This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
New executive order just dropped.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
Am I wrong in reading there seems to be reasonable wiggle room built into the EO?
There's built in discretion to maaaybe adopt a different mens rea standard for criminal regulatory offenses. One hopes that the AG only accepts reasonable defenses of different standards of criminal enforcement, but there are probably many reasonable, wiggly exceptions.
"Excuse me, AG Bondi, in 98% of cases the US Forest Service targets Big Criminal Forestry-- these jerks are always finding ways to wiggle out of their illegal logging. If we lose strict liability standards for this enforcement they will claim ignorance every time, in every forest, and likely get away with their illegal logging. By the way, Mrs. Bondi, I have it on record we protested this. We aren't going to eat this story when the time comes."
Apply that to less reasonable, but similarly wiggly enforcement. Requiring a defense of different standards is good, but there's got to be thousands(?*) of these, and a safe political decision would be to defer to the agency if they request a different standard. This EO wasn't blasted out with political vigor. It was dumped on a Friday with barely a peep, so there may not be a big Trump backing to hide behind any unpopular decisions.
I may just be negative. This seems good, generally. If done intelligently, better. There are likely real trade offs in losing flexibility with higher burdens for enforcement, but still seems amenable.
** Many, many thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I forgot we don't actually know-- which is why step one makes agencies plainly list them. Yuge!
Federal regulations are codified, although you are probably right that nobody has explicitly tagged the criminal provisions. DOGE would do this by having an AI parse the CFR, and it would work.
...about as well as Full Self Driving - good enough for you to put your guard down, and then drive you right into a truck it misidentified as a bridge.
Is full self driving more dangerous per mile than having a human drive? Otherwise it might be the case that having an AI parse the CFR would work better across the board than having humans do it, but would fail a few times in highly surprising and attention-grabbing ways.
I'm pretty sure it is, yes. Provably beating the average human, or even reaching the same level would be a huge milestone that Elon would be shouting from every roof. That ancient rationalist prophecy about truck drivers getting replaced by AI would have already come true.
Eh, it takes time for change to percolate, and truck drivers are sufficiently selected that we can assume they're better drivers than average- the average driver, after all, includes averages from lots of people who insist on driving drunk/high, texting while driving, etc.
Ok, are you actually saying FSD is as safe as a human driver right now, or are you just pointing out reasons why being as safe doesn't necessarily mean wide scale adoption? The former is an interesting conversation, but the latter strikes men a zero stakes one about angels dancing on a pin.
Same question @jkf.
Both. I think the following things can be true- trucking is (understandably) highly regulated and it will take a long time to get major changes like self driving trucks into the mainstream, truckers are above-average drivers and so self-driving software will need to improve massively to replace them, driving a semi truck is a different problem from driving a car and needs beefier software, and liability reasons don’t affect the calculus much because the trucking industry is structured around making insurance companies pay for accidents anyways.
If you add it all up, I think this points to ‘robot Uber’ before it points to ‘self driving trucks’. After all, Uber drivers do not go to school and get a special license and take regular drug tests. These are also regular cars in a far less regulated field.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link