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Corvos
15hr ago
He’s saying that someone with a gun could kill you at any moment without even trying. The same is not true of, say, a rubber duck. It’s natural to be a lot more nervous around one than the other, even if the owner has not yet demonstrated ill intent or stupidity.
this is distinct from intelligence
I disagree, it is not distinct, it is integeral. What is the value that a human equipment operator (or any other "intelligence" for that matter) adds over a machine carrying out a set of scripted movements if not the ability to react and adapt on the fly?
Tell me do you want your "self driving car" to plow into the back of a stopped vehicle because it was programmed to drive south on [route x] at [speed] for [distance], or would you prefer that it percieve and react to the obstacle by applying the brakes and/or going around? Which of those options do you think is the more "intelligent" of the two?
Supah_Schmendrick
15hr ago
Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
But that's a significant difference! You've moved the goalposts from "that's something that can kill if you don't concentrate on it sufficiently" (untrue, but would strongly favor your position a la "ultrahazardous activities") to the true argument of "but people are sometimes idiots, impaired, or negligent" which is a major shift with significant consequences!
Im sure with perfect adherence to a special diet plan you are correct, but as someone in the medical field I’m sure you’re aware there’s a wide gap between recommended use and typical use of anything. Typical vegan diets are not healthy for kids, and typical vegan diets are what the modal vegan kid is eating. Studies show the typical vegan kid is stunted, and that’s a bad thing.
It’s not good for the elderly either, where veganism is associated with risk for bone fractures, sarcopenia, anemia, and depression.
Maybe all of this could be eliminated with the perfect vegan diet. Maybe Real Veganism Has Never been Tried. I don’t really care, I only care about what empirical works for most people.
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
And I’m answering: familial loyalties, suspicions of whether their tribe will benefit, aesthetic preferences, etc.
Who is having their goods delivered? Whose fault is it that what is happening is happening? Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Then Brexit happened and there was a big alignment but it’s amazing how you can predict people’s carefully worked out opinions on the results of certain policies once you know their class, gender, age and job.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
I would naively expect it to help, if only by making charging and sentencing easier.
Oregon tried that decriminalization experiment with drug possession. But it was hideously confounded by fentanyl, and I didn’t find any studies from the recriminalization last year.
Maybe there’s something in gang violence stats? Police have a longstanding interest in disarming gangs. It should be possible to tell whether changes in general gun policy, or even in enforcement, actually reduce gang shootings.
wayfarer
15hr ago
define an axis along which we can work to evaluate both animals and algorithms
trying to evaluate intelligence on one axis is going to take you nowhere, as made clear by your claimed results
perceptivity + reactivity spectrum
this is distinct from intelligence
and if asked "which is smarter, Grok, Claude, Gemini, or an orangutan?" I am going to pick the orangutan every time.
that just proves your intelligence definition is bad and not worth using
wayfarer
15hr ago
It's almost as if there must be some intermediate layer in between.
Can you explain what claimed layer is there?
After all, if all the LLM is doing is predict the next most likely word
that is with so called temperature parameter set to 0, in practice typically is set to LLM predict next likely token
how do you get a chess engine or python script out of that?
by training it on large pile of text first
anti_dan
15hr ago
Imagine if Nazis kept co-opting gun clubs and local chambers of commerce. Perhaps that would help you see the trouble with this kind of excuse making.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
Assisted suicide is not morally analysed or perceived as the assistant killing the recipient by those who support it.
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns?
I think the answer many would give is "in an ideal world, no". Unarmed British police are admired all over the continent.
This seems like an important one, right?
Really, no. Germany and Austria have seen a lot of lethal bladed-weapon attacks by our dear immigrants in recent years, but sentiment to the effect of "if only a victim/bystander could have killed the assailant first" was almost never voiced as far as I could see. (Fantasies took the shape of overwhelming/tacking/disarming the attacker.) The value system is really that different. Try to not typical-mind as much.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
15hr ago
They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway.
The victim was named McGlockton and was killed by a ... you know the answer. Incredibly unfortunate nominative determinism.
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, on the basis of "things should not be illegal if they are fun, even if they are not necessary", we can legalize further things.
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor. And if we really want to counterbalance the federal military advantage, why not allow citizens to start their own nuclear weapons program? Provided they are not minors, mentally retarded or have demonstrated poor impulse control, of course.
In a country where most people hunt their dinner, guns are a necessity. But this is not sustainable in any but the most sparsely settled areas.
Different people naturally have different ideas about the tradeoffs between usefulness (which includes being fun) and danger. Some want to ban any knives with blades longer than 3cm. Some would be fine if you could just buy hand grenades at the hardware store.
For the most part, people agree with the level of regulation around cars, which are immensely practical in most areas but also account for a huge fraction of accidental manslaughters. So you need a driver's license, your vehicle has to be designed according to certain standards and get regular safety inspections, and you need to obey all lot of different rules while on a public road. This is all very bothersome and expensive, but it also keeps these manslaughter cases on a manageable level, compared to a counterfactual level where everyone could build their own vehicle and try to learn to drive it unsupervised.
My estimate is that in most of Europe (e.g. Germany), getting a hunting license (including the rights to own rifles and a pistol, but not the right to bear them outside your home except when on hunting trips), plus the costs of a gun safe is still somewhat cheaper than the costs of a driver's license. The costs to get licensed to own a gun for sports shooting are lower (no need to demonstrate knowledge of tracking down an injured paper target), but also might require a few years of membership in a shooting club. Few people get the license to carry loaded weapons in public, typically this is restricted to on-duty employees of security companies.
wayfarer
15hr ago
Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker
are you sure?
you do not either to replace human workers - combine harvesters replaced vast amount of human workers, without really having either of that
LLM that would hallucinate far less and be better at following orders (with no agentic behavior whatsoever, though I guess adaptability would be be needed) would allow to do the same to programmers
Claude or Grok has suddenly gone "FOOM" and turned into Skynet
if we assume bizarre increase in intelligence of LLM then agentic behavior is absolutely not needed - you would only need human to prompt them once (and surely there are jokers doing "turn into Skynet and murder all humans") several times a day
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...
that seems quite unusual definition of LLM - who else is using it?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
15hr ago
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celluloid_dream
15hr ago
Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
Humans are fallible. They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway. The difference between justified and unjustified can be seconds.
and humans are stupid. They do incredibly dumb shit (warning, death) like shoot each other over literal garbage.
Thoroughlygruntled
15hr ago
sig owners shift uncomfortably in their seats
Tractatus
15hr ago
This is the polar opposite of an "effort-post;" this might actually be the Platonic ideal of "Reasoning From First Principles" being nothing more than Rationalists making wildly invalid assumptions, insisting they're the only logical position to have, and adamantly refusing to verify if the conclusions accurately reflect reality.
The notion that intelligence agencies would ever say "why bother, these guys are already in the bag?" is profoundly stupid; even if one's only experience with intelligence is exclusively through fiction, one would not say something so incredibly clueless, yet hewre we're holding it up as proof "Epstein was Intelligence" is tinfoil-hat territory?
For decades, some of the most successful (and aggressive) intelligence operations against the US are run by our allies; Japan, South Korea, France, Israel, and Taiwan in particular have consistently been labeled as tops threats by the U.S. National Counter Intelligence Center. Most of these efforts are focused on obtaining business, industrial, and technological secrets, but no small amount also goes into gauging just how sincere America's commitment is to our alliances. Anyone raising their hand and saying "why worry about blackmailing this rich and powerful man, he's already on our side?" would be quitely assigned to work nothing of any importance, with "advise" to their immediate supervisors to find any pretext to fire them, that wouldn't result in any problems.
you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims
Not if you wanted any chance of your intelligence operation working.
Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
Again, "Reasoning From First Principles" being utter nonsense. Yeah, you'd like them to not do that, but if they're successful - and it is a known-fact that Epstein was named as a middleman for various African and Middle Eastern deals - you're gonna ignore that problem, until such time as you no longer can. "I can't believe X would do Y, because that would be stupid" should not ever be something that occurs to you.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
Man, don't shoot the messenger here. I'm trying to explain my understanding of an ethos here, not grandstand about it being my position. Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive. Going with my previous metaphor, you may be saying something to the effect of "but they only want to have sex with minors who are really asking for it" - the difference just does not matter to those who perceive sex with minors to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details, and a lot of people in Europe also likewise perceive killing to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details. There is really a complete disconnect of moral intuitions here, with both sides finding the other barbaric - if the story is "Texas home owner shot robber who was running away with his TV", classical Americans will be cheering, while Europeans (+Europeanised American urbanites) will be cheering to lock the home owner up. Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
I don't really see why that's bad - presumably even Europeans want their military, soldiers, spies etc. to do their jobs.
It's complicated. I think a decade or so ago the answer from a narrow majority actually would have been "no", if that job involves actual killing. Now, some of them still will say "no", many more will prefer to not think about it, and many will think something to the effect of "yes for external enemies, but this is not a principle on which you can run a civilised society internally". I'd imagine that even people who are deep in pro-UA brainrot territory in countries like Germany would more often than not balk at the idea that counterintelligence should kill Russian spies inside Germany.
It arguably wouldn't actually be a good swap for the US to get European gun violence levels if it also meant getting European attitudes and regulations towards air conditioning! And that's without getting into values-based stuff like free-speech rights.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation. Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
Supah_Schmendrick
15hr ago
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue.
Except that's not true. New York had significant yiddish, italian, bulgarian, lithuanian, greek, etc. communities, where those languages were spoken alongside, or even to the exclusion of, english in the early 20th century. Chicago had polish, ukranian, etc. Los Angeles today has several areas where spanish is predominant, as well as several suburbs that are at least duolingual with many/most advertisements in mandarin, vietnamese, etc. Up until WWI huge swathes of the midwest spoke german, usually as a second language, but in some areas to the exclusion of english.
Immigrant ghettoization is extremely common, and tends to preserve language use.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
16hr ago
What percentage of pigs are cannibals today?
anti_dan
16hr ago
Its a record, typically on paper of purchases or debts. They are less common now, but a typical example would be when you go to the dry cleaner and drop off a suit, the carbon paper they hand you is commonly called a chit.
It's interesting how open carry has changed in the US in the past 30 years. I grew up in a place with many guns and where open carry was legal, but only the most trashy of rednecks would open carry, and they were derided by other gun owners. "Whatsamatter, you think the Russians are going to invade today?"
Comparing modern to founding-era and 19th century gun discourse is also fascinating; back then there were laws against concealed carry because that was viewed as covert, sneaky, and dishonorable. What do you have to hide and who are you trying to surprise? Whereas open carry was considered completely normal. Nowadays it's the sight of a gun that freaks people out, so concealed carry is much more popular; allow the gun person their hobby without scaring everyone.
roystgnr
16hr ago
the telos of a gun ... is to kill people
There are around 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US now. Over the last century US guns have been responsible for something like a million homicides and a million suicides. Were the other 99.5+% of the guns designed or made wrong?
we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns? If so, then you're making an exception before gun supporters even have to lobby you for it. If not, then it's not going to be much of a ban.
I hope that exception gets more sophisticated than "of course people Following Orders still get guns". Europeans under those rules were responsible for way more than just one million homicides over the last century, even if you only count the civilian victims.
like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first
This seems like an important one, right?
We're happy to drip literal poison into our veins in some cases, because the poisons used in chemotherapy kill cancerous cells faster than non-cancerous cells. The direct purpose of those chemicals, what you're calling the "telos", is to kill human cells: if only 0.5% of doses of a prospective chemo drug killed any human cells, then we really would conclude that it was probably designed and/or made wrong. Their direct effects are pretty lousy. Their specificity kinda sucks and they kill good cells too. But they're still worth it, so long as you realize you can't ignore the distinctions between targets or the indirect effects of the killing in a final analysis.
The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
I'd be curious what fraction of guns left in parked cars are left their because their owners can't legally keep them on their person where they've parked --- bars (depending on state), private property that disallows carrying, etc. I'm not going to blindly use that to push for legalizing carry everywhere (honestly, probably not my preference), but the numbers would at least be interesting.
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