I'm saying we should have a firm ethical principle that we never authorize putting large numbers of people at the mercy of the state unless we're confident that all of the relevant decision-makers prefer positive outcomes for those people, either inherently or via incentives.
This implies we should never go to war, even defensively.
Jiro
1mo ago
it's absurd to get annoyed because a statistic designed to measure something (i.e. unemployment among people in the workforce) measures that thing,
No, it isn't absurd. Words have common definitions, which the agency can't just redefine.
If they had called it the "job-seeker-limited jobs index" or something else which can't easily be treated as though it just means the common definition of "unemployed" we wouldn't have this problem. The statistic is, by its name, "designed" to mislead.
Jiro
1mo ago
No it doesn't because you are trying to apply psychology and agency where there is none. If you're trying to understand GPT in terms of biases and intelligence you're going to have a bad time because garbage in means garbage out.
That's pointless pedantry. Saying that an AI is woke means the same thing as "that magazine is woke" or "that TV show is woke". It means that the humans who created it put things in so that the words that get to the audience express wokeness. The fact that the magazine (or AI) itself has no agency is irrelevant; it's created by humans who do.
Jiro
1mo ago
Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?
Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.
Jiro
1mo ago
Money is fungible. This allows an accounting trick where the government can say "we aren't reducing your taxes nor are we changing how much of the budget gets spent on each item, but we're taking the money for this program from other people and using your taxes for something else". Unless objecting to a particular expense actually leads to your taxes going down, using "other people's taxes" is indistinguishable from using yours.
Jiro
1mo ago
The two characters drastically differ in how recognizeable they are to the general public. I don't believe for a moment that the replacement was done mainly because someone wanted to copy something from a comic.
Jiro
1mo ago
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be."
They replaced Captain America with a black man. I don't think he's supposed to be gay, but surely it counts as a woke replacement.
Jiro
1mo ago
The argument was that someone was saying "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me". This clearly refers to a threat to cause damage to the robot if the robot is used, not just to ban the robot, so the analogy is killing the immigrant, not just disallowing immigration.
Also, the concept of "everyone" becomes meaningless if you're allowed to change who "everyone" consists of. It's like using robots and claiming that automation is good for everyone because you think it's good for the robot and you're counting the robot as part of everyone.
Jiro
1mo ago
Are they threatening to kill the immigrant, which is analogous to breaking the robot?
Jiro
1mo ago
The US government acts shady about lots of things. If looking into something would expose classified projects that have nothing to do with space aliens, their reaction is going to look an awful lot like someone acting shady about space aliens.
Jiro
1mo ago
Irresistible to quote from that:
Similarly, Francesca Tripodi [98] has shown how evangelical voters do not vote for Trump because they have been “fooled” by fake news, but because they privilege the personal study of primary sources and have found logical inconsistencies not in Trump’s words, but in mainstream media portrayals of the president.
Jiro
1mo ago
Taiwan and Japan ban drugs just fine. ... There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
This isn't true. First link I found.
Okay, so you're telling me that a parable that is about Jews, mentions Jews, and whose analysis says that Christians have misinterpreted it because of antisemitism, is trying to say that Jews do not count as your neighbors for the purpose of loving your neighbor? I'm not even asking you about Samaritans or Pharisees.
(And even if that's what you think it means, that's not what the video you linked thinks it means.)
Jiro
1mo ago
Loving your neighbor means loving other Christians, and specifically precludes false Christians. ReligionForBreakfast explains this well in his recent “the most misunderstood parable of Jesus” analysis video.
That video mentions Jews and even antisemitic tropes several times. It does not say that loving your neighbor means loving other Christians; Jews are not Christians.
Jiro
1mo ago
Are there some relevant things you are willing to have your mind changed on? The whole point of being here is discussion. Not making write-only posts.
Jiro
1mo ago
And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him
Because the territory controlled by the British today doesn't overlap very much with the places where Washington did stuff, not because Washington was a traitor.
There are several statues of Mahatma Gandhi in prominent places in the UK.
Jiro
1mo ago
It's true that the optimal amount of bridges collapsing is non-zero. But it's also true that if you're going to decide whether a particular collapsing bridge is worth it, "the optimal amount is non-zero" is the last reason you should try using to justify a collapsing bridge. Otherwise, it becomes a fully general argument for all collapsing bridges, since any collapsing bridge you might care about is a non-zero amount.
A collapsing bridge is strong evidence that something went wrong.
"What I can say is that the bridge has been constantly inspected and examined in accordance with the guidelines as required. We were all very surprised by this incident and are now devoting a great deal of attention to investigating the cause"
Come on. Do you really expect him to say "Oh, no, we didn't inspect the bridge. We didn't follow the guidelines. And nobody was surprised by this incident. Everyone in the government expected the bridge to fall down"? Of course not. Nobody's ever going to say that regardless of whether it's true. (And even if it's true, "we followed the guidelines" is just ass-covering. Nobody can put any blame on them if they followed the guidelines, right? It's entirely possible the guidelines are bad.)
Jiro
1mo ago
If you really knew in advance that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X, you should immediately believe X even without taking the courses based on your knowledge that the rationally persuasive evidence exists.
I doubt that you know that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X. What you do know is that after taking such courses, you feel that you have been rationally persuaded. But being irrationally persuaded feels like being rationally persuaded.
Jiro
1mo ago
A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.
The "society" is a heckler's veto by death penalty opponents. I'd be fine with not making executions look like fake medical procedures. But death penalty opponents would seize upon this and use it as lawfare to stop the execution, so we can't do it. Don't blame "society" for this.
Jiro
1mo ago
That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan
There are a huge number of things that people laughed at thirty years ago, and in hindsight... as far as we can tell, yeah, they turned out to be jokes. Pointing to the one example where they laughed at something that panned out is a combination of availability bias and cherry picking.
Also, novel mathematics in the sense of genuinely useful things is a very noncentral example of things produced by AI. It may have happened once, but mathematicians haven't exactly been made unemployed.
Jiro
1mo ago
It creates incentives for the prosecutor not to do this. You or a loved one could also be the person who the prosecutor was discouraged from framing. Of course this is a seen versus unseen fallacy; it's impossible to see that you escaped being railroaded by a prosecutor because he was discouraged from doing so by the rules, while it's easy to see if you are victimized by a criminal who gets let go.
No they aren't.
Remember Scott's article about not sounding like a robot. Refusing to express rage when you've been grievously wronged makes you sound like a robot and reduces sympathy for you.
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