OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
I don't actually think 1-5 are all obvious, but my point is that you responded to my criticism of my Scott with points that are in the 1-5 area.
Do I think that people are actually going to stop making LLMs? No, I don't. If I had to bet, I'm in the camp that sees LLMs as a 'normal technology'. I think they will exist, more use will be made of them, and that the uses found will be moderate and not that interesting. I think both the doomers and the singularitans will be disappointed.
The point that I made that you took issue with was that it is ludicrous to say that if we don't make LLM-based 'AI', we're '[consigned] to a permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave'. That is absurd. If we don't pursue that technology, we're not even locking ourselves out of artificial intelligence, much less locking ourselves out of civilisational maturity.
The Babel example was meant to be evocative, not an argument as such. You're an atheist, fine, whatever. Scott made a comparison from Judaism so I felt it was within-bounds to reply with another comparison from Judaism.
With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead.
Fifteen years is short term.
This is one of the weird things about the debate to me - the absurdly short timelines everybody seems to be approaching it with. From my perspective, Scott and the 'AI pause' people are basically one subgroup of accelerationist AI-enthusiast arguing with another subgroup of accelerationists. Five, ten, fifteen years, that's all still the short term. That is the immediate future. Medium-term for me means 'within the next hundred years or so', i.e. within the lifetimes of people alive today, and long-term means after that.
Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
Bots have a lot of users, but dislike of the technology is steadily increasing, especially among younger generations, the people you would expect to be the most tech-savvy and most open to new tools.
I don't realistically expect a revolution to destroy it all, but I do think people are underestimating how much it is loathed. Bots are mostly being pushed from above - I was irritated this morning to read a story advising 'AI avoiders' to ease themselves into using 'AI', even though an 'AI avoider', by definition, doesn't want to use it! If the best we can do is impose a kind of social stigma around using bots, or at least carve out the idea that it's legitimate for people in the public sphere to refuse this technology, then that's still something worth fighting for.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
You're leaping up a tower of assumptions here. Let's go in order:
1: A greater intelligence than humans is possible.
2: An artificial intelligence greater than human intelligence is possible.
3: Humans are able to create an artificial intelligence greater than our own.
4: Language models are a viable means by which such an intelligence might be created.
5: It is possible that humans might create such an intelligence via language models in the short to medium term future.
6: It is desirable to create such an intelligence.
7: If we fail to create such an intelligence in the short term, human civilisation will be permanently stunted or developmentally limited.
Scott asserted 7, and in return, I asserted that 7 is an insane position. You have responded to me by asserting something in the range of 2-4.
Let me make some other suggestions. It might be possible to choose not to make super-intelligences via LLMs now, but to do it in two hundred years, or five hundred years, or on any other timeline you like. Or it might be possible to make super-intelligences via some other, non-LLM means. There's no reason to think that LLMs specifically need to be used to conjure up super-intelligence right now or else the human race has no future.
I'm also inclined to challenge him just on the grounds of goals and values. He mentions 'civilisational childhood or an early grave'. Well, what would constitute 'civilisational adulthood'? What is civilisational maturity? He's making a value judgement. Suppose I don't think that technical or computational capacity is identical to civilisational maturity. That just seems implausible on the face of it - and certainly I don't believe that the worth of a civilisation or a people should be measured linearly and quantitatively like that. On the contrary, in individual humans I think that maturity involves a capacity for self-control and restraint; if that applies also on the civilisational level, then one might argue that civilisational adulthood would involve the ability to choose not to go down a path that we judge to be unwise.
In Scott's response, he says that thinking of an AI as all-powerful would be shituf, which is a sin. Firstly, that's not what shituf means, and secondly, arguably the whole point of shituf is that it's not sin for a Gentile. Shituf is an ad hoc attempt to be merciful to Gentiles who hold opinions that, in Jewish eyes, are not properly monotheistic. (I consider this to be grounded in a mistaken understanding of the Trinity, but I do appreciate the attempt to extend grace.) But if we're going to invoke the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, Scott and Pinker both being Jewish, I might suggest also considering another story in the Torah.
I cannot help but read that statement about 'civilisational childhood' and picture someone standing in front of a half-built tower reaching into the heavens and explaining, "If we stop building this tower to heaven, we are consigning ourselves to permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave."
Tolkien's reaction to the news of the atomic bombs was, in Letter #102 (9 August 1945):
The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'd say that I lost some respect for both of them through this argument, but to be honest I don't think I ever had much respect for Pinker. The ignorant and strawmannish Enlightenment Now really ended any sympathy I had for him as a thinker. Nonetheless, Pinker's letter to Scott was courteous and concise; I think you can tell that Pinker is a better or at least more professional writer.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous - there's an awful lot of citing Omohundro and Hinton, and after a while one starts to think that that's because he's only got a handful of people, and is shocked and appalled that anybody disagrees with them. Scott does land some real hits on Pinker - the RAND study mistake is an embarrassing mis-step by Pinker - but also avoids some of Pinker's stronger arguments, and sets up his own straw men.
I'm not particularly interested in nitpicking many of the specific disagreements, especially because plenty of them leave ample room for both to be, in a sense, right. Pinker is correct that 'intelligence' can't be modelled as a single variable; Scott is correct that nonetheless it is reasonable to talk about 'intelligence' in a general sense.
What stood out to me, personally, was the way that the mask came down a bit, and setting aside all disputes about facts, Scott is dedicated to normative commitments that I think are repulsive, or frankly insane. Consider:
My biggest worry about AI right now (aside from the doom, of course) is that, exactly like with global warming, all of this prevaricating will come back to roost. Once it becomes obvious to the average person that AI really is a big deal and really is dangerous - and I am no longer sure this moment is in the future - we will have to choose between two visions. One vision, which I’ve tried to help lay out in Plan A, is to rise to the challenge, give scientists the time and resources they need to solve the alignment problem, and enter the future with confidence. The other vision is to simply ban smarter-than-human AI forever, consigning us to a permanent civilizational childhood or an early grave.
I'm sorry, but this is lunatic. We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted? What? He's got some sort of science fiction eschatology in mind that seems both absurd on the factual merits and, perhaps more importantly, morally blinkered. While I did always know that Scott had some of those bizarre transhumanist beliefs (and I'm certainly not a convert to Phil-Torres-like conspiracism), it is, at least, a useful reminder that he approaches the whole issue of technology from a bizarre starting point that I cannot sympathise with.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
The first sentence here made me think it was some sort of Latin rite Catholic lesbian bar.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that 'Western Mass' means 'Massachusetts', and I am still disappointed, because this story could only be improved by the inexplicable involvement of the Catholic Church.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I work in aged care.
The only significant use I have seen for it at work thus far is listening to and transcribing conversations in meetings, like an automated secretary.
Management also set up a policy bot, so you can ask the bot about the existing policies on such-and-such procedure, and it will search through the intranet and tell you, but thus far it does not seem to be widely used.
For the most part I think nobody knows what it is. All the doctors and RNs I talk to make their own judgements, and find the idea of outsourcing patient welfare decisions to a computer terrifying. Personal care workers and lifestyle workers have no use for it. Residents mostly have no idea what it is. I appear to have been identified by a few co-workers as relatively tech-savvy (you help people log in or troubleshoot a computer problem a few times and suddenly you have a reputation...), so there have been a few cases where I have reluctantly explained to people what ChatGPT is and how you use it. In practice I try not to encourage its use, though.
The most visible use of LLMs or bot-generated content I see at work, as I've commented before, is via YouTube slop. We have large televisions that can access YouTube and sometimes use them to play music, classic movies, church services, the news, or anything else residents might be interested in. Search results are increasingly polluted by AI-gen content, and sometimes YouTube automatically rolls over to them. This is a regular if minor frustration for care and lifestyle workers looking for good shows or playlists.
I probably can't generalise from my field, but if I had to guess, I'd say that for most jobs 'on the ground', which require either interacting with people or interacting with real, physical things, AI/LLMs/bots remain a solution looking for a problem. I know my case that the site manager is quite technophilic and is intrigued by the potential for AI, but thus far the use cases just don't exist.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated.
I don't think this is true. I think people dislike the auto-generation itself. The simple test of this would be that you can show somebody a text, ask if they enjoy it, get a result, and then reveal to them that it was bot-written and watch them get angry.
I'm willing to bet that if you ran a study where you gave the same text to three groups, where you tell the first group nothing, tell the second group that the text is written by a bot, and tell the third group that the text is written by a human, and then ask them all to rate the text, the second group would rate it the lowest.
Maybe that's irrational, in the same way that people will prefer hand-made or artisanal objects to machined objects, but if so it's still a highly predictable irrationality.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
I do like some (but not all) of Scott's writing, which tends to be very long, but I can easily understand how someone who learned by reading Scott would come to conflate length with wisdom.
For what it's worth, this isn't meant to call out self_made_human, whom I have nothing against, and at any rate certainly isn't the worst example of this trend.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
Since when was AI ever fun? Or at least LLMs? I've seen fun things with pre-GPT chatbots, I guess, but LLMs have always been mediocrity machines.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
If you've ever signed out of YouTube and erased all your device history, and looked for anything fresh, it's amazing how much bot slop there is everywhere. Try 'revenge stories' or something for a particularly egregious look at the genre.
I've been a cynic/pessimist/skeptic about 'AI' here before, but one thing I think it will do a lot of is spam, and unless filter technology keeps up and matches it, I think there is a very real chance that platforms like YouTube become genuinely unuseable within the next few years.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
There's a lot I don't like on the Motte, but when it comes down to it, I would rather hate a post written by an actual human than I would engage with anything written or polished by a bot.
I was not particularly a fan of the This Is Going To Hurt review, which I thought was a bit meandering and over-long. The best book reviews are punchier than that. Still, judging from the past book review winners, ACT readers have very different taste to me, so maybe it's in it with a shot. But again, I'd prefer a meandering ramble from a human than something by a bot.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
I think if you had asked even the most ardent American patriot on 9/12/01, “Do you think we should invade and occupy Afghanistan for the next 20 years?” he would have looked at you like you were crazy before answering “No. We’ll just bomb the shit out of them.” We could have gone in, bombed whatever we felt like bombing, taken out the Taliban leadership, hunted down al-Qaeda without letting Pakistan know, and left.
No, I don't think you could have. I think that's the same kind of 'hard man' fantasy that gets you Trump saying they should just tale Iraq's oil or whatever other nonsense.
Pragmatically, the question is whether just bombing Afghanistan and leaving would meaningfully contribute to fighting al Qaeda or global terrorism, and the answer there is "no". Sure, you could try to take out the Taliban leadership and then leave, and what do you think happens in Afghanistan after that? Just blowing everything up was not a solution.
Politically, is that something that the US could viably have done, considering domestic pressures, the ideological and cultural mood in the country, and the international situation? I do not think it could have.
As for wounded pride, I suppose I just agree with the old adage, “war is politics by other means.” If the offense is great enough, war seems like a pretty reasonable response.
I think that killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people over twenty years is neither a reasonable nor a moral response to September 11, all the more so because the the majority of those casualties had nothing to do with September 11.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
I also do not consider 'mended our wounded pride' to be a valid objective for a military operation.
I was thirteen years old. I remember being at home, and my parents came up to me, with very serious expressions, and told me there had been a terrorist attack in America.
I was confused. I was not confused by the attack - I was confused by why they were telling me. A terrorist attack in another country? Aren't those very common? World Trade Centre? Never heard of it. Is three thousand a lot, relatively speaking?
After some more time had passed I did figure out why it was a big deal, but I remember that in the first moments, my reaction was to be surprised that people were acting as if it were a big deal. Mum and dad never told me about random news events in other countries before. My first reaction, therefore, was to get on with what I was interested in, without having any emotional reaction. It was the same kind of story, to me, as "many dead in earthquake in India", or "Russian separatists bomb city in the Caucasus", or "civil war breaks out in Latin America". I heard it, went "oh, okay", and that was it.
Over the coming weeks I did realise its importance. I remember thinking that the real crime of the hijackers wasn't killing such-and-such number of Americans, but rather making America afraid, and now America was going to make the entire rest of the world afraid in revenge.
Though I am a bit ashamed of teenage-me's initial response, I am proud that my teenage self then immediately opposed both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11, or to make the world safer from terrorism.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
You know that your problem is still that every time you are asked for specific examples, all you have is a cherry-picked list of incidents across centuries or millennia, most of which on examination are innocuous.
If you repeat it often enough, it will not thereby become true.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Then why are you so shocked that antisemitism is growing among Whites as they become aware of the cultural mechanisms that have vilified White identity and engaged in strong activism against it?
In America, aren't whites the least anti-semitic racial group, at least if you don't count Jews themselves?
There isn't actually a great awakening here. Statistically, as I understand it, blacks and Middle Easterners are the most anti-semitic racial groups in the US, and Asians mostly just don't care.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Do Christians also have to reject their god? Are you a "Christianity is a Jew-cucked slave morality cult" white nationalist? Or are you a "Judeo-Christianity is a Jew lie" white nationalist?
The short answer is yes. I have beaten my head into the SS wall before, and he does hate Christianity as well.
You may notice that his criticisms of Judaism all apply to Christianity as well. He accuses Judaism of being 'slave morality', which is a far more traditional critique of Christianity. He's moved on to repeatedly attempting to use the Divine Name in a mocking way - that's as offensive to Christians as it is to Jews. Now, as you can see down-thread, I think his real objection to Christianity is that Christianity is 1) uncomfortably Jewish, and 2) an obstacle to some sort of white identitarian politics. If you could produce a Christianity that is purged of either any link to the history of Israel, and its resolutely non-racial orientation, I think he would drop his objection to it, but, well, that has been tried in the past.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
'Serving himself' is not a clear category. Cain was obviously self-motivated in committing the murder, but he was not benefitting himself in committing the murder. The phrase 'serving himself' could cover either.
To recap a little, my position is:
Firstly, it does not make sense to describe the murder of Abel as an act of 'redistribution', or as 'socialism' in any meaningful sense. No material goods nor the distribution thereof were involved. Cain did not believe that Abel was 'stealing' anything, or that Abel's possessions were obtained unjustly. The motive for Cain's murder was envy. He acted out of hatred. Abel did well, Cain did poorly, and out of resentment Cain murdered his brother and then sought to pretend otherwise.
Secondly, Cain's motive had nothing to do with 'self-preservation'. No defense of Cain's actions along those lines is viable. Cain was not defending himself or his interests, or protecting his posterity, or making the evolutionarily optimal decision. Abel's life in no way threatened any of those things.
The fact someone else [generic: "your brother"][2] does something better than you does something to you. You invested for no reward. You feel robbed and you feel angry[3].
Congratulations - this is correct. Abel did better than Cain, and Cain felt envious, angry, and wrathful. But of course the point is that Cain was wrong to feel that way. Feelings are not self-justifying. See Jonah chapter 4. God's repeated question to Jonah is, "Is it right for you to be angry?"
So what is the point of this sophistry about redistribution, socialism, self-preservation, or evolution? The first murder was not about any of those things. Okay, I understand that now you are retreating to a more subtle point - that the psychological tendencies that underlie and motivate Cain's murder are also present in the motivations for socialist politics today. But 1) I think you should have made that point more clearly above, 2) that argument that socialism is based on envy is commonplace in conservative politics and you do not need to drag in Cain and Abel to make that point, and 3) any political position, socialism included, is held by an immense number of people for an immense number of reasons, it's impossible to fully peer into any individual's heart, and human motives are always irreducibly mixed. Envy, pride, resentment, etc., are ubiquitous and present among the adherents of pretty much every political creed imaginable.
Bringing up Cain is just a combination of bad biblical exegesis and bad political analysis. You were responding to Pongalh's correct point that socialists believe that natural resources are a kind of common heritage that should not be privately owned with a non sequitur about Cain and Abel. I think you should try to speak more clearly.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Objectively in what way? In terms of objective self-interest, it's hard to see any benefit for Cain here - even if we take God's wrath out of the picture entirely, what benefit is there for Cain in murdering someone who seems like a valuable ally? If you want to bring up evolution here, Cain and Abel are brothers - kin selection seems like it would recommend Cain and Abel working together to help each other. I don't think there's either a biblical or an evolutionary justification for the idea that somebody else being talented is inherently a risk to you, or for the idea that destroying a similarly- or more-talented person to yourself is necessarily beneficial.
Incidentally, it is not clear whether Abel was in fact superior to Cain. Abel was a herdsman and Cain was a farmer, and implicitly they both seem to have been capable in their roles. Normally I would have thought that herdsmen and farmers can mutually benefit from working with each other. Per Hebrews 11:3, Abel's advantage was his righteousness, but righteousness is not zero-sum. I do not see how Cain can become more righteous by murdering Abel, nor how Abel's righteousness in any way disadvantages Cain. In purely material terms, would they not both have benefitted more through cooperation?
Cain obtained neither relative nor absolute advantage through murdering his brother.
The idea that it's 'objectively' right to kill a friendly, cooperative person merely because they are not yourself is ludicrous.
But here, the message is essentially saying that these natural impulses- you have "envy, hatred, and pride" to keep you alive and reproducing- are in conflict with God's will?
There is no sense whatsoever in which murdering Abel improved Cain's ability to reproduce, or provide for his offspring. Likewise there is no sense whatsoever in which Abel's life, or his righteousness and favour with God, disadvantaged Cain, such that he would have had to kill him to secure his ability to have a family. That is simply not in the text, and neither can it be reasonably extrapolated from the text.
(It may also be worth noting that all of Cain's line died out in the Flood. You might say that counting God's intervention is cheating, but I think that trying to read the early chapters of Genesis while removing God from the narrative is absurd. The whole story is about God. We aren't talking about a historical coincidence where it just randomly happened that Cain's descendants all died. The story of Genesis deliberately interweaves historical events with human righteousness or unrighteousness and corresponding divine action.)
As Cain points out to God, what the fuck? How could self-preservation be the wrong answer here
This story is not about self-preservation.
Why, yes, if you interpret Cain's actions to be something that they were clearly not, and in service of a cause that they were clearly not in service of, you may come up with some different conclusions. But I don't see what weight or meaning that would have for anybody else. Cain's murder of Abel had nothing to do with survival or self-preservation - not even through an evolutionary lens. Evolution is not a war of all against all, where the most psychotically murderous being wins. Evolution and natural selection include cooperation and family.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I don't know. I suspect that if you're Catholic, it's difficult to have an open relationship with your priest, because there's a hierarchy between you.
Some years ago, when I was in my late 20s, I remember having a chat with a local priest, a man in his 50s. In theory we met so that we could have a chat about my own spiritual life and my engagement with the parish (I was, at the time, in the church's choir), but after half an hour we got to talking more casually, and he told me about the departing parish secretary. He had apparently been very disappointed with her, and as he was bellyaching to me, I realised that the roles had switched and I was giving him pastoral care. I'd guess that he just didn't have people to casually talk to like that. Most of us do have people in our lives who will listen to us if we need to just get something off our chest. It's often unfair, but we need friends, a spouse, family, etc., who will listen sympathetically if we need to say, "Ugh, I had a terrible day at work, can you believe what my co-worker said to me?" It may not be virtuous (and perhaps this priest was guilty of the sin of gossip), but it's nonetheless something that a priest, living alone in the presbytery, may not have access to.
I think people do see priests as like islands sometimes, separate from the rest of society? I once ran into that same priest in the supermarket in the evening one day, after mass. I was shocked - wait, you're a priest, what are you doing wearing normal clothes wandering up and down the aisle putting food in a shopping basket? - and then felt stupid for being shocked. Where did I think priests got food? I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of him as another species.
Unfortunately he's since been rotated to another parish and I never see him any more. I hope he's still doing all right.
Every now and then I hear homilies, or bishops' messages, reminding parishioners to pray for their priests. I encourage them to do so, and more than that, if it's possible to do so in a safe way, be kind to priests. They need friends too.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
In what way did the resources not belong to him?
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, "I have produced a man with the help of the Lord."
Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.
In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.
The Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."
Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.
Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"
And the Lord said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth."
Cain said to the Lord, "My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me."
Then the Lord said to him, "Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance." And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.
Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
You might assert that Abel does not own his sheep in the sense that nobody can own any natural resources, because all resources, animals, plants, etc., are created by God. But Cain does not seem to have objected to Abel having a flock of sheep in the conventional, everyday sense of the term.
Moreover joking about 'redistribution' here seems like just a bad interpretation of the text? Cain's motive is not to steal any of Abel's material goods. Cain does not take Abel's sheep, nor even Abel's physical body. It's hard to read as a 'redistribution' of God's favour, because there is no reason for Cain to think that murdering Abel will somehow cause God to favour Cain. On the contrary, Cain attempts to conceal his actions from God. It looks to me like Cain (correctly) believes that God would look upon his act with disfavour.
Surely the traditional reading of this text, where Cain was motivated by envy, hatred, and pride, just makes more sense? Abel had done well, and Cain was envious, and that envy curdled into bitterness and despising. He killed Abel not as part of some strategic move to take anything that belonged to Abel, for Cain makes no attempt to take anything of Abel's. Nor does he make any suggestion that Abel committed an injustice. Cain was angry that Abel had been favoured more than he had been. That was it. That was the whole cause.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'll try to combine two different replies into one here.
I admit this is a somewhat odd position for me to take, because in my experience, almost all of the Catholic priests I've known have been, though possessing their various human flaws, genuinely warm and faithful men offering up their lives for the sake of the gospel, and the Protestant ministers I've known have been an incredibly mixed bag, ranging from people I genuinely consider non-Christians or heretics to people who just seem to be interested in social status and conforming to trends while seeking high status to, thankfully, the small minority of devoted servants of Christ. If I were just judging by what I think of them as people, Catholicism would have a very easy win over Protestantism.
I also agree in principle that the quality of the priest as a person is not the important thing. I am not a Donatist; the sacraments are valid even if they are performed by people who are inconstant, foolish, un-virtuous, or in the most extreme cases, even unbelievers. I tend to think there is a tension here in the church. The efficacy of the sacraments does not depend on the priest's holiness, but nonetheless we do validly want priests to live holy lives. We want all people to live holy lives, after all, and priests are seen as representative of the community, and their lives affect many others. So the tightrope to walk is that priests must strive to be good and holy men, learned, faithful, compassionate, good speakers and wise counsellors, etc., but that priesthood does not depend on any of these things.
However, all that said, I do stand by the observation that, in my experience, lay Catholics do not know their priests as well as lay Protestants tend to know their pastors. I think Catholic priests are often felt to be interchangeable in a way that Protestant equivalents are not, and I take that to be because of the role of the wider ecclesial structure. In general I think Catholics care more about the structure and institutions of the church than Protestants, so the specific individual priest in front of you can be less important than the office he represents and the function he performs.
In defense of the Catholic position, you could argue that's the way it should be. You go to mass to meet Christ, not the priest. I myself think about my role in those terms. (I don't want to get into institutional details, for reasons of privacy, but I am a kind of pastor.) My role is to be 'transparent' - I want people to look through me and my service and see God. All ministers must, in a sense, be like John the Baptist: "he must increase, but I must decrease". We make ourselves small for the sake of the gospel. Protestantism is much more vulnerable to 'celebrity pastors' than Catholicism is. There are celebrity priests, unfortunately, but I think Catholicism has resisted that more effectively than Protestantism has.
That said, no human being is ever fully interchangeable, and ultimately we encounter Christ not through ecclesial offices, but through other living human beings, and sometimes I do worry that the human is lost. Sometimes I do speak to a priest and realise that somewhere beneath his ministry is a very lonely man, and I feel a compassion for him. I remember one priest telling me once about how precious he finds the friendships he has that go back to before his ordination - people who are still able to know him as just 'my friend X', not 'Fr. X'.
At any rate, as far as individuals go, I think the average of Catholic priests is better than the average of Protestant priests/ministers/pastors. No doubt standardisation helps with that. Possibly it's also just because my background has exposed me to a great many mainline Protestant leaders who have been slowly selling out the gospel. In my case, therefore, it has been very important to distinguish between the church's representative (frequently corrupt), the visible institution of the church (also frequently corrupt), and the invisible church (resplendent throughout eternity, terrible as an army with banners). So I put an especial value on practices of resistance, which allow one to remember and hold to the gospel even in the face of straying leaders and institutions.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I was annoyed to read this piece on it in the national broadcaster, which, for all that it is marked 'Analysis' (not even Opinion!), just uncritically repeats the book's claims as truth.
I have not been able to read it yet - and I may not bother - but certainly the impression I get from the coverage of it is that its fundamental case is, well, that nerds are gross.
It is, as it happens, true that plenty of the people it's talking about are gross. I have said it myself. If you look at most of the people he's talking about - Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Altman, Zuckerberg, Srinivasan, etc. - they are, I think it's fair to say, kind of disconcerting. But I think you can't build a larger political argument on that. Someone presenting as anti-social is not necessarily a threat to democracy. Something is being elided here.
I was also struck by the repetition of the word 'billionaire', in a way that reminds me of attempts to use 'oligarchy' as the word of the day a while back. It's democracy versus billionaires, data centres are an intrusion of billionaire power, they found billionaire cities, and so on. Clearly the author has very negative affect around the word 'billionaire', but my sense is that Americans in general do not. As with oligarchy, it feels to me like an attempt to will a movement into existence, as if repeating "people are waking up" enough times will summon the revolution into being.
You've mis-used the word 'trivial'. All those arguments you've made might be true, but none of them are trivially true. They all depend on contingent claims about the world. Any claim that is meaningfully evidence-based cannot be trivial.
At any rate, I read Scott as clearly concerned about time frame. I do not think he is talking about abstract possibilities. Yes, the word 'forever' is in that passage I quoted, but he is plainly talking about short-term technology policy. His view, as far as I can tell, is that we need to 'solve the alignment problem' while creating 'AI' in the immediate short term, or else not make 'AI' at all, and he views the latter option as some sort of permanent stunting of human potential.
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