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Boarchariot
3m ago
I've decided that Lacanian psychoanalysis will be my next intellectual venture, so right now I am reading Sigmund Freud by Pamela Thurschwell, and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis by Bruce Fink.
The Freud book is to familiarize myself with some of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis. It seems like a pretty straightforward historical account of Freud's life and an overview of his ideas.
The Fink book has been really fascinating so far. I am coming at this as someone who has no experience with psychoanalysis or therapy in general, and the book provides a lot of insight on the actual theraputic techniques of psychoanalysis, rather than the philosophical ideas behind it. I started inteoducing myself to Lacan by listening to some podcasts on basic concepts, but they still felt like they were avoiding the heart of everything. This book is grounding, which is refreshing.
faceh
5m ago
That being said...people don't genuinely expect ASI to be omnipotent, right?
From reading (almost) the entire sequences on Lesswrong back in the day, its less 'omnipotent' but more 'as far above humans as humans are above ants.' There are hard limits on 'intelligence' if we simply look at stuff like the Landauer limit, but the conceit sees to be that once we have an AGI that is capable of recursive self-improvement, it'll go FOOM and start iterating asymptotically close to those limits, and it will start reaching out into the local arm of the galaxy to meet its energy needs.
It's not like it would be too hard to imagine, if the stories about John Von Neumann are accurate, then maximum human intelligence is already quite powerful on its own, and there's no reason to think that human brains are the most efficient design possible. If we can 'merely' simulate 500 Von Neumanns and put them to the task of improving our AI systems, we'd expect they'd make 'rapid' progress, no?
Put a different way, I expect that the hard/soft science divide will continue to exist the same way that I can still beat AlphaZero at chess if you put me up a queen in the endgame.
Its a good analogy, but imagine if AlphaZero, whose sole goal was 'win at chess,' was given the ability to act, beyond the chessboard. Maybe it offers you untold riches if you just resign or sacrificed the queen. Maybe it threatens you or your family with retribution. Maybe it acquires a gun and shoots you.
I do worry that humans are too focused on the 'chessboard' when a true superintelligence would be focused on a much, much larger space of possible moves.
One thing that worries me is that a superintelligence might be much better at foreseeing third or fourth order effects of given actions, which would allow it to make plans that will eventually result in outcomes it desires but without alerting humans to the outcome because it is only in the interaction of these various effects that its intended goal comes about.
So, even if I'm putting my foot in my mouth and the definitive breakthrough in aging research will be published tomorrow, anyone telling you that a drug is less than 10 years out is almost certainly wrong.
Certainly, I'm more focused on the 'escape velocity' argument, where an advance that gets us another ten years of healthy life on average makes it that much more likely that we'll be alive for the next advance that gives us 20 cumulative additional years of life, which makes it more likely we'll be around when the REALLY good stuff is discovered. I haven't seen any 'straight lines' of progress on extending lifespan that suggest this is inevitable, though, whereas I CAN see these with AI and demographics, as stated.
An interesting tactic I could see working is trying to expand dogs' lives, because NOBODY will object to this project, and if it works it should, in theory, get a lot of funding and produce insights that are in fact useful for human lifespan. So perhaps we see immortal dogs before immortal mice?
I am not surprised there'd be a grifter problem, because it is really easy to 'wow' people with scientific-sounding gobbledygook, sell them on promises of life extension via [miracle substance], and get rich all while knowing they won't know they've been had until literal decades later when they are still aging as usual. I also somewhat hate that cosmetic surgery and other tech (like hair dye) is effective enough that someone can absolutely make the claim that they're aging slower than 'natural' but in reality they just cover up the visible effects of aging.
Finally, on this point:
Things that seemed inevitable can reverse themselves fairly easily, and I'd agree with /u/2rafa that we haven't seriously tried to reverse the trend.
This is a bit different because the while we can't necessarily know the upper limit on the earth's carrying capacity for humans... we sure as hell know that its possible to for the human population go to zero. Its safe to say that population growth will reverse because eventually we hit a limit. But I don't see any inbuilt reason why population decline need reverse anytime soon.
And Zeihan's strong argument is that even if we start pumping out kids today, it'll be 20 or so years before this new baby boom can even begin to be productive, so we're still in for a period of strain during that time where we lose productive members of society to retirement and death, and are spending tons of money on raising the next generation, meaning the actual productive generations have to provide support for both their parents and their own kids and may not be able to invest in other productive uses of capital. Which would imply a period of stagnation at least.
That is, we can't instantly replace a declining population of working-age adults merely by having more kids now since kids take time to grow and become productive. So a lot of the suck is already 'baked in' at this point, where a reversal in the trend doesn't prevent the actual problem from arising.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6m ago
That's probably a large reason.
In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Probably the main reasons are:
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They're in a government that's doing (by Finnish scale) hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like, and anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration but consider them too redneck and embarrassing to return back to the center-right.
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They ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening - mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but hardly the sort of an issue that would get the masses really moving and made them look piddling. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind - moving to the centre pisses of the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing the sort of "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting and stay home.
The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, but this is probably mostly due to the vast personal popularity of the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly probably a protest vote against the government.
CanofWorms
7m ago
Just as a reminder, the 2016 election had a very real consequence. Donald Trump was able to install 3 conservative justices on the Supreme Court, which in turn allowed them to overturn Roe V Wade. Abortion is now illegal in about a dozen states and de facto illegal in about ten more.
Whether you think this is a big deal is your call. But I can assure you it is a huge deal for lower middle-class and poor women living in those states. So this is a reminder that elections do have consequences, even if both parties/candidates suck.
Ioper
12m ago
There are also the numerous recent scandals...
But yes, I agree motivation pays a very important role in the results of the EU elections given the low turnout. Which I feel is an underdiscussed part of these elections.
ToZanarkand
18m ago
The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.
Regarding the mediocre performance of the SwedenDemocrats (Sweden's far-right party) in particular, my guess is that a lot of people who vote for them domestically aren't particularly Eurosceptic, but sick of MENA immigration and perceived softness on crime. There's probably therefore less motivation for to vote in an election that they're likely to feel has less direct influence on these issues.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27m ago
Interesting.
But I’m talking more about dumb munitions. The kind you’d use in volume to level a building or deny a road. By WWII, with the integration of mobile radio, those kind of fire missions became much more reliable. Add the trove of map and navigation data, and I think you can deliver a few hundred shells to cover an area pretty consistently.
My impression is that, if you need to flatten a town, you can do it fairly efficiently with conventional weapons. Replacing a few hours’ bombardment with a single weapon wouldn’t be worth it. Unless it needs to be instantaneous, as with a strategic deterrent, I expect Russia to keep the genie in the bottle.
I think we need to talk about definitions of mind control here before we discuss that.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly do think the ability to exact full control over someone's mind would be significant (and terrifying, both philosophically and practically), but I'm also not sure if I see a clear-cut distinction between something like "I can make you see whatever I please through stimulating your neurons in a predictable way" and mind control. If you have designed a system which can predictably induce certain perceptions in someone's mind, how is that not already a restricted form of mind control? Unless the argument here is that only certain parts of the mind are non-deterministic.
Felagund
38m ago
I do think that people make meaningful choices. I don't think that conflicts with determinism being true.
Felagund
39m ago
Of course.
(Well, that isn't necessary to be a Christian who thinks determinism is correct—Thomists and Lutherans, for example, can as well, I believe—but you're right.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
39m ago
We kind of are getting there, though.
You are describing the USB port. I am talking about the hard drive. Read Consciousness is isomorphic to mind reading. Write Consciousness is isomorphic to mind control.
If you think that the capabilities you're pointing to are actually the precursors to mind reading and mind control, then would you agree that my prediction, if correct, would be significant?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
40m ago
Humanity is also locked into a demographic decline that will eventually disrupt the stable global order and world economy. No solutions tried so far have worked or even shown promise. It may be too late for such solutions to prevent the decline.
150 years ago we were thought to be locked into a Malthusian explosion whereby widespread famine and war were inevitable as we bred like moties and exhausted our resources. Things that seemed inevitable can reverse themselves fairly easily, and I'd agree with /u/2rafa that we haven't seriously tried to reverse the trend. People respond to incentives, and if the current regime incentivizes DINKs, there's no reason we can't create a new one that punishes them. If nothing else, childfree people are greatly outnumbered by people with children.
for longevity/anti-aging science which seems poised for some large leaps
Don't hold your breath my man. The longevity/anti-aging field (if I can be permitted to throw a bit of shade for a moment) suffers from a profound lack of talent and attention from the wider scientific community. First, consider that any new discovery takes 10-15 years to be translated into the clinic (see: CRISPR 'discovered' for realsies in 2012, first clinical trials in people started in the early 2020s). So, even if I'm putting my foot in my mouth and the definitive breakthrough in aging research will be published tomorrow, anyone telling you that a drug is less than 10 years out is almost certainly wrong. If you show me the first immortal mouse, I'll get excited and think that maybe we could translate a human drug in 5-10 years, although even then we often fail! (see: Alzheimer's, MS, most oncology drugs)
Second, consider that whatever neo-Rasputin tells you, we genuinely have no clue how aging works, let alone how to manipulate it productively. All the conjecture about seven forms of cell damage will remain conjecture until someone actually manipulates any of those things, and makes an otherwise healthy, wild-type mouse live significantly longer. Rapamycin/caloric restriction probably doesn't clear that bar (see section on CR) and doesn't work in higher mammals for that or some other reason, and putting telomerase back into a mouse with progeria certainly does not.
Thirdly, consider that the academics in the space suffer from a profound lack of ambition/vision, while those who have either are, unfortunately, grifters. See: Calico, which launched with 3.5 billion (massive for a biotech):
We are not a traditional biotechnology company, nor are we an academic institution. We have combined the best parts of both without the constraints of either.
Their ALS drug is interesting, but in the last 11 years most of what they've produced is more academic naked mole rat sequencing papers, plus what looks like a pivot into oncology and 'age-related diseases' rather than aging. I'd elaborate on the grifter side, but that would probably ruffle too many feathers to be worth it.
I recently read the Situational Awareness report by Leopold Aschenbrenner, which is a matter-of-fact update on where things absolutely seem to be heading if straight lines continue to be straight for the next few years.
I recently read it too, and listened to the >4 hour podcast. It's certainly interesting, and I won't pretend to be in a position to judge any of the content regarding AI/ML which is far outside my wheelhouse.
That being said...people don't genuinely expect ASI to be omnipotent, right? Like, I assume Hari Seldon psychohistory-level AI just isn't possible, or is far enough away to be irrelevant. I also expect that the abilities of ASI to manipulate nature will mirror our own. That is to say, I expect them to be god-tier engineers and coders, but while I expect them to be capable of running circles around people in the stock markets, generating a flawless model of the economy that can predict any event seems virtually impossible. Put a different way, I expect that the hard/soft science divide will continue to exist the same way that I can still beat AlphaZero at chess if you put me up a queen in the endgame.
All that to say, when I try to use AI today for biology research it's strictly limited by what we already know. If I ask it for novel theories about aging, it spits out word salad that I can read in any old review on Pubmed rather than modeling the world from the ground up and generating a new hypothesis. Perhaps this is one of the 'unhobblings' Mr. Aschenbrenner references, or perhaps the models I have access to have been RLHF'd away from hallucinating anything interesting, but it's not clear to me how throwing more Pubmed articles into the training data set is going to address this problem. And even then, if some emergent quality enables it to piece together a broad worldview, it's not clear to me how the eschatological diamondoid-bacteria scenario is possible (setting aside how dumb an idea diamondoid bacteria are compared to much easier options for eradicating humans). Molecular dynamics simulations just seem too computationally intensive to do in silico experiments deterministically (although I'm not super knowledgeable about this field and would be curious if anyone else here has any input) at the cellular level, which requires some black boxing, which requires empirical experiments in the lab...
To be clear, I'm bullish on AI and even bullish on AI in biology. Nothing would make me happier than some godlike AI oracle that could satisfy my curiosity, I'm just skeptical that even the ASIs pitched by proponents like Aschenbrenner will be as omnipotent as advertised.
So does the average expert, apparently
No, because the "experts" are left wing, and "fascists" are right wing. "Socially conservative/fiscally liberal" is the fascist quadrant, "socially liberal/fiscally liberal" is the progressive quadrant.
You seem to be operating from a bizarre definition of fascism. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" certainly reflects the views of the expert class more than those of the maga hat wearing normie republican, as do the fascists' many vigorous attempts at social engineering and geopolitical aggression.
To be clear, I do not think "the experts" are meaningfully fascist. There has been a concerted attempt by all politically sides to liken their enemies to fascists, which has lead to the word being a largely useless tangle of negative mental associations.
What do you think the point of leaving the Watchtower with you was about?
Not with me, at my doorstep. So my parents pick it up, and they do something with it, which everyone is aware almost noone ever does.
Even granting your portrayal of what they do, it pales in comparison to the sheer magnitude of the effort the rainbow industry puts into converting other people's kids. Though it must be said I do not grant your portrayal, since if they were as stubborn as you said, I would have been at the receiving end of it at some point, given my exposure. They don't even do door-to-door anymore from what I can tell. I only ever see them at subway / train stations, standing around with signs, and not approaching anyone, they're just waiting until they are approached.
That isn't the truce though. We have accepted it is ok to try and convert other people to our belief systems. Do conservatives try to stay away from say regulating abortion for other people, and persuading them it is wrong?
??? We are currently in a situation where trans activists are persuading people to their belief system (using a lot of underhanded tactics that my side is not, by the way) and regulating in their favor, and my side is doing the same. Curiously you only complain about me, and never the trans activists, but ok. Anyway, I'm offering that we both stop - a truce. You say that's not a truce because... there's another active war on a completely different issue I have nothing to do with?
And if the trans advocates have managed to convince the judges then that too should be reflected in the outcomes
Right. And if the non-trans activists have managed to convince them that GAC should be banned, and GAC-doctors should be prosecuted, the same applies. What "double standard" were you even arguing against then?
I am fine with making getting testosterone easier for men sure, seems entirely reasonable.
Fine is not good enough. If you're going to go after me for proposing that I ban it for little girls, you better show me receipts for going after the current system for making it so hard to get for men. If not, you're the one with the double standard.
I accept the medical system in many countries is way too restrictive in allowing people access to drugs/treatments. But let's build on this victory not try to roll it back!
You said we shouldn't limit access to GAC because it would violate some sort of truce. I'm telling you no such truce exists, we violate self-determination routinely, for adults, so you cannot call upon it against my proposal to limit access to radical therapies for children. Now you're trying to use the first-person plural to portray it as some sort of victory for me? Why don't you just answer the point rather than trying to convince me this is something I asked for?
This can be a template for how to persuade the medical community.
Yeah, here's the thing. You might convince me if the deal is we abolish the "medical community" as it's seen today. That was what you were implying in your argument - self-determination trumping scientific validity. If the medical community becomes just a bunch of service providers anyone can pick and choose, I might take it. I'm not interested in haggling over what the medical community allows the rest of us.
Why nerf trans people's ability to get the treatment they want rather than buff everyone else's?
Because if we have a system where authorities are deciding who is allowed to use which medicine for what ailment, I want these authorities to prevent usage of very potent medicine in a way that is not scientifically valid, against an ailment that doesn't even have a proper definition, and cannot be reliably detected beyond a self-report.
If you want to give your son testosterone and they want it too, I'd suggest you find a doctor who can try to do it as safely as possible, but sure give it a whirl.
I wish you'd address my arguments the way I actually present them, rather than constantly changing them to your liking. If anything we were talking about giving testosterone to aging me, when I'm starting to run short on it. And I just told you you're far more likely to find a doctor that will prescribe it to a little girl, than to an aging man.
Voting for RFK Jr or minor candidates better conveys dissatisfaction. They won't win, but the major parties do pay attention to that vote. Typically they respond by making it harder to get on the ballot, but at least you've needled them.
Also it's easier to make a difference than you think. Most people do nothing. If you consistently do a weekly podcast complaining about specific things local politicians have done you'll probably get their attention.
Another thing is that you can take advantage of information asymmetry. If you print out 100 flyers and drop them off at houses along the street the politician lives on and where some of their sr staffers live they will assume it was a major city wide literature drop.
Oregon Goes To The Purge
The court reaffirmed its provisional class certification of the Custody Class and expanded it statewide. The court then found that Petitioners were likely to succeed on the merits of their Sixth Amendment and due process claims and subsequently “order[ed] that counsel must be provided within seven days of the initial appearance, or within seven days of the withdrawal [of] previously appointed counsel,” and “[f]ailing this, defendants must be released from custody, subject to reasonable conditions imposed by [Oregon] Circuit Court judges.”
Some quick background: the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees a right "to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence" in some criminal trials at certain stages of the trial. There's a whole lot of complexity of where and how that applies, but for those who can't afford a lawyer of their own, for covered crimes, the state eventually evaluates whether the defendant is indigent, and if so appoints a public defender, eg @ymeshkout. But this is neither glamorous, fun, well-paying, or even particularly safe work, so there is seldom a glut of people jumping up and down to do that job.
In 2019, a group called the Sixth Amendment Center was commissioned by Oregon state to review the public defence office, and their final report was highly critical, highlighting heavy workloads and huge pressures to close cases with as few hours as possible. Public defenders in Oregon began (or more cynically, were, given the 6AC report) lobbying for changes to their maximum caseloads and reimbursements, and while it's not accidental that their solution would have involved getting more pay for less work, this eventually did get a cap on maximum cases and some additional funding, targeting an estimated 30ish full-time employees added to 400 then-present. During COVID, a combination of increased juggling of cases due to the slower pace of concluding trials, varying treatments of different classes of crime, (and interpersonal issues) only added to the matter; case backlogs became the norm, instead of a rare exception.
In this case, the jailed plaintiffs argued that they were facing the court without competent counsel, or being held indefinitely before trial, due to the lack of indigent defense available. In several cases, they were arraigned and/or had bail hearings without having seen a defense lawyer.
And as a result, the federal judiciary will be letting them loose on the streets, with a pinky promise to arrest them harder should they reoffend.
That title isn't entirely fair. While the original district court injunction required jails to free anyone who'd been jailed seven days without an attorney, the order was later revised to exclude those "charged with murder and aggravated murder", or who have their release revoked, or who fired their own attorney. And at least theoretically, non-jail custody is still on the table, such as GPS monitoring or probation check-ins, though the majority opinion's logic about their effectiveness ("The dissent does not explain why any of these standard measures would fail") is not the most compelling.
But with the class certification, this applies to all jailed defendants within the state of Oregon and the court not-so-subtly invites further such preliminary injunctions from other states in the 9th Circuit ("The State of Washington is facing similar problems and consequences"). While the initial class claims 'only' a little over a hundred defendants presently jailed, the injunction itself is prospective, binding all future criminal prosecutions, with the corresponding impact on any police or prosecutor interest in bringing such charges.
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There's some obvious system failure/'sleepwalking into disaster' problems, here: the opinion jabs at the dissent near its end with "Consistent with the Sixth Amendment, Oregon could solve this problem overnight simply by paying appointed counsel a better wage. It is Oregon, and not the district court, that created this crisis." The dissent points out in turn that yes, Oregon could pay appointed counsel more, and if that would solve things overnight, why not order that instead?
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((Because the current plan involves increasing pay and additional hiring of almost five hundred new public defenders over the next 6 years, which would double the public defender full-time staff, while absolutely no one retires, moves away, or leaves public defense. Hilariously optimistic and too late!))
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But this genuinely is the sorta thing that can be solved, but probably not in any magic wand sorta way. Six years is a pretty unrealistically optimistic pace for the hiring of five hundred public defenders, but if they'd started in 2019 and then put a stricter limit on caseloads, we'd at least be a lot closer to an actual fix, and even recognizing the benefit of hindsight looking back and seeing 'public defense bill with strong bipartisan support derailed over climate change bill that did nothing' is kinda morbid. It's hard to get good numbers on how many public defenders work different classes of cases, or even what classes of cases fall under each category, but it's also hard to believe that there's been a great focus on optimal allocation of present public defense resources.
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I guess this is someone's idea of solving it? Which points, perhaps, to a more critical problem than even the "sleepwalking into disaster" bit: even if someone else does respond, you might not like their response.
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There's a little bit to quibble about on the logic of the decision itself, most notably as to whether the delays so far were unreasonable enough to require, or that the court hearings so far 'matter' in a way that the Eight Amendment counts -- it's very far from clear that bail hearings would have looked that different with counsel present, given the defendants. There's a lot to be said about motivations: no small number of the actors here are pretty hard on the 'eliminate cash bail' train, and a few want that as part of "limiting the reliance on the formal criminal justice system for low-level, non-violent offense". I can't find direct calls to Defund the Police by the less reputable orgs involved, but I also haven't exactly gone searching.
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On the other hand, just because they're bad in other ways, doesn't mean that they're wrong here. There's little to recommend the phrase "The court required Mr. Owens to waive counsel at that hearing in order for the court to consider releasing him". While many of the plaintiffs face potential sentences exceeding their likely time in jail before trial, the mere possibility of pre-trial time served exceeding a sentence -- of 'sentence first, verdict afterwards' -- makes an absolute mockery of the justice system.
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Even if we were to presume the majority of these jailed plaintiffs guilty (which we're not supposed to do, and there's a slim chance may even be incorrect), there's a bigger problem where thousands of indigent defendants who were released on various bails or supervisory custody already, for court cases that will happen whenever the state gets around to actually having two sides, which means a sizable fraction of those cases probably won't happen. Witnesses will age out or become unavailable or their memories unreliable, doubt increases, chain of custody for physical evidence becomes increasingly tangled, so on. There is actually a federal statutory public interest in a speedy trial, and it's there for a reason.
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There are even some dumb culture war matters. People following the Trump trial in New York were trying to game theory out timelines approaches for federal appeals and kept getting stuck on Younger abstention. Here, definitionally, all jailed plaintiffs were in the first stages of a state prosecution and thus unable to get relief in a federal court, but the Ninth Circuit has given a delightfully fast answer to that: Younger is already screwed when it's Important, "even assuming all four factors set forth... are met".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
50m ago
Huh, still empty?
The European Parliaments elections happened. The European Parliaments elect 720 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the member countries to represent the legislative assembly (one of the three main institutions) of the European Union. While the European Parliament is often castigated for weakness compared to the executives - the European Council and the European Commission - it still has a fair bit of power when it comes to, for instance, the various regulations of the European Union. The elections also act as an ideological barometer for political developments in Europe, though since the turnout is low, this factor is by necessity diminished.
Anyway, the theme for this election was the feared/desired rise of nationalist groups and the possibility that EPP, the center-right of the European Parliament (consisting of various center-right parties from member states - people still vote for their old domestic parties in the European elections, not the Europarties like EPP or the center-left S&D, its main partner), would start cooperating with the nationalists, like center-right parties do in many member countries. The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.
There's still a high chance their influence will grow in the coming parliament, at least for the "moderate" ones (ie. the ones that do not challenge the basic idea of the European Union or the general Western thrust of foreign and security policy, like support for the war in Ukraine.) Some of the results (Irish ones, since the Irish election happen through STV and counting them takes a long time) are still waited for and there's a fair bit that depends on how the groupings inside the parliament get reformed. There's little chance that the new parliament will be much improvement compared to the previous ones in terms of getting Europe out of its deepset economic funk.
One particular result of interest, perhaps more consequential than the European Parliament elections, was the onslaught of Marine le Pen's RN and some other nationalist parties in France leading to Macron calling for new parliamentary elections. While they wouldn't lead to Macron himself getting thrown out, if RN and the other groups do well or even get a majority, France might get gridlocked for at least three years.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
58m ago
And if those experts were neutral and ideologically uncommitted, that would be fine.
I'd argue that this is impossible. An expert class, by virtue of being a coherent social class, will inevitably end up with their own ideological commitments. Of course the so-called 'deep state' "aren't immune to partisan pressure." And the very idea of "expertise" implies that sometimes, one party will be "more correct" than the other — how do you distinguish that from "partisan pressure"? ("Reality has a well-known liberal bias," "reality-based community" and all that.)
They overreacted, and their having listened to people they shouldn't have listened to
Says you, a non-expert.
The argument isn't that "the deep state" is perfect, or even neutral, but that it's far better than the alternative, wherein the ignorance and bigotry of deplorable flyover chuds is allowed to influence the state. That's how you get another Hitler.
So does the average expert, apparently
No, because the "experts" are left wing, and "fascists" are right wing. "Socially conservative/fiscally liberal" is the fascist quadrant, "socially liberal/fiscally liberal" is the progressive quadrant.
Yeah, I remember when Louis XVI and Charles I said that too.
They didn't have fighter jets and nukes, did they? Less flippantly, the rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century were unusually successful, historically speaking, because of changes in military technology — the rise of firearms — which vastly favored quantity over quality and labor over capital in military effectiveness. That "age of the gun" is over; the trend for at least a century has been back toward the medieval and early modern condition of capital-intensive warrior elites defeating vastly larger numbers of less-skilled, less well-equipped peasants.
We kind of are getting there, though. As an example, there is a growing class of proposals to make the blind sighted again by introducing optogenetic actuators - proteins that modify cellular activity in response to light - into neurons via transfection, and then using patterns of light to induce vision. If that's not an attempt to Write to minds, I don't know what is.
This has also found a good amount of success in practice - this paper describes a patient that was blind and who was given an injection containing a viral vector that encoded for the channelrhodopsin protein ChrimsonR in his retinal ganglia. He was then provided a pair of light-stimulating goggles that translated visual stimuli into a form processable by him and subjected to some visual tests, and when wearing the goggles he could actually attempt to engage with objects in front of him. Of course, stimulation of the retina won't work for other issues such as glaucoma or trauma, so there have also been attempts to stimulate the V1 visual cortex directly, and on that front there are primate experiments showing that stimulating the visual cortex through optogenetics induces perception of visuals (see this paper and this paper).
DARPA has even funded such research in their NESD (Neural Engineering System Design) program, with some of their funding going to a Dr Ehud Isacoff whose goal is to stimulate neurons via optogenetics to encode perceptions into the human cortex. It's certainly in its infancy, but already there is a good amount of evidence that manipulating the mind is very, very possible.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
The human problems remain, because we're still here and we're still the same hairless apes with pretensions we've always been.
I agree, but this is the core question I'm trying to get at. My understanding is that the main branch of the Enlightenment is specifically based on the assumption that this is not, in fact, true. It holds that human problems are not separate from non-human problems, and that human problems can be solved the same way we solve polio. My argument is that this specific question is a pretty good predictor of the large-scale split in values between the tribes. One side of that split believes that human problems are intrinsic to humanity and thus cannot be solved. The other side believes that human problems are an engineering failure, and if we get the engineering right they go away.
I don't know if the "fundamental nature" has changed but the changes are large and important and I think to a certain extent arguing about whether things are "fundamental" comes down to word games.
I don't think "fundamental" is a word game. Humans have been stealing for as long as they've existed. If you change things to the point that humans actually stop stealing, that's a fundamental change. Ditto for all the other goods and evils. That's my understanding of what "progress" means, from direct observation of progressives. Again, "war on poverty", "smash the patriarchy", "teach men not to rape", "give peace a chance", "New Soviet Man", and so on.
In the industrialized parts of the modern world, we experience abundance that is so hilariously far above that threshold that it's easy to forget that the threshold exists.
This is true. And yet, the hedonic treadmill appears to also be true, such that our desires and ambitions auto-adjust to whatever level of abundance we have and whatever level of hardship we face. I don't think people in the modern world are significantly happier than people in the ancient world. I think people in the ancient world laughed and cried more or less the same as we do, just over different things, and I think that based on reading their own descriptions of their lives.
It is informative that your example compares the experience of the ruling family of one of the world's mightiest states at the time against some internet rando.
The example is of a queen, because queens are notable enough to make it into the histories. I maintain that the core of the experience generalizes to all humans, and of all ages too. Kamikaze spite is a very human reaction to losing a conflict. I don't think wealth or status or anything else has any significant impact on the story. Honor does not seem to have been the exclusive preserve of the ultra-wealthy, then or now. If you disagree, we could change the example to the siege of Masada, which is essentially the same story without the involvement of royalty.
In the first world, beggars largely do not starve.
And yet, they still die disproportionately young, and the things they die of are generally described as "deaths of despair". If our absurd abundance is actual progress, why would "deaths of despair" be a meaningful category?
Nope. But smallpox did stop, and malaria will stop, and polio and starvation and iodine deficiency are mere shadows of the specters they were in centuries past. Our homes are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We're having this conversation over the internet, a magical network which allows most people in the world to talk to most other people in the world whenever they want to, synchronously or asynchronously depending on their preferences. If we decided that the mere projections of each others' words through rocks we tricked into thinking was insufficient, we could each get into an airplane and meet up at some arbitrary city somewhere in the world at this time tomorrow, probably for less money than we each make in a month.
All of this is true. And yet:
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?
...All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
...The above seems deeply true, based on my own experience. It also seems entirely incompatible with the concept of "progress".
Tenaz
1hr ago
That isn't how a system like a cell works, otherwise things would just disintegrate and the "simulation" that is our current intelligence wouldn't work at all
So long as the variations are within reasonable constraints, intelligence will still work. As an analogy, a car can take many branching routes of a road leading in many different directions, but so long as it stays on the road it will continue to function.
the integrity and utility and actions a cell are entirely unchanged by not knowing the exact location of each electron in their carbon atoms, we don't know them now, our brains and cells don't know or care, and we won't know them when the brain is scanned.
We don't need to know the exact locations of atoms obviously--reality will continue to function with or without our knowledge--but a faithful simulation absolutely does.
The carbon atoms function no differently regardless of where the electron is in the probability field.
I doubt this is true, but it's unimportant regardless. The important thing is that the atom's position is unknown, and we know that atom positions can affect things.
Once you add up the 100 trillion particles in a cell...well suffice it to say, even if you did have a few atoms or particles misbehaving they would have no physical impact on the neuron at all well below that number of total particles, and we aren't even above cellular level yet!
It's not "a few atoms" misbehaving, it's literally every single atom. Many atoms in cells are free-floating, and small differences between where you think they are and where they actually are will cause enormous divergence between the simulation and reality.
For example, cancer is generally caused by mistakes made when copying dna, or damaged dna faithfully copied. Radiation famously causes cancer because it literally impacts dna and damages it. This is an interaction at a tiny scale, one which the uncertainty principle renders us powerless to predict.
If your simulation can't predict brain cancer, how do you expect it to predict regular choices? IMO it's self-evident that individual atoms impact brain function. If you want to push this point I'll look for studies to prove it.
Stellula
1hr ago
Both of these things are irrelevant. I see my children as a physical manifestation of the love that my wife and I have for one another, as well as a sort of hopeful proclamation about the future.
Stingray3906
1hr ago
I'm considering casting a completely blank ballot on Election Day. I'm fed up with it all.
Has the right wing rhetoric gotten more dramatic or stayed the same? I've noticed how Farage in the UK with his Reform party has been talking about deportations and net zero immigration. Something no one would say a few years ago. A lot of that is huff and puff on the campaign trail, but its still a very clear tonal shift.
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