domain:lesswrong.com
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30m ago
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions?
And now I'm reminded of a classmate in elementary school, the "gifted" class's perpetual troublemaker, who combined high IQ with even higher impulsiveness. At an age where most kids figure out they shouldn't do whatever random, impulsive thing crosses their mind because they'll get in trouble for it, and the rest figure out that they should at least put some thought into how to not get caught doing the thing before they do it, he couldn't even find the impulse control to do much of the latter before following his impulse. Instead, he'd just follow his impulse, get caught, then put his high IQ and high verbal fluency to work trying to weasel his way out of the consequences.
ControlsFreak
38m ago
we don't need to decide
We do need to decide. The Constitution authorizes Armies and Navies. I don't see any Constitutional provision that authorizes entities that are in some quantum superposition, such that we only see some probabilistic sense of what it is each time we poke at some little aspect of it. I'm kind of liking the hypothetical I just came up with over here. There, I focused on the bureaucratic history, because that's what the other commenter thought it was. Here, I'll focus on the quantum superposition nature.
Let's say they just stand up a Price Force; no bureaucratic history needed; it's from whole cloth. One might ask whether it's authorized by the Constitution. "Wait! Is that an Army, which is Constitutionally authorized... or a Navy, which is constitutionally authorized... or something else, which might not be Constitutionally authorized?" I would probably not buy claims that it doesn't matter, that you don't need to decide, that it's some magical quantum superposition just because we say so. That we can obviously fund it, that it's obviously authorized, and that the President obviously counts as the Commander in Chief of the Price Force, since those all apply to both the Army and the Navy. That perhaps the only consideration is whether or not the Price Force has equipment that needs to be maintained. So, uh, I guess if the Price Force decides they need big supercomputers that need maintained, then they're a "Navy" and a "naval Force" and don't have a 2 year funding limit (and otherwise have to abide by the various Navy clauses instead of the Army clauses)... but if they don't (or we decide to not talk about them), then they're an "Army" and a "land Force"?
But wait! Doesn't the Army have big supercomputers!? Don't they, uh, have equipment that needs to be maintained? Has the Army been a "Navy" and a "naval Force" all along? Did we just not notice? We just didn't poke the quantum superposition right or at the right time or something? Or is it that if we just don't talk about the equipment that the Army needs to maintain hard enough, it can stay an "Army" and a "land Force"?
I still don't see why that applies, and I'm being earnest here. What about the "stochastic parrot" framing keys the average person into the fact that they're good at code and bad at poetry? That is more to do with mode collapse and the downsides of RLHF than it is to do with lacking "consciousness". Like, even on this forum, we have no shortage of users who are great at coding but can't write a poem to save their lives, what does that say about their consciousness? Are parrots known to be good at Ruby-on-rails but fail at poetry?
My explanation of temperature is, at the very least, meant as a high level explainer. It doesn't come up in normal conversation. Context windows? They're so large now that it's not something that is worth mentioning except in passing?
My point is that the parrot metaphor adds nothing. It is, at best, irrelevant, when it comes to all the additional explainers you need to give to normies.
ControlsFreak
58m ago
I'm just asking about how you think Constitutional terms work. AFAICT, your position is that the way the Constitutional terms work is that one simply looks at the history of bureaucratic organization. This seems somewhat foreign to the way we normally interpret Constitutional terms.
For example, suppose there was some bureaucratic convenience reason for just reducing the Navy down to a single frigate. Then, they began expanding the Army's fleet of ships, subs, etc. and their set of maritime missions. Eventually, the expanded set looks kiiiiiiiinda like what the Navy used to do.1 Is it all "Army and land Forces"? Vice-versa, and we get all "Navy and naval Forces"? If they decide the Air Force should really start controlling carriers, because they're more important to the planes these days, and then, meh, let's just give 'em the rest of the boats, too... is the Air Force still an "Army and land Force"? After all, that's what it was originally called. Maybe we just have the Army and Navy just completely swap everything about them except their organizational history; they're the same entities, but they're now doing everything that the other one used to do.
Essentially, can the government sort of trivially change what Constitutional labels/authorizations/rules apply by merely bureaucratically renaming things/growing them out of some historical organization? This would make all sorts of Constitutional provisions (constraints) much easier to deal with, from a gov-maxxing perspective.
Say, the Army probably has some folks who work on the economics of a place. Like, say you're occupying Iraq; they want to understand the economic situation and implement policies for various reasons. Let's just grow that. Maybe stand it up as its own Force. Maybe call it the Price Force, with the mission to control prices globally. Of course, this may have some incidental domestic component to the mission, as these things are all linked. Is the Price Force an "Army" and a "land Force"? Is it properly authorized by the Constitution, since it grew up inside of the Army historically? What if we instead happened to grow the Price Force out of a group of economists at the Navy, since it seemed like those guys were actually better at it than the Army guys at whatever point in time? Is the Price Force then a "Navy" and a "naval Force"?
1 - Not quite PLA/PLAN, but hilarious.
I'd add 'and Democrat-aligned elites' to that as well. As the quip went, they were for it before they were against it, and Saddam was a long-running sore that Clinton bombed as well. Had he not been taken out, we'd probably be debating how incompetent / missed opportunities the US had to pre-empt the basis for the Iranian nuclear program, and Saddam's inevitable response to that becoming public knowledge.
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