domain:lesswrong.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14m ago
In that case I have no choice but to concede. Actual gorilla warfare would have the Japs on the run.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16m ago
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.
That's still deontology. How did you decide who gets to do the "managing"? You think that's based on raw numbers of successes and failures, or assetions of authority deciding to crush your supposedly beloved principle of autonomy under it's boot? If the system worked the way you describe, we'd be living in ancap insurance-ocracy, not what we have today.
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?
I didn't say that we shouldn't seek that kind of power. I'm not arguing that it's bad. I'm arguing that it's irrelevant to the moral question I posed.
The question of whether a morally good human life can be found in merely entertaining one's self does not seem like one that's particularly changed by the intelligence of the human being in question. Whether you live to 40 or 80 or 200 does not seem to have any bearing on it.
I understood you to be suggesting that something about posthuman entertainments would change the nature of the answer - that perhaps it would be bad for you or me to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, but that it might be good for us to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, if we were much more intelligent or powerful.
I'm willing to entertain the possibility, but I think you need to spell out the difference for me. Why would that make any difference?
My moral intuitions, at least, are that it wouldn't make much difference. To take a fictional example: in the setting Exalted, the gods occupy themselves by playing the Games of Divinity, which appear to be extremely entertaining and may be contributing to the gods' quality of life. Nonetheless my intuition is that the Games are contemptible, or that by choosing to amuse themselves in this way (especially when they might otherwise be engaged in other tasks, such as repairing or improving Creation, or caring for their mortal followers) the gods are in some way moral failures. The vastly superior power, knowledge, and immortality of the gods does not seem to redeem the Games, at least to me. So if I consider a scenario in which we were the gods with the super-games, it seems similar to me.
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.
A few problems with this statement:
- It wasn't seen as a failure, if there was no punishment
- The governments don't run on Open Source. If euthanasia was legalized with the intention of lowering healthcare costs, even if based completely on the own initiative of the patient, it's still meets the criteria for a systemic failure. However, without access to all communications and private conversations of all public officials involved in the decision, proving it will be impossible, and so your request is unreasonable.
- You should at least provide a plausible explanation of how these doctors came up with the idea to offer euthanasia in these cases, that doesn't condemn the system. My most mundane one is that they got a pamphlet telling them to shill it, so they shilled it. That's still a systemic failure.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
23m ago
I have custom instructions that specifically tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in conversation with me. As the screenshots attest, it doesn't give a single fuck regardless of the model. In a way, it's actually gotten worse, because when I first put that there it usually listened.
phailyoor
23m ago
I didn't mean to suggest any preferential treatment, just that as someone who participated in the process of creating them you would have a clearer idea of what line is and write well within it.
I also agree that the majority of the text in your essay did pass through human fingers, but there are some elements that are suspiciously suspicious.
Also I hope I'm not coming off wrong here in my comments, I don't mean anything to be negative towards you, I think you are cool, I'm just a huge huge AI hater.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
25m ago
The states and nigh-rural cities where Boy Scouts (and their Evangelical Christian analogues) actually earn those camping and forestry badges. The states where lighters and pocketknives are still daily carry.
phailyoor
26m ago
oh no, I've gone to great lengths to make sure I always turn autocorrect off.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29m ago
Actual gorilla warfare
I do love autocorrect sometimes.
phailyoor
49m ago
All the high tech weaponry in the world doesn't matter for counterinsurgency purposes. Modern combined arms warfare is optimized for defeating peer and near peer adversaries in a stand up fight, not for blowing up a bunch of goat fuckers with rifles. If the enemy doesn't have anti-tank missiles or tanks, a multi-million dollar main battle tank is no more combat effective than a pickup with armor plates welded on and a cannon in the back. If the enemy doesn't have radar, your multi-billion dollar supersonic stealth strike fighter is no better than a crop duster with bombs strapped on it. Of course having armor and air support at all is super important, but the overmatch eventually doesn't provide any additional value.
During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support. An enemy that was also willing to go gloves off and genocide the as many Chinese as necessary to win. Yet even with collapsing state capacity and morale against an overwhelming enemy, the Chinese still managed to stubbornly cling on to territory and inflict serious losses to the enemy, while only taking 3:1 casualties in direct confrontation. Actual gorilla warfare which does not even attempt to meet the enemy's attach head on would achieve a much more favorable kill ratio.
In the end a lake is more powerful than a water bottle, but a bucket will do the job just as well. Yet insurgencies have succeeded in the past even against determined and far more powerful opponents.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
54m ago
I checked, and yes, at some point in the half a dozen loops of iteration, my initial bullet points turned into a listicle. That bit is, in closer inspection, sloppy. At the very least, those additional (explanations) in brackets doesn't add to the essay. Mea culpa. I would normally remove them when I do edit passes, but I feel that it would dishonest for me to make changes, it would, even if not ended to be, come across as an attempted cover-up.
I seriously seriously doubt these words were typed by human fingers
A critique I have consistently received is using run-on sentences and too many commas. I make an intentional effort to replace it with dashes (and even I've got an allery to em-dashes), semicolons, colons or parentheses.
I tried to use our search function to find comments by me which include "-", because I expect that it would demonstrate a gradual and natural increase in my usage over the years. Sadly it doesn't seem to work, perhaps because the system doesn't index individual characters.
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.
... I obviously disagree. One man's "twisting of a natural mind" is another man's polish and increase to readability.
On more neutral terms: prolonged exposure to a tool also moulds the user. I have been using LLMs since the GPT-3 days, and some aspects of their writing have been consciously or accidentally adopted. What of it? I hadn't really noticed em-dashes before ChatGPT made them notorious, and by then even I felt nauseated by them. Bullet points and lists have their advantages, and I will die on the hill that they deserve to exist.
At the end of the day, this is a debate I'm not particularly interested in. I'm on record advocating for looser restrictions on the usage of LLMs, and I enforce the rules (which are, at this point mostly a consensus on the part of the mods, and not on the sidebar). I am not, in fact, above reproach, and I am answerable to the other mods for personal wrongdoing. I deny that said wrongdoing happened.
you would never have written anything nearly close to this essay if it weren't for the corrupting influence of AI
I invite you to look closely at all the examples I linked above. None of this is new - at worst, I self-plagiarized by finally collecting years of scattered posting into one place.
You'll just have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.
As far as I'm concerned, the most compelling reason to not worry too much about anything but the most-blatant usage of LLMs is that it is almost impossible to tell. There are obviously hints, but they are noisy ones. Anyone who opts to be careful can get away with it easily. About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.
I am deeply annoyed by implicit accusations of cheating by generating even a substantial portion of my work with AI, or worse, trying to disguise and launder LLM-usage. I consider even the weaker claims that I use LLMs to help me write to be as farcical as accusing SS of being an anti-semite. For once in my life, like him, I'd go "yeah? And?".
(This is not a personal attack on you, I know we have probably irreconcilable differences of opinion, but you're one of the "LLM-skeptics" here who is open to alternative arguments and willing to engage in proper debate. My blood pressure doesn't rise when talking to you, and I'm grateful for that)
I've already shared screenshots. I would even share the very first draft, which I was writing in the text box as a response here. This post is from 4 hours back, and about an hour before I submitted the final essay. I think that's a sufficient amount of time to write said essay from scratch. I can't fake the time stamps without a time machine, and even GPT-5 can't build those yet. I think it's the version in one of the Gemini 2.5 screenshots, but god only knows at this point. I'm not kidding about staying up still almost 7 am.
If after that much time and hard work, I face such concerns, then what can I even say? I bother now both because I'm definitely not getting any sleep, and so I have something to link to if this happens again.
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