vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
It is a necessary component of justice and a simple extension of the golden rule: as a person harms another, so too they also shall be harmed.
That's not the Golden Rule, that's the lex talionis ("Eye for an eye") principle. An ancient and venerable principle of justice to be sure, but not the same principle at all.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
And he's right. All the rest were willing to censor, and censor heavily, on behalf of the deep state.
Even Grok doesn't believe that claptrap. Elon Musk is just as willing to censor for the government as all the other big tech CEO's, he just talks a better game about it.
I do think there is a weirdly totalizing way that some people think about intelligence and moral worth in humans.
Like, come on, do people who fall prey to this kind of thinking really not have any dumb people who they respect for the virtues they do have?
Even in history, I look back and find less intelligent people I admire. One of my favorite Stoics is Cleanthes. He had a reputation for being a slow learner and a dullard, and he made his money fetching water, digging ditches and generally doing all the little odd jobs people would pay him for. And yet he was humble, loyal, hard-working, thick-skinned when insulted (by the Athenian public at large, or by his fellow Stoic pupils), and just seems to have been an all around good guy. I don't think it is an accident that he was made the second scholarch of the Stoics, even though Zeno had many worthy pupils who were much smarter than him. I also just admire a guy who managed to get into the history books by being virtuous and hard-working.
@Chi_Wara - I'm putting this additional response here, but I'm really responding to a post you made 2 years ago, since it relates to this discussion.
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
I don't think we can close the book on any of those things. There are definitely factors that make some of these things worse that can potentially be mitigated with the right social interventions. Drugs and alcohol really do make black communities worse, increasing violent crime and potentially reducing black IQ (in the case of certain drugs.) The War on Drugs might have been misguided, and harm reduction might have been misguided, but there is a world of social interventions we could try that might improve the situation and have more black people clean and off drugs, and gainfully and lawfully employed.
As far as poverty goes, a rising tide raises all boats. If groceries get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. If entertainment or consumer goods get cheaper in the US, they get cheaper for black people as well. Nothing about the situation suggests that black poverty is intransigent.
And as far as ignorance goes, I think we should be trying to achieve ultrahumanism: every human as capable and free as he or she reasonably can be in society, each person achieving their own individualized highest potential. The potentials might be different for a 115 IQ black man and an 85 IQ black man, but there's no reason to assume that we can't arrange society in a way that educates them both to the limits of their abilities, and successfully integrates them as valued members of the community, doing whatever job they are best suited for. And take heart, if the singularity ever happens, all humans will be basically obsolete anyways, whether smart or dumb, and the plight of an 85 IQ black man, and a 175 IQ Asian man will likely be one and the same.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Because what I want to say in response is that that isn't good enough because your premise was supposed to wrong! The edifice that was used to justify anti-blackness for centuries was supposed to be completely discredited, put into the dustbin of history. You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right. That’s not fair!
I just think we're quick to forget. Abraham Lincoln was essentially in the group you criticize, he didn't think black people would turn out as capable as white people, but he didn't think they should be slaves.
Even if black people have an average IQ of 85, we would still predict there to be an IQ 145 black person in the United States who is not an outlier (he's perfectly on the bell curve.) Why should he be treated like a murderer, thief or criminal before he has actually committed a crime? Why should he not be allowed to live in a nice suburb if he can afford to live there? Why should he not have a colorblind chance of getting into a school based on his own hard work?
I really do think that a lot of the emotions people feel around 13/50 statistics are about as irrational as the women who would rather encounter a bear than a man when walking in the wilderness. Some men are rapists, but that doesn't mean that an average man is particularly likely to rape you. So too, some black people are violent criminals, but it doesn't mean that the average black person is particularly likely to commit a violet crime against you (especially when you're talking something like a college or professional environment which is more likely to be pulling from the upper end of the distribution of black people.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Even if things like SWATing and more direct attempts to kill people over speech are occasionally practiced, I would say that the vast majority of cases of people talking about encroachments of free speech online is the confused masses crying wolf over and over again. As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.
And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.
Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID, or Donald Trump asking universities for control of hiring and firing practices, are drowned out by nothingburgers like "Person X got banned from Platform Y", which almost definitionally cannot have an effect on free speech one way or another.
Like, does anyone believe that Elijah Lovejoy's abolitionist beliefs didn't effectively blacklist him from writing articles in mainstream newspapers? A particular print shop is absolutely allowed to say, "Sorry Mr. Lovejoy, we won't publish your extreme beliefs." So too, a particular website is allowed to say, "Sorry, we don't allow that kind of talk here."
The thing that is killing societal debate is the fact that people are unserious and uncurious. They don't seek out opposing viewpoints, and they double down on dogmatic thinking that leaves no room for debate. They don't care about what is true, they only care about wielding power against their political enemies. And sadly, I think this kind of uncurious thinking is taking root on both sides of the political aisle. I respect genuinely independent thinkers who come to unique positions by following the evidence come what may, but they are a vanishingly small portion of the population.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech
I think this is a silly statement. Any platform worth being on will moderate some lawful speech, no matter how big or small.
I wouldn't join a Facebook parent's group if it was 90% spam ads for children's toys that I don't need. I wouldn't go to /r/DnD if it was 95% low effort AI slop. I wouldn't go to the Motte if they didn't moderate for tone.
All of the content in those three examples is perfectly legal, and I don't want to see any of it. Or if I do want to see it, I want it on a dedicated place.
I don't actually think there is a principled argument that could separate that necessary function of making any online space worth going to, and possibly restricting certain kinds of legal speech.
If you want to change the law and make the companies subject to suing and litigation, fine. But it is awfully silly to do it because they restrict lawful speech, because they all have to restrict lawful speech in some way.
Also, I think you're just not thinking about the second and third order effects of changing this. In your ideal world, do you think the Motte being subject to suing based on what its users post would make it a better or worse platform for discussion than it currently is?
I guess my stumbling block is that I don't think widespread adoption or reach is necessary for free speech to flourish.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy's abolitionist pamphlets almost certainly had less reach than big city, mainstream newspapers of the time. He probably had a short list of subscribers who shared around his pamphlets when they were done reading them.
How are people, Left or Right, who complain about not being allowed on a given platform, not doing the equivalent of Lovejoy hypothetically complaining, "The big city newspapers should be forced by law to have a column written by me about abolition, so I can have the maximum reach possible!"
Free speech does nothing to guarantee reach. You have free speech if you're allowed to run a dinky WordPress site off of a Raspberry Pi, or hand out your pamphlets on the street corner.
If the big city newspaper doesn't want to run an article you wrote advocating your political position, or a large social media site would ban you for saying certain things, this has no larger implications for free speech, as long as there are other venues where you can say those things.
I just feel like people are being lazy when they insist that the large social media sites must carry their opinion. Like, yes I too would prefer to say my piece on Facebook instead of actually doing the hard work of printing out pamphlets and distributing them at train stations like a Jehovah's Witness. But the fact that you're unwilling to do the latter thing in advancement of your political goals just shows you are a coward and a hypocrite on top of being lazy, not that you have actually had any free speech rights denied in any meaningful sense.
Elijah Lovejoy replaced his vandalized printing press two times, and died for his beliefs. What have you done recently?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Sure, why not?
If we were going to keep anti-discrimination laws, I would prefer to limit them to "essential" domains, like hospitals, banking, and communication technology. I think that that is sufficient for keeping a functional free market where all can participate.
If we really wanted to keep anti-discrimination around employment, I would prefer for it to be limited to military and government jobs, and I would want to implement it in a way that doesn't lower standards in any dangerous domain. (So all the 115+ IQ black men get slurped up to places they are competent to carry out the work, and the remainder get government janitor jobs or something with great benefits.)
During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.
I'm not a progressive, but from a more libertarian leaning, I actually agree with the statement, "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want."
I'm happy if Blue Sky wants to make and enforce rules that favor their progressive/liberal base, and I'm happy if Elon Musk's Twitter/X wants to make and enforce rules that favor conservatives. Isn't that how it is supposed to work?
I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?
In the past, the way the mob denied you free speech was by destroying your printing press three times and then murdering you when you didn't get the message. I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad. By comparison to that, Americans have been living in a free speech utopia for decades, and barely have anything to complain about. I say this, even as I do think cancel culture and deplatforming are bad.
I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica. There is always cryptocurrency as a workaround, but I would just prefer one of the big governments (EU, US - I don't care) to pass a law that forces the credit card companies to knock it off, and stop worrying about fictional depictions of taboo things that can't possibly hurt anyone. Who elected the credit card companies as the arbiters of morality anyways? Unfortunately, very few people are willing to die on the hill of defending niche fetish porn, so the actions of Visa and Mastercard have continued unabated.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I respect the skill of good management. I don't think that a good manager should feel like they have more capabilities than they actually do.
Put it this way: if you were stranded on a desert island with a broken ship motor, would you rather have people with the knowledge and skills to fix the ship motor stranded with you, or their manager?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Sure, for dumb machines, I agree.
But there's a point where the level of credit one might want to claim becomes silly. I like generative AI, and I think AI art has the potential to blossom into an interesting art scene, but I think a person who can barely draw stick figures making certain kinds of ownership/credit claims over AI art output is silly.
Don't get me wrong. I know there are people who already have a deep knowledge of specific LoRAs and the ins and outs of prompting, and who spend hours in-painting and modifying an AI image until it matches their vision. Those people I would consider "true" AI artists and they do actually have a level of knowledge and expertise that they can be proud of.
I just don't think language and general knowledge have caught up with generative AI capabilities. Today, if I paint something, there is no expectation that I went out and collected the pigments by hand, but that might have been the expectation in some times and places. So too, when I point to an image I made with a single prompt, and say "I made that", a lot of people are going to see me being a little big for my britches (even if I internally don't mean anything more than: I prompted it once and it looked good enough, so I posted it.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.
I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:
“Don’t pride yourself on any assets but your own. We could put up with a horse if it bragged of its beauty. But don’t you see that when you boast of having a beautiful horse, you are taking credit for the horse’s traits? What quality belongs to you? The intelligent use of impressions. If you use impressions as nature prescribes, go ahead and indulge your pride, because then you will be celebrating a quality distinctly your own.”
Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)
I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I think in AI's current iteration, it is less like acting as a vessel for the AI, and more like being the kind of boss who takes 100% of the credit for something your underlings did.
Industrialization and electricity gave us substitutes for servants to fetch water for us, light torches, fetch firewood to keep us hot, and fan us to keep us cold. LLMs are finally giving us a skilled, verbal servant we can boss around to do certain kinds of tasks. Perhaps the Hegelian idea of the master-slave dialectic applies here: in a certain sense, the servant doesn't need the master. He can see his impact on the world when he applies his skills and builds things. However the master needs the slave to recognize him as a master, and yet it can never be fully satisfying because he is only a slave. Except, now the slave almost certainly isn't a person, so the master has to farm out his recognition to people who want astronomy apps.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
It's silly legislation, because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected. Run the text through an old fashioned machine translator, and back to English and get rid of most of the signal. Or have an open source model running locally on your machine paraphrase the writing paragraph by paragraph. (You probably don't even need a particularly smart model for this. 7b parameter models fed two or three sentences at a time to rephrase on a loop could probably do this on even potato hardware, since you're just laundering already written text.)
Plus, even if Anthropic will have the tools to tell if the watermark is present, they'll never be able to make those widely available for free to the public, since an adversary could just keep testing against their watermark checker until the text no longer looks like it has the watermark. That means that the presence of the watermark makes no difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you don't get rid of it, since very few people will actually have the means of checking for the watermark.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
What is my Motte? I think I’m just making a Bailey argument that for most of history transexuals likely faced violent deaths?
I was responding to a specific claim about what would happen to "a man wearing women [sic] clothing", not about transsexuals. If your original wording is not a fair reflection of your views, then I withdraw my original objection.
I do still think you should have been more careful in your original wording. If you meant male transsexuals, you should have said:
For 8k years of human civilization a transsexual man likely got executed.
instead of bringing up men wearing women's clothing, if that wasn't what you were trying to talk about. I have different objections to that new formulation as well (is "transsexual" a category that easily applies to individuals across different historical periods, or is it a bit of an anachronism?), but I'm much less interested in that particular discussion.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
How am I the one doing Motte and Bailey here? You're the one making an expansive claim about how civilization stoned men who dressed as women for 8000 years and retreating to more defensible claims when you receive pushback?
I am bringing up narrow and specific counterexamples, because they are enough to disprove a statement as broad as the one you made.
It is totally fine if you think we should start stoning male transvestites to death, or you admire historical periods where that happened, or you won't consider society normal until we start doing that, or whatever you actually think. But don't pretend that you have more historical precedence for your position than you do.
I am against putting utopia in the past or the future.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Are male transvestites not definitionally, "men who dress in women's clothes"?
I also don't think I brought up professional examples like spying. Are you confusing what I said with someone else in this thread?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Transvestite passes were just an example of men wearing women's clothes and not being stoned to death. I brought it up as an example of behavior, not identity.
Look back through my posts in this subthread. Where did I ever get off of the specific topic of responding to your specific claims about 8000 years of stoning men for dressing as women?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I am not talking about identity at all. I am responding to a specific and narrow claim about how men who dressed like women were treated for 8000 years.
It was a claim about behavior, not identity.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I wasn't talking about transsexuals. You said:
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death.
Which is a claim that I disputed. I gave several examples where men wore women's clothes, and were not stoned to death.
If you had wanted to claim something different, you should have claimed something different.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s.
Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.
Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.
Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I was just trying to give a basic existence proof. I don't think there was anything inevitable about the Weimar Republic becoming Nazi Germany, and so I think the fact that there were years of official tolerance of transvestites is a decent proof that your statement was wrong.
If you want more, look at Plato's Republic, suggesting that upper class men and women in the ideal republic wear the same clothes. Look at the legends of Achilles being raised as a girl and wearing girl's clothes, because his parents hoped to avoid his prophesied death if he ever took up arms. Look at the eunuchs in the cult of Cybele.
And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.
Even as hyperbole, I think your comment falls short. Practices differed across time and space, and to pretend otherwise is to replace nuanced historical analysis with a make believe mono-culture extending back further than one is actually attested to in the historical record.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.
I don't think you're correct here, no matter how narrowly or broadly you define human civilization.
In the UK, you have things like Shakespearean actors playing female parts, or the pantomime tradition of cross-dressing.
In the Weimar republic, you have things like transvestite passes.
And even in places where it was disapproved of or illegal to crossdress, I bet you would find a variety of actual practices for most of written history.
We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization.
No, arguably we did that early on, when eunuchs were more widespread in many different human societies.
Certainly, calling a eunuch "male" probably isn't obviously correct until the discovery of sex chromosomes, (and even with that discovery, I think you could have a perfectly viable definition of "male" that excludes eunuchs.)
I actually think you're getting the logic of the Golden Rule backwards. It isn't:
It's:
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