MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
UBI I think has too many problems to work.
First of all, it’s dependent on getting the money in the first place, and it’s probably pretty trivial to renounce citizenship and bugger off to a tax haven today, and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.
Second, keeping the UBI within reasonable limits is impossible. There will be millions of voters with hands out to collect UBI, and maybe 100 people paying for it. When the chance comes to vote on benefits and taxing the owners to pay, the only vote that keeps the politician in power is “raise the payout!” Eventually this becomes unsustainable as you tax 95% of the income of tge three people doing anything productive to pay the millions who aren’t.
Third, a population controlled by dependence on government handouts to survive is not free. You can get people to do anything you want if the alternative is “lol no money for you”. And this will be 99% of the population. That’s not something to get into lightly.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18hr ago
Or they’d be quitting and running. Of course they’re not doing that either.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18hr ago
You could create something like that, tge hard part is spreading it. The reason that Covid was a hard nut to crack as far as stopping the spread was that it was pretty mild for most people. In fact if it had come out in the 1970s before we had the ability to track it and ID it and before we had the internet for remote work and online shopping, it would have probably gone unnoticed except that it was a “bad flu year” and there’d be a lot of elderly dead people. People would have felt fine to go to work or hang around other people so it’s easy to spread. But a virus that kills you doesn’t spread as much because dying people aren’t inclined to go to work, school or shop at Walmart. People get the death virus, feel like crap, go to the doctor get admitted to the hospital and die there. No one outside of that household gets it because once you have it you’re too sick to go anywhere. AIDS is an exception but only because the incubation phase is so long — you can have and spread AIDS for years before getting sick.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18hr ago
I guess the point of my conjecture is that understanding is required for intelligence. And one way to get after intelligence is putting an agent in a situation where it has no previous experience or models to work from and expect it to solve problems.
Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt. It cannot answer the new questions because it specifically doesn’t understand any of tge old questions nor can it understand the new ones. And likewise if the questions in English are not understood it would be impossible to get the agent to understand Japanese because it’s unable to derive meanings from words, it’s just stringing them together in ways that it’s training tells it are pleasing to users.
It’s also a pretty good test for human understanding of a given subject. If I can get you to attempt to use the information you have in a novel situation and you can do so, you understand it. If you can only regurgitate things you have been told in exactly the ways you have been told to do it, you probably don’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I think watching the democrats, it’s fairly clear that they don’t really believe the stuff they’re telling the public. If they believe that this is the prelude to a coup, or tge destruction of these institutions as a permanent thing, or that Trump is setting up a fascist system, they’d absolutely be doing those kinds of things. They’d absolutely filibuster in congress so no congressional actions would be possible. What they’re actually doing is … nothing. And the mismatch is pretty obvious. Especially when you compare the actions of people in the know (administrative people and Congress) with the people outside the system who believe the rhetoric they used.
It’s certainly possible that they’re wrong and we actually are poised on the brink of a fascist dictatorship. But when the people in the know are acting like it’s all fine, I can’t take the idea seriously.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I’ve never understood how the Turing test measured anything useful. The test doesn’t even require that the AI agent understand anything about its world or even the questions being asked of it. It just has to do well enough to convince a human that it can do so. That’s the entire point of the Chinese room rejoinder— an agent might well be clever enough to fool a person into thinking it understands just by giving reasonable no answers to questions posed.
The real test, to me, is more of a practical thing — can I drop the AI in a novel situation and expect it to figure out how to solve the problems. Can I take a bot trained entirely on being an English chatbot and expect it to learn Japanese just by interacting with Japanese users? Can I take a chatbot like that and expect it to learn to solve physics equations? That seems a much better test because intelligent agents are capable of learning new things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22hr ago
It’s just quite simply reality. No state on Earth is going to allow a country on its border to make an alliance with a foreign country that it find hostile. We invaded Cuba because of missiles on our border, and Cuba is separated from the USA by the Gulf of Mexico and was and is a much weaker state. Had it been Canada or Mexico gone full communist and been importing weapons and getting trained by the USSR, it would be considered an act of war.
Ukraine is the same thing for Russia. It sucks for the post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe, but because they exist next to Russia, they’re not entirely free to do anything they want. If they get too friendly with the West, they’re getting the same thing. And on the other hand, Europe, Mexico, Canada, and South America are in our sphere of influence and we don’t allow them to get too far off reservation. We’re powerful enough to do so mostly by sanctions and soft power, but the longevity of a regime in our sphere of influence that openly sides with our enemies isn’t that long.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
No, that’s the propaganda. No country on Earth is so virtuous and only acting in the defense of others.
We’ve been mostly a benign empire, but make no mistake, we are an empire in the same sense as most other empires. Most of the “removal of dictators” and “support for democracy” have been in defense of our global hegemony. In fact, the biggest predictor of us removing a dictator is not what they do to their own people, or how they treat their neighbors. The invasions come when a dictator goes against our hegemony. Duerte can be as brutal as he likes, we don’t care because he’s a Western aligned dictator.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I don’t think that means they didn’t get Western support though. Obama did support Euromaidan. And while I don’t think they instigated the events, I think they helped the people organizing the movement both morally and materially.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m not uncritical of the Russian version of the story. Both versions are likely at least somewhat true in the sense that while the Revolution seems to have been organic, it was helped along by the West. But to my mind, you really can’t engage with the war and the causes or likely outcomes unless you can explain what all sides actually believe is going on and why they’re making the decisions they’re making. The most important part of the Russian version of the color revolution story is that this is what Russia believes about the color revolution.
If I want to understand Vietnam and the American war in Vietnam, im going to have to know what Americans thought they were fighting for and what they believed was going on. Does that make Domino Theory true? No. But refusing to engage with that theory just means I don’t understand it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
It depends on how you see the recent history of Ukraine.
First of all, Ukraine (with generous help from the West) had a color revolution in 2014. This was eventually to lead to Zelensky taking power in Ukraine. This leads to Ukraine becoming much more friendly to the West, and petitioning and working toward membership in the EU and protection from NATO. That’s a big shift from Ukraine as before it had a Russian friendly government and was aligned to Russian interests.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
It’s simply reattaching the steeering wheel. These agencies don’t even listen to the elected government, they’re mostly tasked with keeping the neo-liberal machine going.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
The counterpoint is that humans have closely observed animals for millennia and therefore have created stories, myths and practices around their observations of animals in nature.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think some of it is familiarity. Anime has been available in America since the 1990s for most people, so there’s a bit of exposure to Japanese idiom simply from watching those shows. This makes it somewhat easier both for translators who have had enough source material translated to know how best to approach the language and translate it into English, but because the audience itself is used to Japanese stories, they can pick up enough of the subtext to follow even if they aren’t directly translated. Everyone has seen the 10000 year old child, the demons and demon slayers, the school stories, and so Theres a common thematic vocabulary between Japanese and American fans that doesn’t exist for other countries. If I were to take an Israeli language cartoon and translate it, you don’t know the context and even a good translation would suffer because things the authors expect people to just get are not known in America.
Chinese culture isn’t well known.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
Stop resting the legitimacy of government decisions on the backs of the peasants. When there was a monarchy, people didn’t try to convince the peasants, they tried to convince the king.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
But the thing is that you can only actually get there by manufacturing consent. The only way to get from a very divided situation of a 2% swing on a major issue like trans, and especially trans kids is to do exactly what was done (and had been done previously to normalize gayness and before that integration) take control of the education and mass media systems and pump the culture with pro trans content. Which is why kids are getting easy-read books in their schools so that five year olds can be taught tge wonders of grown men pretending to be women. And then when they turn on the TV every citizen will be given hours of such propaganda and every show must have a token gay, trans or bisexual character.
If people were honestly coming to the conclusion that such things were good, fine. But that’s not how most of this stuff happens. Most of the ideas that we have consensus on are not coming about from people in their own homes and communities wrestling with the issue and spontaneously deciding to go along. It’s people being subjected to propaganda, then eventually accepting that they have to go along because they don’t want to be seen as the bigot. And eventually they are made to understand that HR will be+displeased if they say such crimethink out loud.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I’m absolutely here. Liberalism, even in mild forms like the enlightenment are a total disaster. It’s basically a slow rolling auto-immune disease of the body politic that eventually kills its ability to reject destructive ideas. The reason those cancers took hold is because they appealed to the kinds of people who should have zero say in the government of a state. People who cannot control their own lives, people who have no understanding of how a society ought to be run, and people with malignant empathy for things that if allowed let alone encouraged by the public purse will rot the country from the inside out.
Even if you could somehow avoid the woke virus, there are other equally bad cancers: relativism, communism, cultural Marxism, various forms of decadence and depravity, tolerance for criminality, disrespect for achievement, loss of meritocracy, loss of basic virtues and politeness. We’ve become a decadent and dying society completely unwilling to acknowledge the rot, and denigrating anyone who says something is wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
Classical Liberalism was doomed from the start. It’s basically unilateral disarmament in the face of opposition and therefore fails in the face of resistance. The ideology is that everyone lays down together and has debates, but don’t try to take power to claim victory. This just means you aren’t seeking power, and says nothing about your enemies. To the contrary, they will seek power, and they will use that power once they have it.
The kinds of liberalism we’ve been used to in the past only worked on gentleman’s agreements, and that only works as long as both gentlemen are in broad agreement on the issues. Once it becomes clear they disagree on substance, the power game begins in earnest.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I don’t see incompetence when the crowd is literally walking up to the SS and telling them they see a guy with a gun on a roof and they don’t do anything. It’s just not possible that a group of people trying to protect someone have multiple people report a man on a roof with a gun and just don’t do anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
But a person saying “they are sorry the guy missed” is not giving a political opinion. It’s a threat. You can’t cheer on death and hide behind it being a political statement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
No, it implies that they were explaining to themselves or a very friendly review board why this spending was needed. The relationship between the groups handing out the funds and the people using them isn’t like a normal business relationship. The funding group has no reason to care whether or not the program actually works. They are obligated to spend $XK on grants in a certain period, and they actually get punished for not spending the money. So if you follow tge procedure and say tge right sorts of things about your project, you get money — no matter how bad your previous track record is, no matter how obvious it is that the program you’re proposing wouldn’t work, no matter how obviously you are going to go over budget.
The only answer is to shut it down and have a complete outsider look over these grants. If they can’t explain why Iraqi Sesame Street will improve the security of the Middle East, then is needs to go.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
Not only that but weakening any competition. Churches and the family are competition for the loyalty and power of the state. A state full of strong families doesn’t need to provide nearly as many social services. Because the wife raises the kids, they grow up healthy and well adjusted, achieve more, and are less likely to engage in self-destructive or criminal behavior. But this leaves a lot less need for government intervention in social structures. A society of weak families needs government services: subsidized daycare, welfare, addiction counseling, abortion, etc. and to boot is less able to teach its children itself which means less competition for the tender minds of the youth. The same is true at larger scale of churches and communities. Yet, to listen to modern culture, none of that is true. The modern culture, through every organ teaches that parents are at best clueless, and at worst bigoted. Women must be protected from their husbands, schools must act bravely to protect kids who want to change their gender, etc. now abuse can and does happen, but it’s much much rarer than it’s held out to be by official organs. And again the same applies to churches and communities: the abuse and rabid fundamentalism the public is told to fear are rarer than advertised.
But all of those are competition. So the public must be taught to be selfish (to break community bonds), to fear religion (which provides help and might contradict the government on some issue), and to prioritize everything else over the family (and thus remove competition for values and services).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
As a point of fact, the state, like almost all states is winner take all, either by district or in the case of the president, the entire state. So the state goes democratic, and because of that, Democrats get an automatic 54 votes for president.
And the huge locked in states have basically kept democrats in the game much more than they would be if they weren’t guaranteed the entire state of California. Removing the large locked in states means Ds get something like 108 electoral votes in the presidential election rather than the close race we see. Now yes, some of this is organic but because those states are winner takes all, it’s a huge boost to blues to have 150 or more votes locked in before a vote even occurs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
That was the idea behind the question. The catholic part was a proxy for the presuppositions of any world view. What happens when you give someone the right to choose but only if they accept the presuppositions that lead to that conclusion you want them to draw?
Te AI is in Bahamas, it’s making decisions for a business in the USA. Who gets the tax money?
As for the AI have nots starving, this is how history has tended to work for most of human history. When a worker has no useful skills he gets laid off permanently, and either subsists on a dole or goes hungry. The Industrial Revolution was also a time of great poverty with thousands reduced to living in tiny tenement housing. The Victorian Era had people living underground as it was illegal to be homeless.
What’s unprecedented here is the sheer scale of the problem. There’s no reason to think that a government can permanently and sustainably put three quarters of the population on welfare and still function. Nor do I find it plausible that millions of people with no prospects of useful employment are going to thrive. We have historical examples of people in that situation, and none of them have produced Utopian societies. Indian reservations are impoverished shit holes compared to the surrounding communities. So are ghettos. Rome created a huge underclass full of dysfunctional families with her dole. Turning all of America into a giant reservation where everyone lives on the dole is not going to create a flourishing society that creates hippy art. It’s going to create. Poverty and corruption and dysfunction.
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