domain:slatestarcodex.com
magicalkittycat
3m ago
It's not really possible to know too well, Trump just shits out words and claims at random. But decent chance it's real and he just said it was because he was briefed quite recently. Would also explain the pivot on Russia if he thought they were losers for such a drastic ratio.
But even if he was making it up and it was lower, even half with 7:1 ratio would still be fantastic.
anti_dan
9m ago
If your behavior is indistinguishable on the exterior from the actions of a cackling demon? Yes
If she wants to kill herself that's one thing. She didn't need assistance. She was young and healthy and could've just hung herself, or jumped off a tall building, or in front of a train. The fact that she couldn't muster up the will to do this, honestly makes me question how suicidal she really was in the first place. After all, thousands of people in the Netherlands do this every year. But unlike the bedridden elderly people that are usually taken as an example in these cases, she certainly always had the option.
What I really think we shouldn't be doing as a society is validating or normalizing such a decision. That is not about the details her specific case, but about the example that's set for others. It doesn't even matter if her mental suffering truly were unbearable in some manner. Ultimately only she knows her inner mental state. To an outside observer, she was young and healthy, and she had people who cared about her. (We should all be so lucky!) And we're going to just kill her on request? That shouldn't be normal. It's what's observed from the outside that sets the norm.
anti_dan
11m ago
There are hurdles. If Gaza was full of Americans it would be a paradise and Israel would be afraid not of terrorist attacks, but of being surpassed as the local economic power.
anti_dan
15m ago
It has a bad record? Please elaborate. Of you are American, expanding the franchise is strongly correlated with poor governance. If you live in Russia, voting is strongly correlated with Vladimir Putin being in charge. In Gaza, Hamas. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Grant_us_eyes
20m ago
Every time I see arguments speaking for Euthanasia, I recall reading the comic Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis.
The first story in said comic series involves a gonzo journalist by the name of Spider Jerusalem in the far future hunting for a story, stumbling across a break-away group being lead by an old companion of his. Said group has taken to utilizing radical body-mods to effectively partially transform themselves into half-human, half-alien hybrids. They're effectively throwing a political hissyfit/riot to get recognized as some sort of special group by the City, so they can acquire benefits and whatnot. Of cource, there's the slight issue that said radical body-modding tech they're utilizing was a failure from the start, hence the hybrid part, as it should have been a perfect transformation, but whatever...
Anyways, the story ends with Spider effectively shaming everyone into calming down and not bashing all the hybrids brains out on the sidewalk, and ends writing a column about the entire circumstance.
One line in said column always stuck out at me, roughly paraphrased from memory, as I lack said comic in front of me to quote verbatim. 'If we were a civilized society, we'd give these damaged people a playground sandbox, a pat on the head, and let them do their own thing in peace'.
If we were a civilized society.
Civilized.
That word, I've always felt, did alot of heavy lifting. Loading bearing, you could call it. If we were civilized. If we lived in a society where a sizable chunk of people that wouldn't take advantage of such a fail-state, that wouldn't abuse the system, that wouldn't twist it for their own ends. If we were mature. Adult. Civilized. If things were only civilized, we could do so many things.
I'm a big believer in personal responsibility. I feel that if people want to do something, that doesn't harm others, they should at least have that option. Suicide included. If you want to check out, well, I personally don't agree with it, and it's not my thing personally, but I can at least understand why some people would want to do so. My odd life has put me in close contact with a wide spread of people, including some older individuals that refuse to change their behavior and have basically decided that if they're going to go out, they're going to go out living life on their terms.
However.
I'll be the first person to play the devil's advocate and note we don't live in a perfect world, that perverse incentives are the quiet ruler that dictates more than I wish, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. While personal responsibility and choices is one thing, it's entirely another to give authority to the state.
Do I trust individuals to make good, well-informed decisions that have the best outcome for their future? No. But the thing about believing in personal responsibility is that this also includes the fail state to fuck up in a cataclysmic fashion.
Do I want to give that sort of power to the State and Authority as a whole? Fuck no. I could go off on a long rant here about how I feel some laws and societal allowances have a gargantuan knock-on effect on societal development as a whole in a very bad way, but I won't belabor the point, and it would be distracting, anyways.
Am I being cruel, here? Evil, one could argue? Dooming people whom suffer, physically and mentally, in a state of agony that last as long as they live? Perhaps. Is this fair? I don't know. I wish we had better options. I honestly, really do.
If we were just civilized...
But what I do know is that maybe, just maybe, we want to keep that genie in the bottle for a very good reason.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
32m ago
Yes, because the government has been allowing them to get away with it. And in our fictional universe of Fascist America, those same people and their acquaintances are being beaten and thrown in jail for the first rock thrown, and thus relegated to menial labor jobs once finally released a decade later. This is what happens to rock throwers in actual police states. What middle class or upper class person is going to stick a gun in the face of an actual policeman if it means that for him and his family, their future is thrown away? What person in that situation would allow their kids to hang around the kind of people who are throwing rocks if letting it happen means the rest of the family loses their position and lives in poverty? If it meant that your other kids can no longer dream of going to college and getting a decent job afterwards?
Maybe the lower classes with little to lose would try it. But the control the modern world has is such that it’s less a fear of getting shot and more a fear of the social and economic consequences to follow of stepping out of line. They fear HR more than anything.
Throwaway05
33m ago
In many European countries it is common to see police armed with rifles at every public transit station (at least it was last time I was abroad).
Britain is the exception.
iprayiam3
33m ago
Who am I to tell you what's massive or not?
The person using the number as part of an argument that there's no cause for concern?
I would start raising eyebrows past 20%, and be alarmed past 30.
That's pretty wild numbers, imo, and reduces my ability to take your general judgement of risk, safety, acceptibility, etc on this topic as particularly calibrated toward anything persuasive. I think burying your own calibration in a p.s. is kind of dishonest when you are trying to lay out a defense of something.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
35m ago
Speaking not as a mod, I don't think we should (or realistically could) ban "AI-assisted" writing. (Something that was obviously mostly or entirely generated by AI, OTOH...) That said, I was starting to be impressed by your essays, then I realized that a substantial portion of them are AI written, and now I tend to skim over them.
IMO, using ChatGPT to do light editing and maybe make some suggestions here and there is one thing (just advanced grammar and spellchecking, really), but actually letting it generate text for you is ... not actually writing. We can debate whether GPT can "write well" by itself, but it's definitely not you writing it just because you gave it a prompt, and I would even say that "collaboration" is stretching it.
Throwaway05
35m ago
Imagine you hate your life. Every day you go home from your job, stare off into space, and drink a ton of alcohol. You aren't particularly suicidal, but you have fleeting thoughts at times, you still function...with the drink anyway.
One day the thoughts are a little less fleeting...you think to yourself but shit, I don't live on a busy road and getting hit by a car sounds like a lot. How would I even hang myself? Stabbing myself? Seems hard.
The thoughts pass, as they always do.
But if there was a gun? "Well fuck it." Lights out.
I've seen a shocking number of patients who managed to shoot themselves in the head and think it was an oopsy.
So yes limiting access to lethal means is an important part of standard of care and improves outcomes.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
43m ago
I mean the fact that so many (in fact I’d argue most) urban cores have become anarchic places where the law doesn’t matter is a general argument against liberal democracy. One of the hallmarks of a good system is that life where the system has control is better than places where it doesn’t have control. When the places nearest our form of government are places that people are paying as much as they can afford to either protect themselves from or escape, the system sucks. And on that score I’d urge anyone who suggests that modern liberal democracy is the absolute best system of government to walk through the urban core of your nearest city unarmed and alone. It’s genuinely scary in many places where crime and criminal gangs are common and not pissing off the gangs is more important to survival than obeying the law.
Now if you’d go to the “bad old days” of whichever autocratic government you choose, chances are you could walk down the street at least in daylight, didn’t worry so much about crime because that government would not tolerate the kind of store-looting in broad daylight that happens today, or mugging or rape or home robbery. Try any of that in China or North Korea, you’re going to be caught and imprisoned rather quickly.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
48m ago
I think being depressed is very good reason not to agree to people's pleas to die right away! It is a mental illness which twists your cognition. It should be difficult to kill yourself on the grounds of depression.
I do not think it's an absolute indicator to ignore someone, if used in the literal sense. You have to keep in mind that the BATNA for these patients is jumping in front of a train. That makes absolutist stances less than actionable, in the pragmatic sense. If you want to achieve this in the real world, you need to lock some people up for the rest of their lives on those grounds alone, and I think letting them kill themselves might well kinder in some cases.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
57m ago
Look, I think it's quite clear that my statement about tigers was hyperbole. You seem like a perfectly nice guy, while I wouldn't jump into the ring to save you, I'd throw rocks (at the tiger) and call for paramedics.
That is the nice thing about being able to compartmentalize one's combative online persona from being an actually nice and easy-going person in reality. There are very few people I would actually watch and let die, and they're closer to Stalin than they are to people I disagree with on a forum for underwater basket weaving.
But when you imagine talking to your own grandmother - a perfect example of a novice user - what do you do?
If this were a perfectly realistic scenario, my conversation would go:
"What the fuck. Is that a ghost? I thought your ashes were somewhere in the Bay of Bengal by now."
Do you understand why I paraphrased what is usually a more nuanced context-dependent conversation IRL? If my granny was actually alive, I would probably teach her how to use the voice mode in her native language and let her chill.
And I have to say, if I told you I'm not biased towards Teslas, Elon doesn't send me cheques, and in fact I just paid money for one, how wide would your eyes go as you attempted to parse that?
Uh? I don't know. If you have a reputation for doing that, I genuinely do not recall. I am very active here, but I do not remember that without actually having to open your profile.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
Cannibalism is an extremely common feed cost reduction technique in the pork industry.
Corvos
1hr ago
Broadly that described by @self_made_human. Total autonomy (as least for educated people) over their own life and death in all cases, Roman-style, which in practice means breaking the social/religious and legal taboo over suicide. The 'assisted dying for the terminally ill' case was introduced as the thin end of the wedge where those objections were not very sensible, with advocates knowing that the would be able to push the ball significantly down the slope once the Schelling fence was overcome.
I think that the 'we will euthanise the elderly to save NHS money' people aren't wrong at the edge but this happens to some extent anyway with Do Not Resuscitate; I expect some scandals but not widescale abuse. I am more worried about the elderly pressuring themselves into suicide, and about those with long-standing but irrational suicidal tendencies. I differ from @self_made_human in thinking that suicidal depression is an absolute indicator that a given person cannot be trusted with this particular form of autonomy as their judgement in this area is compromised.
Personally, I would rather have legalised voluntary assisted suicide specifically for dementia patients, requiring two time-spaced diagnoses of clinical dementia from two different doctors and a voluntary statement from the patient taken when compos mentis (to the extent that this is practical). I think this addresses the real, secret fear that is propelling normie support for these political movements and is limited enough to be stable. Alas I don't think that 'culling the mentally-feeble' would make it past the journalists and I don't think it would satisfy the campaigners, but I think it would take the wind out of the issue.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I was going to write that myself if I wasn't so lazy. Thank you/curse you for scooping me, and I obviously agree.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I will note that this is a concern I have intentionally and prominently addressed. I am personally okay with euthanasia as a cost-saving measure, keeping someone on the verge of brain death in the ICU is both expensive and futile. Doubly so if the savings are used to extend more lives on net.
As it stands, I am willing to compromise on my fantasy of euthanasia booths next to children's parks if that's the cost of making it available in more jurisdictions. What I proposed is a version specifically designed to appease the squeamish, while still being something I am content with myself. This involves removing or minimizing financial incentive to individuals or even most parts of the system.
To the extent that this calls for amendments in places with legal euthanasia, well, it does do that. It's just not as pressing as elsewhere.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
Yeah, OP has bit (and I cannot blame him given the amount of poor reporting and understanding out there) on a lot of the popular misconceptions about U.S. healthcare.
Your mention of EMTALA and how the ED works is super instructive. Supposedly during the recent strikes in South Korea hospitals would just post up guards outside the ED and not let people in and they would wander off to another hospital, get better on their own, or just die on the street. Not an option here and EMTALA violations are one of the few ways a physician can get truly screwed.
But yes the U.S. isn't really a private system, it's not really for-profit (or non-profit - it's a mix of both in surprising ways). It is super complicated but is part of where the confusion comes from a lot of time.
Things in the U.S. are more expensive than the rest of the world but part of that is cost of living part of that is poor health of the population part of that is the fact that the U.S. can actually afford it and subsidizes everyone else...
Usually expensive cancer treatments in the U.S. end up discounted, or insurance will cover them (but not fast enough), and they might not be available at all in other countries or it takes too long to get an appointment to get delivered them.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
I'm pretty sure I haven't done that. My frustration isn't with your average user. It's with people who really should know better using the term as a thought-terminating cliche to dismiss the whole enterprise.
I'm pretty sure you said people like me are less intelligent than a parrot and that you hope we get mauled by a tiger. You did not specify that it was only directed at those using it to dismiss using AI, it was anyone using the term unironically. If I felt shame like normal people I would have simply stopped doing it instead of defending it - and I would no longer be helping people stop anthropomorphising a tool.
You lay out your complex 'fallible intern' model as the superior model. It can debug code and synthesise academic papers, it has a mind, though unlike any we know. You say we need to teach people to give clear instructions, provide background documents, and verify all work. But when you imagine talking to your own grandmother - a perfect example of a novice user - what do you do? You drop the intern model completely in favour of a genius with the world's worst memory. Why?
Because you know the intern model is too complicated. You know it doesn't work for a normal person. You'd never actually saddle your grandmother with the mental load of dealing with an intern who is an amnesiac - and is also a compulsive liar who has mood swings, no common sense, and can't do math. You give her a simple tool for the problem. But your tool deals with the symptom, mine deals with the cause.
I believe that you are trying to help people too, but you really are prioritising defending your model first. It might work great with techbros or the techbro adjacent, but even you drop it when you imagine a real world situation with a novice.
And I have to say, if I told you I'm not biased towards Teslas, Elon doesn't send me cheques, and in fact I just paid money for one, how wide would your eyes go as you attempted to parse that?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
At the end of the day, most moral systems reduce to normality, outside of edge cases which are, well, edge cases. If you're not cooking my dog, and I'm not feeding yours poison, we'd get along regardless of the underlying reasons.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
The courts aren't part of the government?
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
What do you think the intended use case was?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I've cried myself hoarse trying to reason with people who reflexively think LLM=bad. They're tools, tools that have serious flaws, but which are so useful it makes you wonder how you managed before. It's like trying to navigate the internet before Google.
I suspect that if Scott, Gwern, or any of the other big names were obscure today, and broke containment, they'd go nuts trying to fend off accusations of being AI. There is good reason why the LLMs were taught, intentionally or inadvertently, to mimic such a style. Nearly formatted essays with proper markdown are not the sole domain of AI. They make things more pleasant, at the cost of a very small amount of individuality. I promise you that every one of my essays screams self_made_human regardless of how many models I ask for advice. You should take it as a compliment, in this particular scenario.
Britain is not in the EU. It was the biggest British news story of the 2010’s.
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