domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10m ago
There's a rationalist shibboleth that I am very fond of: "The optimal amount of X is not zero"
This isn't a call for nihilism or a license for carelessness. It's a recognition that we live in a universe of trade-offs, and that clinging to a perfect "zero" in one narrow domain can inadvertently cause immense harm in others.
For some very high stakes activities, it really ought to be extremely zero over human timescales. For example, if there is an automated system that is responsible for initiating a response to a nuclear strike, I sincerely hope that the failure rate is 0.0... per annum, for several zeroes. Stanislav Petrov was responsible for preventing an accidental nuclear war because he correctly diagnosed that the Soviet early-warning system was malfunctioning.
The lower the stakes, the more the leeway for failure or unpleasant outcomes. If you truly wanted a government that never "systematically" murders someone (and we're assuming that murder is definitionally objectionable), then your best bet is to get rid of government altogether. I suspect that doing so will just lead to an increase in the number of murders overall.
Consider medicine, my home turf? What is the acceptable rate of iatrogenic death, i.e patients killed by the treatment meant to save them? We know for a fact that surgery has a non-zero mortality rate. Anesthesia can kill. Drugs have unexpected, fatal side effects. We could reduce iatrogenic deaths to absolute zero tomorrow by simply banning all surgery, all anesthesia, and all prescription medication. The number of people who would then die from otherwise treatable conditions would be rather large. We accept a small, managed risk of systemic medical error because the alternative is a certainty of systemic medical neglect. That is the only sensible way of going about such things without, as I've said before, literally infinite money/resources.
(This is why deontology is insane. The Pope might not want any orphans to starve in Africa, but he doesn't pawn off the Pope Mobile to pay for it. At least adopt something more sensible like Rule Utilitarianism/Consequentialism. It is easy to say that the optimal number of starving orphans is zero, far harder to make it happen without sacrificing more important concerns)
Even the legal system, in your own example, abides by Blackstone's ratio. A certain number of the innocent will accompany the guilty, be it to the gallows, a short stint in prison, or in paying fines. To reduce the rate of wrongful conviction to literal zero would be to dispense with a legal system. Guess what that does to crime statistics?
If I had to put a number on the "acceptable" rate of systematic murder, the most obvious way to peg it is by calculating the number of non-systematic murders that would occur. I think I can slightly bias the conversion ratio, but in both directions. I am quite unlike to be either systematically or unsystematically murdered myself, but I guess I'd prefer the latter for the sake of fairness, should Rawls drape a veil over me.
phailyoor
11m ago
All that matters is spreading the idea that they can get away with it. Soccer mom by day, assassin by night.
Antifa is a bunch of sheltered rich kids, yet they've committed dozens of felonies each because they keep getting away with it.
phailyoor
13m ago
The army can't afford to guard every single Combination KFC Taco Bell in the country. The daily fast food raids are going to be hard fought but I think the insurgents can pull it off.
Gaashk
19m ago
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
I looked at the new, improved GPT5 free content I got today, and, lol, there are 18 in a single response. But then it generated a .docx of basically the same content, and lo and behold, the em dashes are gone, and now there are a lot of colons instead. Also, it's formatted nicely with headings. Huh.
ChickenOverlord
25m ago
The median American doesn't need to fight though, only a small percentage does. The same was true in Afghanistan, Syria, and in any other guerilla conflict you can think of. In fact the "3%ers" (who I assume are mostly glowies) are named after the supposedly only 3% of colonial Americans that fought in the Revolution.
It's certainly pushing the boundary in terms of what is and isn't AI slop, and I'm sure it doesn't violate the rules (for obvious reasons).
But even though it doesn't trigger obvious alarm bells, my eyes did glaze over when you started the AI slop listicle format and started delving into details that nobody really gives a darn about.
At the very least I'm pretty sure your listicle headers are straight from the mouth of a computer, not a human.
Red Team Testing
Implement systematic "penetration testing" for the oversight system. Create fictional cases of people who clearly should not qualify for assisted dying —em—dash—maybe—filtered— someone with treatable depression, a person under subtle family pressure, an elderly individual who just needs better social support ...
I seriously seriously doubt these words were typed by human fingers.
Aaaand even if somehow those words were typed by human fingers, you would never have written anything nearly close to this essay if it weren't for the corrupting influence of AI. Talking to robots has corrupted and twisted your mind, away from a natural human pattern of thought into producing this meandering and listless form that somehow traces the inhuman shape of AI generated text. It lacks the spark of humanity that even the most schizo posters have: the thread of original thought that traces through the essay and evolves along with the reader.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
30m ago
What's the acceptable rate of systemic murder?
For me it's 0 so I don't think any case can be dismissed as anecdote.
If we're allowed to use the "any system can fail and that's okay" I ask then what your position is on capital punishment and collateral damage in the pursuit of legitimate military targets.
Supah_Schmendrick
32m ago
To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control.
There has been linguistic drift; at the time of the founding, the word "regulated" meant "functioning," and in the concept of a militia - which the founders generally intended to be the primary American military force to the exclusion of standing armies - meant well-equipped, trained, and disciplined.
As far as I'm concerned the 2nd Amendment, properly understood, requires every citizen to own, maintain, and drill with M4s and other military weapons, a la Switzerland. However, practically the champions of militia vs. a permanent, professional military establishment lost for good after WWII.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
34m ago
Oh, I agree with you 100% that Americans don't have the temperament required to fight back against a tyrannical government. But that is a very different argument from "we can't fight tyranny because they will have tanks and fighter jets". I don't get the sense that @ChickenOverlord was trying to claim Americans are going to put up a fierce resistance, just responding to that specific argument.
ChickenOverlord
36m ago
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
Also the I-70, I-80, and I-90 freeways run through some very mountainous territory full of some of the most conservative groups of Americans. Rebels in the mountain west could literally cut the northern part of America in half. All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
42m ago
An extremely high one- do you know anything about pigs?
Your anecdote is not typical - most pigs are raised in factory farms where they, as far as I know, eat mostly corn and soy.
A friend of mine raises them at home and feeds the heads to his other pigs when he slaughters them. Feral hogs happily eat dead piglets.
Touché, but if the pigs are cannibals because people are feeding them pigs, I don't know if this reflects well on human honor either.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
49m ago
If you have any evidence of systematic failures of the Canadian system, as opposed to anecdotes, then I would be happy to see them. Any large system would have failures, and eye-catching, condemnation worthy failures to boot.
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
Is this a claim that this essay was mostly, or even substantially AI generated? If so, that would be false.
I have no qualms about stating that I use AI, but for the purposes of proof-reading, stylistic suggestions/polish, critique, or research. In fact, I've been an open advocate for doing so. What do you think this post suggests?
I'm happy to provide affirmative evidence. I've uploaded an album of screenshots. You can see the embryo of my original draft, further refinements and conversations with o3 where I did my due diligence. As a matter of fact, I spent at least an hour tracking down sources, and groaning as I realized that the model was hallucinating. If this essay is LLM-slop, then please, explain.
In fact, I can go further:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302888?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302842?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302567?context=8#context
Or one can simply look up everything I've ever said about euthanasia on this forum:
https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?sort=new&q=author%3Aself_made_human%20euthanasia&t=all
You will find what I hope is extremely strong evidence of me formulating and discussing similar views months/years back, often with identical wording. Short of video-taping myself while writing each and every comment, there can be no stronger proof.
Total blockades and a lack of local ressources does tend to hamper economic growth.
I'm not about to defend Hamas, but if you were a Gazan businessman in the 90s, there really isn't a lot you could do when trade is functionally impossible.
Can't buy machines for industry, couldn't even export the production, tourism is a no go, can't even have 3G cell towers or any sort of proper internet so no weird internet business.
It's a prison. The inmates are making shanks and trading cigarettes. As you would expect.
The only meaningful difference in a protracted civil conflict is mountains.
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
You could run a guerilla for a very long time if you wanted to and had enough civilian support. And that has actually happened many times in American history. With extremely bloody outcomes.
You are a fool to think Americans can't be driven crazy enough to be the men in black pyjamas when that shit happened many times in a small scale up and including within living memory.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 53m ago
So... what, you're saying that people have a responsibility to prove to you that they're not secretly cackling demons?
Do you realise that universalising this attitude results in civil war?
Is anyone looking at making a Chat GPT5 analysis? I don't want to preempt anything, but the results seem underwhelming.
Some people seem to put a premium on its usability though ('it does what you tell it to do').
Edit: All sorts of memes and squabbling going on over at /r/singularity
P-Necromancer
1hr ago
The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first)
And defensive war, right? The vast majority of Europe maintains a military and they don't arm them with tasers. Indeed, if you listen to their rhetoric regarding, say, a Russian invasion, it doesn't seem like that willingness to kill is 'begrudging' in the slightest. If it's truly a matter of value systems rather than practicality (war, you might argue, is more dangerous than random attacks perpetrated by individuals, but that's not an argument from values), what set of values afford nations the right to preemptively arm themselves to facilitate lethal self defense, but deny that right to individuals?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
You should provide evidence for your claims. I'll start.
In 2023, 15,343 people received MAID in Canada, with 95.9% (14,721) falling under Track 1 (those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable) and 4.1% (622) under Track 2 (those whose death was not reasonably foreseeable).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Canada's MAID is the usual poster child for assisted suicide abuse, having been accused of suggesting it for people who are unhappy with the conventional medical care provided, or for political reasons, or for people who cost the system too much.
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
Consider the counterfactual, or inverse case:
If you were offered the opportunity to remove 40 IQ points and half your lifespan, would that help in any way? Is there a particular reason the status-quo is privileged?
How does that change any of the ethical questions? What ethical difference does it make whether we're talking about playing Crusader Kings or an arbitrarily more complex super Crusader Kings? What is the relevant ethical difference between regular tennis and nuclear tennis? It seems like zero to me.
To the extent that you ask me to involve ethics in the question, my thrust is that most ethical theories tend towards eudaimonia, and some people really enjoy games. The same principle applies to enjoyment of just about anything really, though I suspect Marvel movies are best enjoyed while severely concussed.
In other words, most moral theories kinda like it when people have fun, all else being equal.
You can, as you do at the end of your post, just dismiss the question and assert an answer. But why should that answer be compelling? If your position is that there are no external criteria for a good life and the only thing that matters is self-approval, I think it's reasonable to reflect a bit on why you feel that's the case.
There are no universally compelling arguments. If it doesn't compel you, I genuinely can't do better than sigh/shrug. In this case, I have interrogated a rather related question, namely the concept of universal morality. My genuine takeaway from doing that is to come to the conclusion that there's no reason to believe such a thing exists, and even if it did, no plausible way to know that we've found it. The same applies to questions of objective/universal criteria for leading a fulfilling life.
Eventually, most of the "real" challenges that humanity faces will be, at least in my opinion, rendered obsolete. That leaves just about only games to pass the time. They can be complicated games, they might be of relevance to the real world (status games, proof of work or competence), but they're still games we play because we've run out of options. I think this isn't a thing to complain about, once we get there. Our ancestors struggled to survive so that we wouldn't have to.
Jiro
1hr ago
People get upset about restricting voting rights because in the real world, doing so has a really bad record.
pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps."
Voting is also used to keep other people from doing things to you. I suppose you could say that is still pointing guns, but it's the self-defense style of pointing guns. Everyone who wants to restrict the franchise on this basis talks about using the vote to take from others. Using the vote to keep bad things from being done to you usually gets handwaved away.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Are you proposing letting someone buy the gun, and then doing the check?
No, I'm proposing someone buys the gun, and if the police happen to find out the person was prohibited, they can prosecute then. No special police-state powers related to guns, any more than they get every utterance referred to them for possible prosecution (yes, the NSA wants almost that, but that's generally considered a bad thing).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
You should really feel bad about nerd-sniping me at such a vulnerable time. Btw, essay's out.
P-Necromancer
1hr ago
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary.
It strikes me that there's some tension in this notion. To the extent that guns are incredibly dangerous, it's because others might deliberately use them on you, right? Not that accidents don't happen, but we rarely describe cars as 'incredibly dangerous,' and they're much more dangerous than guns on that score. Cars are certainly more useful, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous. If you mean they're 'inherently' more dangerous... I don't think that's true? A speeding car carries vastly more energy than any bullet, and, if used carelessly, is certain to cause injury while guns are only moderately likely to do so. They're designed to kill while cars are not... But so what? Imagine a dud artillery shell which, through some manufacturing failure, doesn't actually contain any explosive. This object was certainly designed to kill, and in fact to be far more deadly than a normal firearm, but if someone called it 'incredibly dangerous' I'd expect them to be roundly mocked.
If it is about crime: to the extent that it's reasonable to fear others might attack you with lethal weapons, aren't means of self defense necessary? It can't really be both.
Banning guns entirely in a highly criminal society might reduce the level of danger you're subjected to, but not because they're unnecessary -- in fact, you'd be much safer if you acquired a gun illegally and kept it carefully concealed -- but because being denied that necessity is balanced out by degrading the capacity of the others to hurt you. In a minimally criminal society, guns might be almost completely unnecessary, but they're also not all that dangerous.
In terms of the slope slipperiness, Canada is expanding MAID to people suffering solely from a mental health condition. This is legally required due to a court case they lost challenging the MAID law's exclusion of the mentally ill. They have temporarily delayed having this take effect, but eventually they will either implement it, or be taken back to court and forced to implement it.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/news/2024/02/the-government-of-canada-introduces-legislation-to-delay-medical-assistance-in-dying-expansion-by-3-years.html
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