ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
18hr ago
the Christian-Socialist-Democratic-Party/Liberal-Unionist-Secession-Party/Green coalition in [Euro country] is breaking down over the question of whether state pensions should cover ceiling fans.
I would love a full comment explaining this one.
ControlsFreak
19hr ago
I don't know what you're talking about. You gave a nice definition and the properties of your definition. I'm not even asking for more at this point. Yes, I did ask you to say at least something about what your words mean, because if you can't manage to explain it at all, it's highly likely that you're confused about your own words. But at this point, I'm just looking at your nice definition/properties and observing that you solved your own problem from before. This is good news! This is wonderful news! Shouldn't you be happy that you had a problem before, and now you've solved it? The "inherent tension" in your philosophical positions has evaporated! That's the whole point of this OP.
ControlsFreak
19hr ago
They're very not new to me, but apparently, they're pretty new to you, because you thought that this was a very serious issue for you. But now you've solved your own problem, in like a quarter of a second. Record time in philosophy! Just needed a common sense and consensus definition of evil!
ControlsFreak
20hr ago
I need to go hunting on SMBC, because he had to have made a comic about this. If not, he really needs to.
That is, I'm pretty sure you've just solved your problem of evil, in quite the unique way.
It certainly seems logically plausible that whatever god may have created the universe, at the time that he/she/it created the universe, thought, "Hmmmm, I wonder if it would be evil to create a universe where eventually, one day, maybe, depending on how things go, a two year old will get ALL?" Perhaps this deity looked around, took an opinion poll to gauge the vibes, determined from the (presumably otherwise empty) room that it seemed a-ok, and proceeded to create said universe. Guess that just wasn't evil, by a common sense and consensus definition of the term.
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
This dovetails a bit with my footnote below about figuring out what "box" a person's world is. CSRs have scripts for the majority of the issues that they see on a regular basis. Task number one is to figure out whether your issue fits within one of their scripted boxes. If so, you're probably in good shape. If not, then individual quality can vary substantially. I've had multiple experiences where, after determining that my situation did not fit their script, it was very apparent that it would be important to get a person whose box extended beyond the scripts and included the knowledge/intelligence sufficient to work the problem. I've had times where, for example, they told me they could solve the problem, but they could not explain how the steps would work well enough that I was comfortable proceeding. A hang-up and a call back later, and I got someone who was very capable of conceptualizing the problem properly, taking a few minutes to work through how a solution would work, and (critically) explaining how it was going to work. Whether a simple call back to another Tier 1 CSR will get you that type of person versus having to fight to get to a Tier 2 person may vary.
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
When I talk about consensus morality, I'm talking today.
This definition is valid at, like, every snapshot point in time, then, yes? The same action could be "evil" at one point in time and "not evil" at a different point in time?
ControlsFreak
22hr ago
Those are all necessary and sufficient conditions in your definition of evil? We can go through them one by one, but maybe let's just start with the last one. If, uh, someone (who?) isn't "willing to enforce" a "preference", then it's, uh, not evil to go against it? What even is "willing to enforce"? Like, does the enforcement need to be realized? Can it be weighed against other things? If the someone (who?) is like, "Yeah, I'm willing to enforce this, but due to other considerations (other priorities, something inherently difficult about detection or enforcement, etc.), I'm not going to put too much time and effort into it," does that still count for determining whether something is evil or not?
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
Whence a consensus that evil means "in bad taste"? I guess perhaps you're not incorporating consensus at this level of generality, so are you instead just asserting that your definition of evil is "something done in bad taste, as measured by some vibes about a consensus" or something?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil
What's that? Whence consensus?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
@P-Necromancer I think I'd like to bundle these two, as they're getting at a similar thing.
I agree with what you both say. Plenty of humans will come up with ridiculous things to do, or even just things that might make sense but have problems, and if you're not supervising them appropriately, they may just do their things. But that's like, the essence of technical debt?
For the example of fixing some OS issue, imagine I didn't have really any technical knowledge of how things work (say, I don't really even know what the registry is unless a tech/LLM tells me something about it). Maybe I'd take my computer to a human tech. Could even be a corporate IT guy. Perhaps, knowing that I don't have a clue, I just give it to him. "Here's my problem; please fix it Ralph Rufus."
Who knows what he'll get up to? What stuff he'll mess with along the way. Things he'll try just because, and then maybe leave it in a changed state, even though it didn't progress toward a solution to the actual problem. This cruft can build up. After years of having this corporate IT guy and that corporate IT guy and the other corporate IT guy just doing who knows what, maybe at some point, things get bizarre enough that the next one says, "Dude, stuff is wild here; we probably should just wipe it and clean install."
That makes sense, and it's utterly routine in the world with humans. I hear my wife tell me about weird stuff that's broken on her work computer... and even weirder stuff that whatever IT guy she talked to did. She doesn't have a clue what's going on. I get it.
I also agree that as of right now1, the best is when you know enough about what's going on that you can get it to explain things and are able to then understand it, yourself. Get it to document things fully, provide a suite of tests, have a back-and-forth. It can provide tons of utility!2
...but, if you genuinely lack enough knowledge to be a competent participant of that back-and-forth, it still may let you "just do stuff". There can still be tons of utility here, as it may still get things right a lot, and folks who have had some problem that they've wanted to fix for ages and could never get the time with a competent human and certainly couldn't figure it out on their own will be able to fix many of those problems, and it will be wonderful. It may also, occasionally, along the way, build up technical debt.
Note that I'm not saying that this is some unique problem that is fundamentally different from dealing with humans. Instead, I'm now conceptualizing it in the same way that I conceptualize human-driven technical debt. I think that dovetails well with both of your descriptions. If there is a downside, it's probably that many folks who wouldn't have ever tried to fix that OS problem or make that code will now do it, and they might be building up technical debt while they're also accumulating utility. They may choose to do it a lot, and they may jump into it with both eyes shut. This may still be the right choice! They may still get more utility from all the wins than they lose from either discrete bad events or built-up cruft.
This is a conflict, a tension, which is why I said that I was, indeed, conflicted. I'm am still neither an "LLM good" or "LLM bad" person.
1 - I continue to take no position on the question of to what extent future progress will render this concern de minimis.
2 - To briefly respond to the 'shouldn't you just hang up on a human customer service agent who you can tell is going to be unhelpful', yes. Absolutely. I didn't bother with the specific issue of it getting hung up on deleting the registry value, because I was close enough that hearing it append its bad idea one more time wasn't important to me. I did mention that I used multiple LLMs, and that was part of it; I left out every twist and turn of the story, but yeah, I not only just scrapped the prior context; I even just jumped to different models. This is a useful skill to have, when dealing with humans and LLMs. Even when dealing with some human professionals, my life changed long ago when I realized that I could grasp some understanding of what their "box" of the world was, and once I realized that my situation was outside of their "box", I just moved on from them. But the concern here is that you have to have just enough knowledge about the thing to be able to gauge where their box is, when you're outside of it, or when they're going off the rails. There are a lot of people who don't have that with humans, and they're not going to have that with the many many more things that they're going to want to do with LLMs. I don't have that with all sorts of different humans or things that I might want to do with LLMs.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Yeah, I chose not to, because of course, the goalposts will be moved to, "You should have used my preferred LLM instead." I just mentioned that I used multiple different ones, multiple different companies. Thinking always. Not $200/mo. Of course, someone will just say, "You won't have any problems if you pay $200/mo for my preferred LLM." Maybe? I even note that they will perhaps get better! Yes, they're all getting better, even the cheaper ones. They get better as do the expensive ones. But will expensive ones still produce technical debt? Why do you think they will or will not? I don't know if they will! I'm saying that I don't know. You seem to be implying, but not even stating that you know (or how you know) that they certainly won't, if only you pay enough or wait an unspecified period of time.
I'd note that a common feature of your style of comment is that you immediately accuse your interlocutor of "dimmish (sic) the utility of LLMs". But I didn't do that! I said that there were ways in which they provided quite a bit of utility! Imagine having a discussion about any other technology like this. "You know, this nuclear science stuff is pretty cool. Can provide a lot of energy for cheap. Miiiight be worried about some possible dangers that might come up, like, ya know, bombs or stuff." "Why don't you tell us exactly what device you've been using in your own experiments?!?! Why are you trying to dimmish the utility of nuclear science?!?!" Like, no dawg, you just sound like you're not paying attention.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I commented recently about my personal experience using LLMs for work-related math stuff. I found that it wasn't great at giving me a whole proof (or really, much of a part of a proof) without error, but it helped me with some idea generation and pointing me to tools that I wasn't familiar with. To be fair, I haven't yet gotten access to any of the ones that are supposed to be hooked up to automated theorem provers, so maybe they'll work better (I've signed up for one, but their system wasn't working at the time; starting this post prompted me to try again, and I was able to get in; maybe I'll find time to really test it soon).
I guess I'd just like to report some experience with LLMs for other computer stuff. I had an extremely minor issue with one of my PCs. I wondered if LLMs could help. Through the course of this, I tried using multiple different LLMs.
The good is that it did have some good ideas for how to get started, and possible causes of the issue. I may have caused a bit of a false start off the bat, because rather than really consider the multiple ideas that it gave me, I thought, "Yeah, I could totally see X being the problem; maybe I should just do that." It was easy for me to think that I could just do the likely fix; it's normally an easy thing to do, and there's zero harm if it wasn't actually the cause of the problem. However, it turned out that my specific system has a surprisingly stupid design, and it was going to be a much greater pain to do it. So I resigned myself to hoping that it was one of the other root causes suggested by the LLM in the meantime, and I'd come back to the first idea later if I could confirm that it really was that.
The extra good is that, in hindsight, I am very sure that it was, indeed, one of the other root causes. So thankfully, I didn't waste too much time on the false start. However, once I began to implement my preferred fix, something strange was going wrong.
This is where we get into the bad. In diagnosing what was going wrong with the attempted fix, it got allllll into mess that was actually pretty low probability. Suggested permissions issues, suggested problems with registry entries. A couple of them were low risk, and at the time, seemed like they could be plausibly related, and I did mess with a couple things. Others were the ugly. No, Mr. Bot, I am not going to just delete that registry value (especially after I did a little non-LLM side research on what that registry value actually does).1
In the end, when I told it that I was balking on doing what it wanted me to do, it suggested that I could, in the meantime, do one of the standard procedures in a different way. Of course, it thought that doing this would just be a step toward me ultimately having to delete that registry value. But I figured trying this alternate procedure at the very least couldn't hurt, and indeed, it helped by giving me an actual error code!
The LLM thankfully helped me decode it (likely faster than a google search), which allowed me to adjust my fix. This was actually the key step, after which, I was able to understand what I think was going on and manage later hiccups. Unfortunately, the LLM didn't grasp this. It still was set on, "Great! Now you're ready to delete registry values!" Sigh.
After I adjusted my fix, I was able to get another (unrelated) error code from another step in the process. This time, I actually tried a google search for the error code first, and it came up empty, but the LLM told me exactly what it was (and it made sense), which was very nice and convenient. One final adjustment, and I think I have it working just fine.
The only remaining bad point is that the LLM still didn't realize that we'd fixed the problem! It still was all, "...and now you're ready to delete stuff in the registry!!!" I told it multiple times that the thing that was broken which was motivating it to think of deleting the registry value was no longer broken. Didn't matter; it really wanted to nuke that thing.
It all still leaves me quite conflicted. It was great in doing some idea generation and decoding error messages. But man, does it leave me scared to think about all the people who are just giving LLMs free rein to take actual actions in their computer. I focused here on the registry key issue, but there were more things along the way that it came up with that left me thinking, "...no, I'm pretty sure I don't want to mess with that unless I've got a lot more information and confidence about what's going on." If I had just said, "Go fix this, Ralph Wiggums2," who knows what sort of bollocks it would have done to my system. This worries me, because I hear all these people talking about how great it is that they can just tell their LLM to go change whatever it thinks is necessary to go fix whatever problem on their computer... and they really think they're rapidly approaching a world (if they're not already there) where they'll be happy to give it full access to just do anything to it.
It also dovetails with the worries about vibe coding. Forget about changing some OS settings; they're actually choosing to run arbitrary code on their system that is generated by an LLM. Yes, some folks do rock solid sandboxing, but let's be honest, if you're making anything that you or anyone else is going to actually use, it's not going to stay in a sandbox for long. I listened to a podcast this week, where one of the hosts, midshow, was like, "Yeah, I had this LLM make this program. I'm gonna have it add email functionality." And he just did it, live on air. Sandbox? Schmandbox. It now sends emails. What's it actually doing along the way? Who knows? He didn't check any of the code; of course he didn't. He wanted to see it send an email while he was still live.
"Technical debt" is the phrase that went through my mind in thinking about these experiences together. Yes, I was poking around at permissions/registry; sometimes, those things genuinely just get messed up. I've had experiences where my permissions have just gotten borked for completely unknown reasons; sometimes, I've been able to fix them; sometimes, stuff like that happens and you get to the point of, "This thing has been running a long time, and who knows what the long history of stuff has been, when this or that may have gotten corrupted; better to just wipe the OS and install clean." The term is more traditionally used with coding, when stuff has just gotten glommed on, piece by piece, and at some point, it's better to just throw it all away and invest in a clean slate rather than continuing to maintain the old mess. You can glom on email functionality to your vibe code in a few sentences and about twenty minutes. You don't need to think about whether that may be accruing technical debt.
Maybe the LLMs will keep getting better, and it'll be even easier to clean slate stuff in the future, so the pain of accumulating technical debt won't be as bad. But man, I can't help but think that a lot of people are unknowingly setting themselves up, both in their systems and in their vibe code. That one day, they'll just say, "This is broken; I don't know why; it's a mess of stuff that LLMs have globbed onto it over years; just go fix it, Ralph," and it will just do whackier and whackier stuff to their system/code that is already so whacked out that it just doesn't fit the mold of training data used to train the LLM.
1 - FTR, it was actually super relevant to be at least looking around in the registry, and doing so helped me understand what was going on.
2 - For those who haven't heard yet, this is the name for a technique where you tell the LLM to do something, and you set up a loop to repeatedly prompt it to keep working and doing stuff "until it's DONE".
ControlsFreak
7d ago
I think it is a moral argument, through and through.
it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it.
Desert is an even more complicated area of philosophy which is kind of neither here nor there, but let's go back to what I was responding to in your earlier comment real quick:
"No human should ever go hungry, cold and homeless, nor be barred from the joy of raising a family; all else being equal it is always more ethical to help a sentient being get these things if it wants them than not to"
This is sort of just not true, at least given the sort of academic work I've discussed. They do, in fact, think that there exists a person who is not able to morally consent, which, given the conceptual framework, cashes out as "they should not have sexual relations", and it would be morally wrong if they did. Do not interpret this as assigning any particular blameworthiness at this stage; blameworthiness is yet another separate consideration. That said, I think folks would be getting pretty close to assigning some level of blameworthiness to another individual who helped such a mentally disabled person (who is incapable of morally consenting) have sex, even if they wanted to. There's sort of nothing about desert in here.
What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy
I don't think this is really the case. IIRC, the academic work was perfectly happy to stipulate that the hypothetical sufficiently mentally disabled person in question was mentally capable of feeling joy from sex. It was the consent part, the morally-important part (especially to those who think that consent is the be all end all of sexual morality, in which camp this philosopher definitely resided), that was subject to consideration.
Since the academic work was confined to the question of sexual relations, specifically, I don't believe it addressed questions about 'the joy of raising a family', but I think it would be at least coherent to similarly assume that such a person may, indeed, be capable of feeling joy from having children and doing whatever it is that they can do to raise them, but I think that's also kind of neither here nor there if we're in a world where they may not be capable of consenting to sexual relations in the first place. Questions may get even harder if one pokes at the content of what it means to 'raise a family' and to what extent they are able to do that. (I am taking no position on this.)
"Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects... [emphasis added]
I think this is emblematic of one of the other issues I had with the entire academic project of distilling all sexual morality down to consent. How broadly does one look for possible ill effects? There were multiple different cases (youth for sure, but some of the discussion touched on other cases) where even he couldn't stop himself from turning it into some sort of empirical test. Vaguely something like whether, say, 'allowing' youth to legally/morally consent to sexual relations generally did more harm to them or not. When one goes down this route, IMO, it's no longer an actual investigation into the philosophy and conceptual nature of consent. It's about being stuck to only having one term in your toolbox to use for all things sexual morality and simply trying to slap it on to cases that one finds objectionable for other reasons (some sense of empirical 'harm' in this case). Letting this sort of thing leak through into the conceptual nature of consent and one's ability to consent opens the door to all sorts of other thorny, even hotter-button issues, where many people (especially left-leaning ones) would vehemently object.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Eh, some people are so mentally disabled that I've seen academic philosophers in ethics (certainly left-leaning) seriously consider whether they are capable of even consenting to sex (IIRC, concluding that some of them likely are not). See also related questions about whether some people should not be held morally/legally accountable to certain crimes in the same way (and quite the lengthy jurisprudence at this point specifically with regard to the death penalty). This is and should be a true edge case, not "hurr durr, your IQ is 90, we should sterilize you", but these conversations are often still happening in the open in 'respectable society'. My sense is that it's typically left-leaning people pushing ideas that low IQ means different criminal justice, though I'm not sure if there's much of a partisan lean either way on the consent to sexual relations question.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
I've had difficulty even with its step-by-step proofs. It will make very subtle errors that really kill the whole point of what you're going for. For one example, I had a spot where it introduced a variable and then sneakily assumed a property for it that was never proven (and I suspect couldn't be). I spent more time trying to figure out where its various proof attempts were broken, then sometimes asking it to fix it, then having it come up either with something related that was subtly broken in a different way... or suddenly go in a completely different direction that required me to step back to square one to figure out if it was on to anything. I never could get it to give me a non-broken proof. This was recently, with a GPT5 subscription, using the thinking and deep research modes.
On the other hand, I may still find value in talking to it about problems I'm working on. Perhaps I should incorporate it in my process in a new way. Instead of seeing what it says and spending a bunch of time trying to validate the answer, I think in the future, I'll just ask it various questions, skim what it's got, poke at any clear issues, and ask it to take different approaches. I have had it introduce me to tools that I'd never encountered before, and that has been helpful. So far, I haven't actually used one of the tools that it introduced me to, but they're nice to know, and thinking about one of them did help me realize that I already had another tool in my toolbox that let me do something. So, in a very roundabout way, it did help me solve a problem, just by jogging my thought process to something new and different that ultimately led me back to something I already knew.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate
He goes to pretty significant lengths to come up with a scheme that manages the facts that they each currently have two and that there is a rotating six-year cycle of elections, ultimately for the purpose of being able to say that at one single moment, every State would have their number of Senators cut from two to one at the same time. Will this suffice for preserving "equal Suffrage"? As with many things Constitutional, it might just depend on how people feel about it.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
Sorry if I wasn't entirely clear; I'm concerned about the nomination part of the contingent election, which is pre-veto and pre-Condorcet. For nomination, you only need 1/10th support. So, what I'm thinking is that one party controls >= 50% of the state Senate, so they pick >= 5 names (from their general party pool), all of which are ideologically approximately the median of their own party's position. Yes, the minority can come together and pick some of their own, too. So you'll have five or more essentially identical majority party candidates and four or fewer minority party candidates (ideologically arranged however they so please).
Then comes veto, and the minority party can't pick off any more of the majority's nominees as the majority can pick off of the minority's nominees.
Then comes the counting of the votes via Condorcet (yes, this is on the same ballot as the vetos, but I'm not sure it matters if we assume sufficient party solidarity). I think that the majority can ensure that at least one of their (slightly longer than the minority's) list of essentially identical party candidates gets through.
The vetos/Condorcet can definitely moderate if the party actually has to choose five individuals that are from a small, finite set that still possesses a significant spectrum of ideologies. If you've only got thirty folks in your party in the Senate, it may be difficult to cluster them all right at your party's median, especially if there are other reasons (ineligibility, perceived lack of being 'ready', etc.) that might prevent tight bunching.
The vetos/Condorcet can be very effective if you actually think you can get defection in any of the three stages from any of the more moderate members of the majority party. But if they can clearly tell their moderates, "You're getting someone who's not too bad, doesn't really matter who, just the median of our own party's ideology (which is kind of what we, as a public, are already getting), and if you defect, we're probably getting one of their guys (oh, and we'll probably be able to figure out that it was one of you 3-5 who defected)," then I'm not sure we're likely to get that moderate defection at any point.
I'll note that his footnote 33, going through example contingent elections treats every example as though the nominations are still coming directly from the state Senate, itself, in this version, too. This small set and assuming factions rather than party discipline results in examples like:
The majority naturally prefers #12, the center of the party, but #9 won their party primary and is officially their candidate. The minority prefers #34, which, lol, isn’t going to happen. The majority’s different factions nominate #2, #9, #12, and #19. The minority puts forward #21, #33, and #34.
I agree that it may have just been an oversight, but the reason why I think it's actually important to correct that oversight is that I think the majority essentially nominates #12, #12, #12, and #12, just with four different names coming from their more general party pool (ok, in his exact example, they pick #9 by name, then three nameless #12's). Even here, picking only within the state Senate, with strict party discipline (and sufficient eligibility, both legally and for other party sensibilities), they could manage something like #9, #11, #12, and #13, and we probably don't get nearly the same moderating effect.
Mayyyyybe you'll actually get more defections than I think, and there would be at least a different space of maneuvering involved, but this version lacks the sort of serious punishment that the first version had of, "If you go to the contingent election, #12 is sooooo far off the table, because the very punishing algo (if you can keep it) is only giving you #18-22 as options. As an aside, if anything, that algo may be too punishing to the majority party; if the minority knows that #18 is their worst option in the contingent election (and they're able to prevent a 2/3rds in the main one), then they may plausibly choose to just force a contingent election every time. It would definitely give more moderate US Senators, but there may be knock-on effects, even more incentive to figure out how to game the algo, etc.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
In a similar vein, Orin Kerr pointed to an old study that presented folks with two videos of protesters that were actually the same video, and I guess altered to the extent possible at that time to just change the political valence of what they were protesting for.
Many of the most accurate accusations I've seen in these lengthy discussions are accusations of hypocrisy. And yeah, there probably are a lot of hypocrites when it comes to these scissor situations. It's genuinely difficult to come up with a coherent set of neutral rules for these types of extreme situations, and frankly, there's probably variations in state laws for some of the details. It's also extremely difficult to not let your political leanings bleed into a neutral assessment of neutral rules even just a teeny little bit. I'm generally fine with letting the courts handle it and don't care all that much for the water cooler talk (though I can see how it can be of some value). I do see that some folks will even explicitly bracket out 'there's a legal standard, which someone else will figure out, but let's talk on the moral level', which, uh, I guess is a fun thing to try so long as everyone is distracted from trying to claim that Morality Don't Real.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Yeah, I read that version of it, and I sort of didn't like it quite as much. He didn't talk much about the feature that I didn't like; he just slipped it in there. That is, that they can nominate anyone in the state who meets the qualifications of being a US Senator. I think this plausibly makes it more vulnerable to party discipline concerns. Part of what made the first proposal interesting was that they were limited to nominating from their own body, and he went to great lengths to note how small these bodies are. Moreover, the punishing algo prevented them from even being able to try to game the nomination phase; you were just 'stuck' with the center (excepting the major concern about algo manipulation that maybe I still hold the faintest of hope of fixing in another way).
Here, I think he's implicitly relying on the partisan pull to nominate multiple candidates (in an attempt to get through the veto stage) to enable a subset of moderate partisans to 'defect' from the party and nominate someone more centrist. I think the key maneuver he's relying on here is the secret ballot nomination, but that only enables defection; sufficient party solidarity may prevail. If they're only limited to nominating from the 10-30 sitting state Senators of their party, I could see how they're likely to end up with some amount of more moderate nominees. But in this second case, the party can select from anyone. So they make a list. They pick this list to be all people that they think are as close to exactly at the median position of their party's caucus as possible. They assign which senators are to nominate which nominee, allowing them partial visibility 'through the secret ballot' (if somebody steps out of line, you have it narrowed down to <5 people). Sure, the minority party can veto some subset of these "identical in all but name" nominees, but without completely confirming the math, I think sufficient party discipline should get one of them through the final ballot.
Possibly, yes, the minority party could nominate some folks who are centrist enough to try to break the majority party's discipline, but I see this as a major weakness that was not present in the version where you had an algo that could plausibly identify the punishing middle from within the body, itself. If there's any way to further harden the algo approach, I would significantly prefer it.
Also, yes, I would like to encourage a top-level post. Would love more visibility for this stuff!
ControlsFreak
13d ago
That is quite the incredible read. Thanks!
I actually quite like the concept of the solution, but he also admits in later posts that it's just not going to work. I'd probably agree that the two biggest problems are even explaining it to people and Goodhart's law on the algo. Still, the conceptualization of the problem and the broad principles guiding our search for a solution are more spot on than most treatments I've seen.
Shame that it's buried in a gigantic cluster of a thread on yet another silly, tragic, scissor shooting. I'd almost just collapsed the whole thread a few times, but I'm glad I managed to catch this. I'm sure I'll be toying with it in my mind for quite a while to come.
ControlsFreak
17d ago
If we're talking funniest things, I've always thought that the funniest thing would be if the real deception was that Israel gave up on/got rid of nukes for who knows what reason, deciding that it was actually sufficiently fine, so long as everyone else believes they have them. Stay officially ambiguous, occasionally task someone with "leaking" juicy details about how awesome and secret their nukes are, and free-ride on the reputation.
Saddam went so far as to deceive his own military commanders (beyond some tiny core) into believing that they had some set of chem/bio/whatever (I can't remember the details) weapons, to the point that their battle plans on the eve of the invasion were based around getting and using them. Didn't work out for him, but ya know, high risk plays happen, I guess?
...they probably still have them, tho.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
shitty Chinese drywall that later outgassed sulfur compounds
For the purposes of my comment, it is this temporal relationship that matters. Sure, the other temporal relationship between folks realizing this temporal relationship and choosing to ban it is fine. But this one is the one that holds the conceptual link.
I'm certainly not going to defend the UAS/component ban, either, but that's not the point here. The point is that even if we assume that all of that is dumb and doesn't make sense as a Type I ban, we can still make it illegal to use a UAS to kill someone or even just make it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or something, and this type of ban will have particular qualities tied to the specifics.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
when anyone who wants to put together a piddly little indie game that uses player controlled image gen is going to need to spend time implementing some, easily circumvented, controls to prevent some class of images to be generated
Sorry, h-what? This is truly out of left field.
And it's not just the deep fakes, we're going to have to get used to every image or video on the internet that doesn't have verifiable provenance being suspect.
Yeah, sure, agreed. Not sure the relevance.
Do you think a kid should get expelled because he imagined what a classmate looked like nude?
I cannot possibly think of how this is remotely responsive to my comment. The answer is obviously no, but the mind is boggled.
*More than 239. The occupation page gives per-specialty mean (not median) numbers ranging from 222 to 451.
Since there are claims about numbers relative to the federal general schedule, the 2026 general schedule location with the highest locality pay tops out at 197. That is the max, not the mean or median. If all doctors were forced onto the GS, that means everyone not at the max would have to be shoved somewhere below that.
...or they'd have to make a separate "doctors are special" schedule, meaning that they wouldn't have to raise all federal employee wages alongside raising doctor wages.
We might need to come up with a catchy cartoon name for this strategy, otherwise it will lose the memetic war to bumbling Ralph Wiggums.
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