Human wisdom is surely capable of distinguishing between imperfection, negligence and fraud.
No it isn't. That's why I gave that example.
There's also the question of malicious actors. You not only need the ability to distinguish between those, you need the ability to distinguish between those when faced by a hostile actor who is deliberately blurring them. You may know what negligence is, but if some politician looking for a scapegoat pointed to imperfection and said "that's negligence", would you be able to prove the politician wrong?
Jiro
2mo ago
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
If you had to ask "does it really help", it was not with candor.
Things that people do involve tradeoffs. If the doctor doesn't properly communicate which measure has which effect, the patient can't properly decide the tradeoffs. Taking a walk outside is low on the scale of burdens, but it still isn't free, and implying that it helps with the patient's condition when it doesn't is dishonest, even if the doctor admits it when questioned.
Jiro
2mo ago
If you go back to the 1980s, we didn't have the modern Internet, and that's drastically going to affect how popular culture gets spread around the world. Japanese culture in the 1980s had spread as much as could be reasonably expected in a pre-Internet world.
Now that we do have the Internet, spreading culture is much easier. If Chinese culture has spread only as much with the Internet as Japanese culture spread without the Internet, Chinese culture is really doing badly.
What usually happens is that a hundred people expressed their right not to associate and the employer fires the person anyway.
Jiro
3mo ago
we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it.
The NRA was created by Union officials who thought pro-Union forces needed better training. You are describing a Michael Moore-style history which is the opposite of actual history.
Jiro
3mo ago
"Typical human beings are not distracted by such things, so I think you're not sincere about it".
You're basically claiming that the slope is slippery, but it's not actually going to slip towards any particular thing.
It is slipping towards a category. Many things are in the category. Republicans losing their license is one thing in the category, but not its entirety. You'd also need multiple slippery slopes all failing to get to the point of taking away the licenses of Republicans, but that does not mean that each individual slope isn't real. Republicans would need to be seen as evil enough that it's okay for the law to stop them. Freedom of speech and association would have to end. You could claim something similar for not being allowed to drive into the wilderness, but the principles that would be violated by that are a lot weaker, if they exist at all, than the principles violated by not letting Republicans have licenses.
I'd also expect "taking the wilderness away" to not immediately happen in its full form, while the pot of water with the frog boils over. Self-driving cars could first be limited to not run into protests, or the police could be given discretion to stop them when crimes are involved. Once that's established, the next step might be to keep them out of busy traffic if congestion would be too strong, or some other similar restriction that isn't just "can never go there". Cars may be commandeered by the government to take suspects to the police station, maybe even just for questioning. Police will get warrants to exclude someone from being allowed to have any vehicles go to their house. Cars will be kept out of the wilderness in nighttime hours when, you know, the wilderness isn't patrolled, and away from top-secret government areas. By the time you get to "can't go to the wilderness at all" it'll be a minor step.
This of course can happen for Republicans as well.
Jiro
3mo ago
Because a slippery slope isn't going to slip to every possible thing in a category all at once. If you're too specific about which thing it slips to, you can endlessly deny that the slippery slope exists. By your reasoning, since you specified Republicans, a slippery slope towards taking away the licenses of Democrats, or people who won't get vaccinated, or people whose names start with the letter A, wouldn't count because it's not exactly the same as the example you gave. That's sophistry.
The substantive part of a slippery slope here is that drivers licenses will be taken away for things with no connection to driving, not specifically Republicans and nothing else. They have indeed slipped like this.
Jiro
3mo ago
If you generalize it a little to "taking away drivers licenses for disfavored things that have nothing to do with driving", yes. They already take drivers licenses away for failure to pay child support.
Jiro
3mo ago
Politicians aside, that at least seems to show that the AI is good with actually matching the adjective or adjectival phrase with the corresponding noun. I've found that AIs tend to get this sort of thing wrong a lot of the time; there'd be a good chance that the couch, bra, and panties would be given to random people in the image.
Jiro
3mo ago
25 mph speed limits in your local area don't lead to 25 mph speed limits on the freeway because there's no mechanism by which the former makes the latter easier, so slippery slopes are only weak ones like "someone who wants to restrict one thing might have more desire to restrict another".
Having computer-controlled cars that phone home makes it easier to have cars that the government can turn off because the computer phoning home is a part of the mechanism that the government would use to turn the car off.
"No longer prolong" compared to "intentionally ending" is a fuzzy distinction. Which one is removing a feeding tube?
And even if that counts as "no longer prolong", that still means people have to die in agony instead of peacefully.
Jiro
3mo ago
Mental illness is one of the ways we get the homeless who are particularly likely to cause problems (the other is drugs). So I wouldn't call that a noncentral example.
Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them?
I think that's the wrong question. There's a difference between "not verified as well as the New York Times should be able to verify" and "not verified at all". It's possible to believe that LoTT verifies well enough to not get very many fakes of the conventional kind (by people who intend for the fake to be believed by the audience) even if Trace managed to sneak something through.
But even then, the harm done isn't to that group. The harm done is that now every time someone brings up LoTT, they face a barrage of complaints "look what Trace did, LoTT never verifies", etc. even if those complaints are exaggerated or mistaken. Just in this thread we've seen someone not understand that Trace had to fake a second round of evidence. Trace's role in creating such misconceptions and forcing LoTT supporters to dispel them is harm.
Jiro
3mo ago
I view it as a -- correct! -- suspicion that she was being presented with a "gotcha!" question, and decided it was better for her to avoid the question
It's not a gotcha question because the questioner is trying to trick her into saying something. It's a gotcha question because the position that she wishes to promote is incoherent and having to answer the question exposes this. The problem is with the underlying position, not with the question, and the fact that this position is vulnerable to gotchas is entirely of her own making. As such, it isn't an excuse.
Jiro
3mo ago
No, their goals were reached independently of anything they did. They didn't accomplish anything.
Jiro
3mo ago
The whole reason the hoax tarnished their reputation is that
According to JulianRota above, the hoax caused them no harm whatsoever. Maybe you should argue with him.
Jiro
3mo ago
Also, "How do you know other cases LOTT highlighted as real weren't fake"? Because this fake didn't need to be believed for more than a few days. And getting away with that is much easier than getting away with a fake that's meant to be permanently taken as real.
If a right-winger had sent in the exact same fake and she had published it, leftists would have outed it as a fake within a couple of days. We'd know it was fake, and that assumes the right-winger wouldn't have figured this out and not bothered in the first place.
Jiro
3mo ago
In combination with JR, this amounts to "they weren't harmed, and besides, they deserved it".
They do those things, but they don't do them in the proportions that you imply. Someone insincerely arguing for a position is much more likely to be telling you BS, even if every human will probably be telling you some BS.
Jiro
3mo ago
First of all, this is only true if the argument includes no personal observations or other claims that might be false. Second, this is only true if you're an ideal perfect arguer who notices BS 100% of the time and can never be fooled by it. If you're an actual human, you don't want to bother with someone who's likely to make a lot of invalid arguments, because you might fail to notice some of them because you're an actual human.
The "system" that prevents this is the "everyone" part. A politician who calls a scientist a fraudster under your system doesn't have to convince everyone--he just needs to convince the police and a judge.
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