domain:science.org
No_one
1d ago
What kind of abuse? I think the limit is pretty generous, e.g. it takes several hours to exhaust it unless you use huge context sizes.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Maybe? I think it's unlikely, Westerners tend to have rather flanderized views of what it's like in India. We aren't all vegetarian sadhus chanting om while shitting on the street outside Taj Mahal.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I agree, children shouldn't own firearms. As the meme goes, they should instead be trained to operate crew-served weapons. It suits their frame, and teaches cooperation and other valuable life skills.
Consider the three categories of people nearly everyone agrees should not own firearms: children, people with mental deficiencies, and people with demonstrably violent impulses they cannot control. Notice anything? We generally don't trust these categories with much of anything. The first two get guardians or become wards of the state. The third we imprison. This suggests something interesting about the nature of trust in civilization. We've already made these fundamental judgments about competence and dangerousness. The gun question isn't really creating new categories, I'd say it's revealing categories that already exist.
I like guns. They're cool. I want to own guns. I am also libertarian adjacent, and I believe that I am willing to pay the tax on my beliefs that come from the downsides of widespread firearm ownership.
The first major anti-gun argument runs: guns are dangerous and unnecessary, and this combination justifies banning them.
Dangerous? Absolutely. Their purpose is literally to be weapons. But we don't ban everything dangerous. Cars kill more Americans annually than guns, and cars can achieve horrific mass casualties (see: Nice, France, 2016). We could make bombs from commonly available materials that I won't list here because I'm not a psychopath, but the point stands.
The "unnecessary" part does more work in this argument. We don't typically ban dangerous-but-necessary things. Chainsaws are dangerous but necessary for forestry. Commercial aviation is dangerous but necessary for modern logistics. Even cars, despite their body count, serve essential transportation functions. Even prostitutes, despite their body counts, serve essential transportation functions as the town pony.
It's the dangerous-and-unnecessary combination that supposedly justifies prohibition. But this opens a philosophical can of worms that I suspect most gun control advocates haven't fully considered.
Who decides what's "necessary"? Jet skis kill people and serve no essential function beyond recreation. Theme parks occasionally kill people and exist purely for entertainment. Large houses consume resources and increase inequality while providing no survival advantage beyond a certain point of diminishing returns.
Most hardcore authoritarians - sorry, "public health experts" would indeed ban all the fun toys if they could. The UK has been steadily moving in this direction for decades, restricting everything from kitchen knives to mean tweets, apparently operating under the theory that a sufficiently bubble-wrapped society approaches optimal safety.
This reveals what I think is the true philosophical divide: either you let adults decide for themselves what risks are worth taking for what benefits, or you have a central authority make these decisions for everyone. There's no stable middle ground here, every "reasonable restriction" contains within it the seeds of total control.
And keep in mind: you might not be the one making these decisions. Bureaucracies have a nasty habit of optimizing for metrics that strip every joy out of life while genuinely believing they're making things better. Eventually you'll be sad enough that you'll find the second argument more compelling.
Of the specific alternative forms of suicide you've mentioned, I think jumping off a tall building or bridge is almost as easy as using a gun. Guns are slightly more convenient, but it isn't very hard to find a bridge and overcome your fear of heights.
Wikipedia tells me that the US has the 24th highest suicide rate per capita. It's beaten by Japan, and South Korea takes the number 2 spot. The tiny little Saint Vincent and the Grenadines takes bottom place, and its suicide rate is as low as its water content (Wikipedia says both are negligible, or perhaps the country is too poor to afford water bodies and statisticians). Firearms really aren't that big of a deal in that regard.
(Do they contribute? Of course. I just don't think it matters particularly much.)
Here's where I probably lose some readers: I think competent adults should have access to reliable methods of suicide.
Not because I want people to kill themselves. Quite the opposite. On an individual level, I think suicide is usually a terrible mistake, and anyone contemplating it should get help. In many cases, I am the help. Sometimes that isn't enough, and all the King's horses and psychiatrists combined can't put your will to live back together again.
But there are cases where continued existence involves unbearable suffering: terminal illnesses, degenerative neurological conditions, lives of such persistent misery that death genuinely seems preferable.
More controversially, I think this extends beyond medical cases. Some people draw genuinely shit hands in life: too many cognitive limitations to achieve their goals, chronic health problems, inability to form meaningful relationships, economic circumstances they can't escape. A life of quiet desperation and misery, year after year.
Civilization is fundamentally a voluntary association. We agree to follow certain rules and norms in exchange for the benefits of cooperative society. But if the implicit terms of this agreement are "you must participate forever regardless of how miserable it makes you, and if you try to leave we'll ensure the exit is as torturous as possible," then civilization starts looking less like a beneficial arrangement and more like a prison. Some places manage to be both beneficial and prison adjacent, such as the dementia care homes that I'm frankly sick of visiting, but I hope the average person can be extended more autonomy than an 82 year old with Alzheimer's.
The gun control advocate might respond: "But we can address the underlying causes of despair! Better mental health care, economic support, social programs!"
Sure, we should do those things anyway. But two problems with making them prerequisites for respecting individual autonomy:
First, it assumes we can solve all sources of human misery through policy interventions. This seems... optimistic. Some people will always be dealt rough hands by genetics, circumstance, or pure random chance.
(I am an optimist, in that I put higher than 50% credence in the claim that a Singularity within a decade or two that will solve this issue. But this is far from inevitable, and I think it's cruel to dictate how long someone needs to stomach their misery)
Second, it places the burden of proof on the individual to justify their decision to the satisfaction of others. You have to convince the authorities that your life really is sufficiently miserable to warrant an exit visa. This turns suicide from a tragic personal choice into a bureaucratic process, which seems to miss the point entirely.
This brings us back to the central thesis: forbidding gun ownership means you don't trust other adults to make fundamental decisions about their own lives.
But trust is the foundation of civilization. We trust strangers to drive two-ton vehicles at high speeds in our direction. We trust random people not to push us onto subway tracks. We trust that the person preparing our food hasn't poisoned it. We trust that pilots, surgeons, engineers, and countless others will perform their jobs competently rather than causing mass casualties through malice or incompetence.
Every functioning society is built on millions of these trust relationships. When trust breaks down, civilization breaks down. You get high-crime neighborhoods where people don't go outside after dark. You get societies where every transaction requires extensive verification and monitoring. You get authoritarian systems where the state assumes everyone is a potential threat.
(Hmm.. I write this while still in London)
The gun control position, taken to its logical conclusion, suggests that ordinary adults cannot be trusted with the power of life and death over themselves and others. But this power already exists everywhere around us. The main difference is that guns make it more obvious and immediate.
If you genuinely believe that most adults are so irresponsible, impulsive, and dangerous that they can't be trusted with firearms, then you should probably also believe they can't be trusted to drive, practice medicine, operate heavy machinery, raise children, vote, or participate in countless other activities that require judgment and self-control.
This is a logically consistent approach, but then one must contend with the fact that there's no consistency or rigor in how we approach this. Any Tom can still his dick in a Harry hairy pussy and pop out a kid without needing to get a fucking loiscence. Cars, forklifts and doctors need licenses just about everywhere. People automagically age into the right to vote, unless they commit a crime and become felons who are stripped of it.
I also doubt that even US-levels of firearm ownership are particularly strong mitigating factors against the risk of coup or government oppression. The government has drones, tanks, nigh panopticon surveillance if they cared to really use it. I am happy to acknowledge that it increases the difficulty of the government acting up, but I claim it's not that big of a difference.
That being said, I like guns, and wish I lived in a jurisdiction where I could shoot beer cans with the boys over a barbecue. And not the anemic shotguns or hunting rifles can get in the UK, those bore me to tears. Give me a minigun in Vegas, and give me the salary to fire it for more than a few milliseconds.
Red-tailed hawk painted like a Bald Eagle screeches in the background.
Corvos
1d ago
Because I don't know anything about either of those groups. I guarantee you they would be affected differently by tariffs.
I can look it up though:
Rwanda is a small landlocked country in East-central Africa which is home to approximately 12 million people. Historically there are three main social groupings in the country – the majority Hutu (84%), the minority Tutsi (15%), and the much smaller Twa (1%).
The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was mostly social – the Tutsi forming the wealthy, powerful part of society, and the Hutus the lower, poorer part.
In 1957 The Hutu Manifesto was published which denounced the Tutsis and their perceived dominant position in Rwandan leadership. When the King died in 1959 the Hutus, supported by the Belgians, rose up against the Tutsi leadership. Thousands of Tutsis were murdered and over 100,000 were forced to flee to neighbouring countries including Uganda. The first municipal elections held in Rwanda took place in 1960 and saw a Hutu majority being elected. The monarchy was abolished in 1961, leading to further attacks against the Tutsis. In 1962 Rwanda was granted independence from Belgium and George Kayibanda from the Hutu nationalist party came to power.
The years following independence saw repeated massacres of Tutsis. There were also attacks on Hutus by Tutsis, who saw themselves denied political representation as the nation became a one-party State. Tutsis were denied jobs in the public service under an ethnic quota system which allocated them only 9% of available jobs. Tensions were further inflamed by increasing pressures on the Rwandan economy, resulting in rising levels of poverty and discontent.
So the Tutsis were a minority group that had been in charge in the early half of the 20th century and were then overthrown. When bad economic times struck Tutsis were hit by a double whammy of discrimination from the Hutus government and scapegoating from dissatisfied Hutus. Meanwhile the Hutus are likely propped up by the government and have more access to land and government support.
I strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit very badly by 50% tariffs and the resultant economic problems. I also suspect that anybody who has serious business in Rwanda thinks about this kind of thing on a constant basis. The failure of foreign hegemons to consider very delicate inter-tribal dynamics in favour of academic theories about what should be important is a recurring complaint since the 1800s.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Eh, I think it is probably correct that かのじょ is an innovation! To begin with, it's an awkward mixed kun-on reading that just makes it look more pronominal over the natural かのおんな which is really just that woman, and there is no reason to believe かれ or あれ should originally be gendered - indeed, in the Genji quote it refers to a female character (Lady Kiritsubo), and in deliberately old-fashioned speech you still find lots of examples of あれ referring to females.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Would you be upset about the extirpation of cockroaches(don’t give me crap about them being ecologically necessary- ants will do it instead)? How about some species of critically endangered beetle or banana slug that requires trained personnel to distinguish from a much more widespread species?
For me thé answer to both is clearly ‘no’, even if I would be upset about the extinction of elephants or tigers or blue whales.
aldomilyar
1d ago
Yeah I'm in a similar mind as somebody from a country where there's no real norm of gun ownership. I feel like the benefits I get from general disarmament outweigh the costs I get in the rare situation where I'm being attacked violently and would have had my gun at hand and be able to use it effectively, or I am achieving intense guerilla warfare against state oppressor of my choice.
Tree
1d ago
I’m a utilitarian, but even granting human-level moral worth to animals, I have no problem with cannibalism, in principle (avoiding the brain for health reasons, etc), so eating human-like animals is obviously fine. You are what you eat. The closer to us the life form, the more nutritious. It’s unnatural to eat grass and wood like vegans do. Say no to exophagy.
I was thinking about that watching Ravenous, where cannibalism gave you super strength and eternal life. There’s a great contemplative moment in the middle of the film where the hero lies in the woods wounded, while seasons pass and the cannibal just enjoys nature. In the end cannibalism was a tortured metaphor for colonialism and capitalism. Fine, those things are obviously awesome and bring eternal blissful life and immeasurable wealth. But cannibalism as a metaphor for the fire of life itself would work too. Get busy living, or get busy dying. Those who walk away from omelas are the latter. Are you so self-hating that you would scorn your own meat?
It is an absurd position to tell me that I am a twig or emaciated at that weight when I am well within the bounds of a healthy BMI.
By what measure? By whoever wrote the BMI definition(probably some ascetic quack), yes. By the light of modern science, no. BMI of 20 for a man is severely underweight imo (any connection to the topic above purely coincidental). All meta studies find lowest mortality in a BMI range of 25–30. Mortality for the (lower than BMI 20) is as high as the (higher than BMI 35) group.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
I’m guessing you don’t argue against background checks for buying a gun(is this guy currently on probation?). But what about the more in-depth ATF background check off fingerprints? What about requiring psychiatric testing? And, of course, do we require owners to have safe storage facilities so their guns don’t get stolen- people who steal them being, almost definitionally, among the categories you’ve articulated as shouldn’t own a gun.
Having laid out a slippery slope, you now understand why I argue against background checks for buying a gun. Gun rights are like speech rights; no prior restraint is reasonable, nor are special rules which impose some sort of additional burdensome responsibility for exercising the right (the equivalent for speech here is "stochastic terrorism").
I broadly agree that the right to keep and bear arms is pretty core to full citizenship in the west. But I don’t agree that that right is incompatible with gun control.
Gun control by definition vitiates the right to keep and bear arms. If I have the right to keep and bear arms I don't need to ask the government permission to do so.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I would not consider Gustav thé crocodile to be evil- but at the same token, I would consider it morally obligatory to kill him if at all possible, because humans are so far above crocs in the great chain of being that it’s not worth having thé discussion.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
Some societal stereotypes seem to be based on things that haven't been true for 10-20 years, and the updates are slow to happen. The "middle aged dude running off with the floozy from work and buying a red convertible" trope is indestructible, but I've personally seen more of the "woman loses her mind and gets divorced (or the opposite order), borderline abandons her kids, and goes on a years-long drunken sex binge" version.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
#NotAllDolphins
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It’s not uncommon, although it isn’t the majority, for native English speakers to use ‘meat’ to mean specifically beef and refer to chicken, sausage, ham, Turkey etc with the specific term. I’m wondering if that’s the origin of the confusion?
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
1d ago
ajuuiomml
1d ago
Veganism is a product of modernity that I imagine only exists due to industrial petro farming. The Jain are the closest I can think of, but they do dairy. Veganism is an impoverishing luxury diet.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The interesting question you raise is ‘where do you draw the line on figuring who is a mentally sufficient non criminal responsible adult?’
I’m guessing you don’t argue against background checks for buying a gun(is this guy currently on probation?). But what about the more in-depth ATF background check off fingerprints? What about requiring psychiatric testing? And, of course, do we require owners to have safe storage facilities so their guns don’t get stolen- people who steal them being, almost definitionally, among the categories you’ve articulated as shouldn’t own a gun.
I broadly agree that the right to keep and bear arms is pretty core to full citizenship in the west. But I don’t agree that that right is incompatible with gun control. There’s even some euro countries which seem like they qualify based off of a quick wiki scan- and some blue states with theoretically laxer gun laws which seem like they don’t.
Pongalh
1d ago
"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"
"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"
You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I know this is a meme but it is one I've never encountered in real life (although I've heard about it often). Hard to tell if that is due to geography or era (these days most of the male doctors I know are terrified of being on the wrong end of woke crimes and are careful at work for that reason).
I feel like i addressed @rae's objections about structure and LLMs just being token predictors within the body of the text itself. Eg
most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model. An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word...
@self_made_human disagreed with my definition of intelligence and approach to assessing it wich is interesting from a philosophical standpoint but also kind of irrelevant in practical terms. Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker, or if we're going to wakeup tomorrow to find out that Claude or Grok has suddenly gone "FOOM" and turned into Skynet, and i don't think it's "hamstringing" my (or anyone else's) understanding to point that out.
@daseindustries just seems to be angry that someone would break from the rationalist consensus.
Though aditedly taking the week of the 28th off to go on vacation probably dindnt help.
Corvos
1d ago
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was told that 彼 and 彼女 as gendered pronouns were an innovation to allow translating European works into grammatical Japanese, but perhaps it's not so or it was a minor twist on an established usage.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I think the biggest logical fallacy (or questionable ethical framework) in her stance is damnation-by-association. If a chimpanzee has never molested another chimp, nor eaten it, does it make it an individually honorable chimp? What proportion of individuals must not have committed grave sin for the whole to be condemned?
This suggests an end-state which is a surveillance state for both farmyard and wild animals. I chuckle to think of a world where "cruelty free" chicken is certified on the basis of their moral behavior before slaughter.
I do not think the majority of chimpanzees have eaten another chimp, though orangutans and bonobos seem much nicer chaps.
If a chicken is raised alone in a coop, and hasn't pecked other hens to death, am I not allowed to eat it? Or should we only eat the alpha chickens, the matriarchs who dominate the rest? Once they're eaten, the next chicken down becomes the dishonorable alpha, and is thus fair game.
I don't know dawg, and I don't care. I just had half of one in a Nandos, and it's not done digesting. I will meditate on this when I have blood supply to spare.
Thank you for laying out your thoughts but this feels like the majority of apologetics - only convincing to those already convinced and skating quickly and lightly over the difficult points.
In particular you seem to pass very quickly over argument one. You lay out the anti-gun argument reasonably well:
- We allow people to have some dangerous things because it's not practical to do otherwise.
- Lots of unnecessary things are fine because they're not dangerous to anyone.
- Guns don't fall into either of these categories and so we ban them.
Then having clearly explained the main reason why lots of countries ban guns (they don't fall within either of the categories of object we usually tolerate), you don't refute it.
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary. You seem to want to argue that banning things because they are unnecessary is a slippery slope, and that banning unnecessary things even when they are lethally dangerous weapons is excessive because most people can handle dangerous things just fine. But now you've parted ways with everyone except the people who think that you should almost never ban anything, and those people are already on your side!
This is why most gun apologists either try to make them seem less dangerous (no automatic fire, strong license checks, short-range hunting shotguns or bolt-action only) or more necessary (defend yourself, defend your liberty); those arguments don't always work but they sometimes do.
Likewise for argument two. Your response to the argument that guns cause more people to die from suicide is, essentially, YesChad.png. Where's the argument here? I know someone who's intermittently suicidal; it's genetic and it runs in the family. If he had guns he'd be dead by now.
I'm reasonably pro-gun for a Brit and these arguments are doing the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. Also, it's just that classic American thing of happily insisting that all other countries are just pits of suffering and distrust and only (part of) America has achieved true civilisation. I'm a nationalist myself but really.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
You're getting it!
You don't need to write so much to show that 2rafa's argument is risible, though I appreciate the rigorous formalization. I'd like to think the ridiculousness is apparent from my much briefer comments.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. 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 given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
I feel though that the kind of people who will not attempt to get illegal guns because they're more trouble than they're worth are the kind of people that are peaceful enough that they could be trusted with them anyway.
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