walruz
9d ago
Roughly 100% of cases I've come across such an argument that wasn't made up by their opponent (or genuinely espoused by the clinically insane), it is being made in relation to a setting that is reasonably 100% white, 100% male, or both. Not wanting Los Angeles tier skin color diversity in 13th century Bohemia, or not wanting girlbosses storming the beaches of Normandy is completely reasonable.
walruz
12d ago
The people who I hate the most are those who view this war as a way to test new drone technology with real live meat puppets, or who put the strategic goal of "weakening Russia" above the lives of real people.
Funny, the people I hate the most are those who started the war.
Although Americans whining about Ukraine not giving up faster as if they cared about the Ukranians, come a close second.
walruz
15d ago
Yes, but a bridge or a power plant isn't a maternity ward. Targeting enemy infrastructure is lawful to the extent that it is necessary for accomplishing military goals and is proportional to the value of those goals as long as the war itself is lawful.
If you bomb a country just because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, strikes against any target is a war crime.
walruz
15d ago
In your analogy, we couldn't have made murder illegal, and murder can't have been immoral, before the invention of CCTV. To say that an action ant be immoral or illegal unless you have the capacity to prevent all occurrences of that action is nonsense.
walruz
15d ago
So a better analogy is who is to blame when a soldier dies on the battlefield - the enemy shooter or the soldier that didn't take cover?
The king or president who instigated the war.
walruz
15d ago
What? Iran invaded the US, Trump bombed their infrastructure and people still called him a war criminal?
On another note, I do like how Ukraine is gloves off - many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it.
There is no conspiracy against Trump. He is just a retard who makes retarded decisions based on retarded information and retarded mental models.
If Trump blows up a bridge or a powerplant because some foreign leader "insulted" him by not cowing to some retarded demand for some trade deal or because he didn't like the fact that the existing diplomatic solution was negotiated under Obama, then yes, that would be a war crime.
If Trump was fighting an existential defensive war and completely within all rules of war bombed enemy infrastructure to degrade their war fighting ability then no, nobody would "screech" about these actions.
walruz
21d ago
1: A greater intelligence than humans is possible.
Evolution has selected for intelligence in us, but has selected for intelligence only to the extent that the trade-offs are worth it. Since such trade-offs (size of birth canal, caloric requirements, etc) exist, it seems supremely unlikely that our level of intelligence is the highest one possible.
And even if von Neumann or Einstein or whichever specific individual you care to name is the absolute highest level of intelligence possible, it should be obvious that the ability to create an arbitrary number of such individuals, who do not need to sleep and who do not need to rest, would be able to produce a higher aggregate intelligence-driven output than humanity.
2: An artificial intelligence greater than human intelligence is possible.
Human intelligence runs on physical hardware. There is nothing magic about a human mind. Building anything that occurs in nature is just an engineering problem.
3: Humans are able to create an artificial intelligence greater than our own.
A weak assumption, since we have already done so across a wide variety of domains.
4: Language models are a viable means by which such an intelligence might be created.
The core argument really doesn't hinge on whether LLMs is the path that leads to AGI. If LLMs are a dead end, just replace "invest in LLM" with "invest in Ai research".
5: It is possible that humans might create such an intelligence via language models in the short to medium term future.
Nobody has said anything about the time frame.
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.
Again, nobody said anything about time frame.
But these go together: If human level intelligence isn't the highest possible level of intelligence (and all signs point to "not"), and if there exists technologies or scientific insights that require a higher level of intelligence to discover or make proper use of, then it is trivially true that humans are locked out of such technologies.
The italicized assumption above is the only assumption that isn't trivially true and that is actually necessary for the stunting argument to be true.
walruz
21d ago
The fact that the fallback AI in individual drones isn't an existential threat does not imply that the sum of drones, coordinated by a vastly more capable AI when they're not being actively jammed, isn't one threat.
Your argument fully generalises to "The fact that the combined C4ISR apparatus of the US armed forces isn't present in totality in the mind of every single USAF pilot (and no, human pilots aren't telepathic), means that the US air force is completely harmless".
walruz
26d ago
Homicide is killing someone who doesn't want to get killed. Murder is killing someone who doesn't want to get killed *and who the law doesn't want killed either *.
Rape is fucking someone who doesn't want to be fucked. There is no analogous distinction to murder-homicide because there are no cases where the law let's you rape someone.
walruz
27d ago
Which is, of course, a retarded meme. If a group of people revere some figure highly, a perfectly valid defence of some other figure is to point out how they're similar. If someone gets offended by a comparison, it's purely a them problem.
walruz
28d ago
Murder and homicide are the same act under different circumstances. If we're discussing the morality of an action, the jurisdiction in which it takes place is immaterial.
We're not discussing the law.
walruz
29d ago
That depends entirely on the jurisdiction, and not really germane to what people think the morality of the act is.
Driving a get away car from a robbery gone bad isn't more or less evil if you do it in Chicago versus if you do it in Oslo, despite you being charged with felony murder in one jurisdiction and aiding and abetting a robbery in the other.
walruz
29d ago
Regardless, they are examples of murder but for the unlawfulness. There are no analogous examples for rape, is my point.
You can rationalize the act of premeditated killing, whatever you want to call it, but you can't rationalize the act of rape.
walruz
30d ago
Sure. My reasoning is in the context of modern western society, in which very few people believe that central examples of war crimes are bad.
walruz
30d ago
Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?
I think basically any sober analysis will conclude that murder is fairly obviously worse than rape. However: I think most people will think that someone being a rapist (without additional information) makes them a worse person than if they were a murderer (again, without additional information).
I think a large part of the reason is that there are a lot of circumstances where murder is morally permissible or even necessary (self defence, military action, the cops shooting a hostage taker, not to mention the shitloads of revenge stories where we cheer when the protagonist murders the antagonist). There are no similar situations where rape is morally permissible (in most people's views). It's really hard to argue that you raped someone in self defence.
walruz
1mo ago
Yes, there are other sources that makes this believable, but OP started a whole thread on this issue based on the lone source "Trump".
"Researchers at NASA claims they have found signs of habitation on Mars" <- start a thread
"A guy drinking engine coolant behind the bus stop who know for certain claims he has found signs of habitation on Mars" <-maybe wait for some actual sources
walruz
1mo ago
But make no mistake: American power is expanding.
They already have a base on Greenland lol. Trump, as usual, acted retarded and gained nothing, but he's probably too senile to realise (or the last person to talk to him spun it in a positive way).
walruz
1mo ago
So something actually happened regarding Greenland.
Details are fuzzy, but Trump just posted
So there's no actual reason for thinking that anything happened, then?
walruz
1mo ago
CUAD [who] defended a member who stated "Zionists don't deserve to live"
Ok, but where is the antisemitism? It may be immoral to wish death on your political enemies, but it certainly isn't racist.
walruz
1mo ago
But from someone who's maybe generally seen as neutral (at least tolerant): even neutrality and "non-political" is a political position. If you make a space non-political, you alienate the political members and kick out those who can't restrain themselves, just like how if they make a space political they alienate you and kick you out if you can't fake adhere to them. Your position is (subjectively) more reasonable because it allows silence, but I still feel for the people who get kicked or voluntarily leave for being political; from firsthand experience many of them are very kind and talented (such that to me, their politics is a personality flaw, nobody's perfect), so it would be nice to accommodate them somehow.
First: Political opinions aren't tourettes. I have strong opinions about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that I'm discriminated against in every activity where talking about tax reform isn't appreciated lol.
Second: Neutrality is a political opinion in the exact same way that not playing golf is a hobby. Without looking it up, what is your opinion on whether sweden should have one or two levels of local governance? Even if you're Swedish, you probably don't have much of an opinion and that is fairly obviously not because a political stance but merely the consequences of you not having read up on the issue. Not having an opinion on something is perfectly fine, and not being interested in an issue isn't """"political"""".
There's probably not much of a civilian market for shape-charge warheads, though (and you're not going to kill a tank by dropping a hand grenade on it) (I realise tanks have been killed by drone-dropped hand grenades dropped through an open hatch, but you can't rely on all crews being similarly
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