching in the Parable of the Talents: we are all given different endowments, and we are expected to make the best use of those endowments that we can as individuals.
The liberal/libertarian simply believes that the best way to set up society is to let everyone pursue the proper management and development of their God-given talents by protecting a handful of core principles: life, liberty and property (or the pursuit of happiness.)
I'm personally glad that we had individuals like Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, Temple Grandin and many others who contributed greatly to society through their unique endowments as individuals, even if a Christian might not otherwise approve of an atheist or a homosexual.
Additionally, modern rights do not have much with duties and obligations. Or to be more precise rights are entitlements absent duty or obligation. You are entitled to your right, you do not have any obligation toward that right.
Don't most rights imply a corresponding duty? Admittedly, most of the duties fall on the state, for example the right to free speech implies that neither the state nor its agents should suppress your speech, unless it is in a handful of exceptional categories like fraud, copyright, libel/slander, fighting words, and specific threats of violence.
However, I think that you can make the case that the West historically viewed rights as a bit broader than that. For example, free speech connects with the Greek virtue of parhessia (frankness of speech), and thus in its widest conception free speech implies an obligation to speak truth to power even if you're in a regime where that will get you killed. (And in fact, many Stoic philosophers, like Helvidius Priscus, did just that, criticizing the emperor and accepting their death sentences with poise and equanimity.)
He said that human rights exist as a fiction created by state as opposed to their existence as that of the sun or the moon.
Rights might be legal fictions in some sense, but so is money, or the concept of the United States, or the position of President of the United States. You could grind the atoms of the universe down and you would find no money, no debt, no contracts, because this is a category error. Those things exist as collective beliefs inside people's minds, as data patterns in their brains.
vorpa-glavo
29d ago
Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics).
I mean, there are definitely comparisons you can make to past historical eras. Andrew Jackson's presidency has a lot of Trump parallels: non-politician elected to the presidency, political scandals that became loyalty tests for supporters, non-normative uses of presidential powers, firing large amounts of federal employees and putting in their own guys instead, disagreement with the central bank of the US, etc., etc.
And surely some of the presidents we had at the height of the machine politics era of US history were at least as corrupt as Trump is? Perhaps they had more decorum about it, but corruption is corruption.
I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.
More options
Context Copy link