Imaginary_Knowledge
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User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
3d ago
And it's hard to imagine anyone sincerely believing the purpose of the dog-TV system is plastic licking. Maybe I'm sanewashing it, but ISTM there's a logical and useful way to understand POSIWID:
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Let there be a system S, an agent with control authority over the system A, and some outcome X that A claims S is to produce
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Observe that S falls short of ostensible goal X
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Let B be an action that A can take to make S produce more of outcome X at positive ROI
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Observe that A does not execute action B
Given the above, e must conclude based on A's failure to do B that A's purpose for S is not solely X. Maybe B is not actually positive ROI because we lack an understanding of its true costs. Maybe A is retarded and doesn't understand that B is available to him. But, if we assume B is positive ROI and that A is a competent actor, what alternative do we have to concluding that A is optimizing S for some unstated goal Y, not only X?
Yes. Or more specifically, he demolished the retard version of POSIWID then claimed victory over the nuanced version. That's wrong and called strawmanning
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
Sure, but what grinds my gears is laundering subjectivity as objectivity by speakers asserting that moral facts that just so happen to support their position. It's good and right and honorable and beneficial to have an opinion and express it. It's dishonest and annoying nonsense to present an opinion as fact, and no statement about morality whatsoever can be construed as a fact.
Of course not. Necessary != Sufficient
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
Small process node lithography is dual use
I always interpreted POSIWID as meaning that sustained normalized deviance is no deviance at all. If, say, a big tech OS project fails to ship year after year and company leadership fails to replace the project's management, then we have to conclude that either 1) the company-system is not under the control of agents with the ability to modify the world to achieve their goals or 2) the purpose of the OS project is not to produce an OS.
Otherwise, why wouldn't the OS project management been nuked from orbit after the fourth or fifth annual failure?
POSIWID doesn't mean, as Scott strawmans, that any side effect of a system is desirable or a failure of a system to fully achieve that goal reveals that goal as a lie. Total nonsense. If a cancer ward were curing only half its patients and despite having funding and expertise refused to install a new radiation machine that would increase the cure rate to 2/3, and if hospital administration tolerated this state of affairs, then we would be forced to conclude that THAT SPECIFIC cancer ward's purpose was not to cure cancer.
POSIWID only works in negation
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
Thanks
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
You know why the Fed could do that? Because no one could fire Powell, and no one elected him.
Correct. I don't think our own problems get solved until we have an executive with unchallenged personal authority and immunity to firing.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
What is it that defines those aims?
Drives honed by billions of years of natural selection.
What is it that we collectively want that democracy used to be good at achieving? Survival, yes. Hedonistic self-interest, to a point. But humans aren't single-minded selfish pigs
We have drives. They're complex and fuzzy. They arise from a mixture of genetically installed circuits and early socialization. So what?
Humans have conscience
Conscience isn't a concept well enough defined to be part of a meaningful factual assertion.
that's charitable left-coded "help the needy" stuff, or punitive right-coded "go after sinners and stop them from sinning"
Those are both lefty charity perspectives. The religious zealot believes he's charitably saving souls.
But ignoring morality as a powerful force in human affairs
I'm not denying that morality as a powerful force exists. It obviously does. I am saying it is not an independent object worthy of philosophical analysis. What you call morality, this powerful force shaping affairs, is merely evolutionary psychology writ large, not something independent and eternal like mathematics.
(Moved to correct thread)
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
If we can make a phone, we can make AI killbots. If we can't make a phone, we can't make killbots. The Chinese can make both. They will win the next war if they have killbots and we don't, and it won't even be close.
We need domestic electronics manufacturing capabilities. All the pain-free ways of building them have failed. Tariffs might have worked. They probably wouldn't have, but they might have. And we didn't give them a chance because we cannot endure short term pain. That means we're fucked.
I'm not sure I'm getting my point across. You're still talking about the object level impact of the tariffs. I'm talking about the ability of the state to translate will into action when the action involves short term pain.
Did Trump have a sincere change of heart? Did Dimon convince him on the merits of the ineffectiveness of the tariffs in achieving his stated goal? Or did Dimon instead point out that Trump wouldn't last long if he kept doing this even if it was good for the country?
It looks to me like a chunky soup of unnamed elites was unwilling to suffer these short term consequences and blocked Trump despite their having no formal authority and Trump having all the formal authority. That they were able to do that is what doesn't bode well for the country.
How are we supposed to solve the problems with elder care and entitlements if we're unable to endure pain? It tells me we're going to just give up the Pacific the first time the Chinese sink an aircraft carrier. It tells me we're in for another episode of high inflation, because every other inflation solution involves pain. A man or nation that cannot endure pain is weak and not long for this world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
I believe Trump believed and still believes that tariffs are effective for causing import substitution and bootstrapping new domestic industry. He also wanted and probably still wants the US to be able to make phones. There are good reasons for a country to be self sufficient in strategic technologies.
Trump was forced to undo this policy, either through political pressure or his own assessment of the impact of the policy on his political capital. I don't think his mind was changed about the merits of the policy. I do think this reversal is evidence that the US is incapable of doing hard things.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
It doesn't matter whether they would have helped at the object level. What matters is Trump believed they would and had the mandate of the people to exercise his judgement in making policy. We just can't get stuff done. Yes, I'd have been hungry without breakfast yesterday although I had it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
What an awful sign for our civilization --- Trump's reversal reflects our lack to accept short term pain to achieve long term objectives. For my purposes here, it doesn't matter whether the tariffs on phones would have actually helped: what matters is that Trump believed they would, that he was the duly elected head of state, that imposing tariffs was within his legitimate authority, and that he had a majority in the legislature as well.
He still couldn't do it. If he couldn't, nobody can. And if our societal time preference really is this high, we are fucked.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4d ago
It's also possible that this behavior, while annoying, can't be stopped at any positive ROI. We're talking about a policy of the mods restoring posts people have consciously deleted. I think the safety valve of post deletion makes people feel safer being bolder and so enlivens discussion. If breaking deletion is what it takes to stop this guy, then maybe stopping this guy isn't worth it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
5d ago
There is a moral order
Is there? I find myself unpersuaded by assertions of morality divorced from their effectiveness in achieving real world aims. Moral statements are nothing but polite fictions for aiding collective action. If this collective action amounts to escalating protection and promotion of falsehood, of what use is the polite fiction? Democracy is "good" because it's worked (better and for longer than it has had any right to work) for solving collective action problems. Now that it's stopped working, is it still good?
Imaginary_Knowledge
5d ago
Forget object level considerations. There are only narratives. There are no moral facts. No timeless principles except the laws of mathematics and natural selection. Whatever is, is right.
If the right seizes power, it will have factual raw material sufficient to build a "power narrative" sustaining its rule, just like every power structure has. It's impossible to say whether Trump "is" justified: there's no objective righteousness evaluation function. What matters is that if he tries something and wins, he's able to post hoc rationalize it in a way that allows the losing side (or enough of them) to internalize the change and operate within the new power structure.
Google after all did change Google Maps to read "Gulf of America".
Imaginary_Knowledge
6d ago
Yep. And each time power changes hands, even more norms will become irrelevant. The process will escalate until there's one final undeniable rupture of the old system and a new one emerges.
So why risk the other side winning? Why wait? The rupture is inevitable. We're inside the event horizon of political chaos. The only thing accomplished by adhering to the remaining rules is risking ultimate and permanent defeat. Better to act decisively, now, and win.
We're well on the well-trod path of democracies experiencing escalating norm violations that spiral into physical violence and the breakdown of traditional understanding of power divisions within the government. No country can operate solely according to a written constitution. Functional government always requires tacit understanding of proper rules and order of subordination. When a figure within the government tries to exercise merely textual or positional authority in violation of these tacit agreements, then (even if he's in the right by the rest of the law) the result is strife, unpredictability, and retaliation. Norms break down. The Overton window widens. Eventually, it widens to include physical violence, which starts with street thuggery and ends with proscriptions.
We are on Mr. Gracchus 's wild ride and there is no way off. The only thing that matters now is which faction wins. The norms are broken and can't be fixed. Sulla couldn't restore the norms and we can't either. There's no point getting nostalgic about them. The only goal now is to win.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6d ago
Are you under the impression that object level considerations matter? We're looking at a power struggle not a high school mock trial. It's zero sum. One side will win and the other will lose. One side has a lot more soldiers. How many divisions has Roberts?
At this stage in this country's political evolution, which rhymes with the end of the Roman Republic, the executive is absolutely justified in crossing the Rubicon, just as Caesar was.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6d ago
There it is: a casus belli for ignoring the supreme court. Trump has the perfect narrative: he needs to keep the country safe and the court is letting philosophy and activism stop them seeing it. SCOTUS chose violence by trying to override what is obviously executive branch prerogative. Now all Trump has to do is find his cojones.
Imaginary_Knowledge
11d ago
Acceptable collateral damage. Trump's election gave us a preference cascade and stopped wokeness ascendant. I'll take that any day over optimal trade policy.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
Judicial power ultimately relies on popular buy-in. The courts don't have very many divisions. The energy of this moment is so intense that an attempt by courts to stop it would do nothing except damage the legitimacy of the court. A few more "Hawaiian judge" rulings and the administration will begin covertly defying the court. A few more after that, and the administration will openly and brazenly defy the court. This is a civilizational moment and it can't be stopped by some guy in a robe.
What makes you think there are huge unrealized wins in unknown algorithmic improvements. In other domains, e.g. compression, we've gotten close to the information theoretic limits we know about (e.g. Shannon limits for signal processing), so I'd guess that the sustained high effort applied to AI has gotten us close to limits we haven't quite modeled yet, leaving not much room for even superintelligence to foom. IOW, we humans aren't half bad at algorithmic cleverness and maybe AIs don't end up beating us by enough to matter even if they're arbitrarily smart.
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