quiet_NaN
1hr ago
A smart 12 year old could plausibly manufacture physical « evidence » on her own body, as well as perhaps other types of « evidence », just thinking through it, if she were very devilish and devoted to lying.
Sure. However, there are base rates to consider.
Probably one in a hundred men would risk everything to fuck a cute 12yo, with perhaps four more being successfully deterred by the penalties.
I admit that I am vaguer on the rate of 12yo who would fish their stepdad's condom out of the trash, penetrate themselves with a penis-sized object and distribute the contents of the condom within their vagina, then go to the police to claim either statutory or violent rape, fooling the police into collecting the evidence in an embarrassing medical procedure, while also lying successfully (and avoiding evidential pitfalls). It might plausibly have happened in human history, but I think it is very rare for sixth-grader girls to engage in such behaviors. Saying that one in 10k girls will do something so crass within her 13th life year is almost certainly an overestimate.
So on priors, we might believe that 99% of the men who are accused of raping a 12yo with rape kit DNA evidence are guilty.
Of course, I do not know what the evidence against that guy in particular was. Perhaps it was weaker than DNA, and thus easier to fake. But if it was merely "he said/she said", few people would flee a jurisdiction rather than trusting the court process, which is very much designed to err on the side of "not guilty".
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
If the mother was a remotely neutral party, e.g. the daughter had accused her football coach, then I would sure trust her a lot if she said "ok, my daughter claims he raped her, but four weeks ago she was claiming that her English teacher was a cannibal and three months ago that her schoolmate had gunned down a stranger in the woods."
But I expect that about half of the women who are confronted with evidence that their daughters were raped by their romantic partners will react with denial.
The alternative is simply to horrible to contemplate. "My taste in men (or my lack of ability to judge character) resulted in my daughter having her life ruined in my care" is simply not a reality most people could bear facing. If accepting a reality meant one would kill oneself, humans are pretty great at not accepting that reality.
Life with a vindictive lying teenage daughter is not easy, but it beats having a partner who is raping his stepchildren by a country mile. Sure, your neighbors will be wondering how you raised your daughter so wrong, but that is much less of a social death sentence than having them wonder if you were watching while your partner was fucking your daughter.
So her mother claiming her daughter is lying is worth very little, here.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I highly doubt that the 10k$ borrowed were all spent on legal advice. Very likely it paid for bail. I imagine that bail restrictions which prevent you from skipping bail are common?
I also feel it unlikely that an innocent man would trust the judicial process so little that he decided to become a fugitive from justice instead. I mean, obviously the hero waking up in a hotel room next to a suffocated prostitute because he was framed by some sinister, highly competent entity is a common movie trope. And indeed in that situation it might be entirely rational to become a fugitive rather than entering an Alford plea.
But a 12-yo is not exactly equal to some Illuminati conspiracy as far as her ability to frame innocents is concerned. I find it unlikely that the prospects of facing baseless accusations in court would drive an innocent into hiding.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
I think character matters in politics. So do the people of Ohio -- if nobody cared about the candidates beyond their policies nobody would have produced an ad with the words 'pathological liar' in them.
If your politicians do whatever will benefit them personally, then you can not depend on them being honest about their preferred policy either. The way I see it, character is a prerequisite. Policy differences would have to be very large to overcome this. I would probably vote for Trump over Stalin reborn running on a credible campaign of turning the US into the USSR.
The other thing is civility. While it might seem that we have rock bottom on civil behavior in the culture war, I can assure you we are still a long way off. "Yes, my candidate obviously hired hitmen to kill his opponents, but his tax policy is much more sound than theirs" is not a thing you will hear me utter.
The third thing is that even if you only care about getting results no matter the cost and the commons burned, he seems not to be very good at getting the results, because his campaign ad backfired spectacularly. There is no place in politics for Stupid Evil.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
I mean, purely on priors, claiming to be a sexual abuse victim is statistically correlated with being a pathological liar. Though I suppose that most liars who wrongly claim to be sexual abuse victims will not be able to point to the person they accused fleeing the country. If she was claiming to have been raped by three unrelated men during her childhood and five more in college, and none of the investigations had ever gotten anywhere, that would be very different.
A mother who worked with sexual abuse victims calling her daughter accusing her husband a liar pushes the probability of her daughter being a liar up, but only marginally. Humans are very much willing to believe whatever is the most convenient thing for them to believe, and for plenty "my daughter is a liar" is much easier than "the person I fell in love with is a terrible human being".
For political office, I would prefer someone on whom the priors of being a pathological liar are low, same as I would prefer someone for whom the probability of being a rapist is low. So the ad harms Acton's qualification very marginally.
On the other hand, the decision by his campaign to publish this ad harms Ramaswamy massively. He most certainly did not have more insight into the truth of the claims than the grand jury decades ago.
Even if I could tolerate playing dirty, he played dirty incompetently, getting caught in the crossfire. A savvier candidate would at least have made sure that the ad did not have his fingerprints on it, then released a statement on how horrified his campaign was about the ad, and pledged to investigate who had paid for it.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Donna borrowed $10,000 from her father and hired an attorney who recommended that she and Bud move away for awhile until things could calm down and charges could be dropped.
Is this ethical behavior for a lawyer? It seems a small step from advising your client what chemicals to use to dissolve the victims body in so the cops would not find anything. If I were a lawyer I would be careful not to mention anything which obviously prevents justice from being done outright. "Based on a preliminary analysis of the evidence, it seems very likely that you will go to prison for multiple years after the trial." If the client picks up on it being not in their best interests to be present for the trial, that is not my fault.
Also, especially as someone "building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America" (presumably a program to help SA victims, not a program to facilitate SA), skipping town makes you look guilty as fuck. Absent physical evidence, sexual abuse is notoriously difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt. And this was likely a few decades ago, so the chances that you get a jury who decides to just take every claim by a woman as gospel seems small.
At best, it is a vote of no confidence in the justice system. "Any guy can go to prison if his stepdaughter accuses him of sexual abuse because he did not buy her an iPod" seems a bit outlandish from where I stand, and if you believe it, that raises the question if this is not a worthier cause area to dedicate your life to than helping the supposed victims of sexual abuse.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My guess is, the rise of coding agents in early to mid 2025 saw sudden demand for memory, because this requires having to store large projects.
I was under the impression that the median memory chip is probably sitting on a fancy GPU in an AI data center. I do not think that people running vibecoded corporate-sized java codebases is enough to explain the shortage.
There are also higher order effects, though -- some FPGAs face a shortage not because AIs use them, but simply because producing AI chips is so massively profitable that it is very tempting for fabs to upgrade to the latest process generation instead of making peanuts by continuing to build boring 28nm chips.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
But if you solve 100 physics problems, you may wind up with some commercially valuable or dangerous tech.
Depends very much on the kind of physics. Suppose LLMs find a consistent theory of the four fundamental interactions which agrees with observations. While important in some ways, this will not lead to a superstring bomb in all likelihood, at least not within a decade (at non-singularity speeds).
By contrast, I would claim that most experimental physics problems are at their heart engineering problems. Going from Hahn's discovery of fission to reactors and nukes was mainly an engineering problem (though it did require inventing some new physics along the way). Controlling fusion power is mainly an engineering problem. So is building LHC or LIGO. My experience is that the new physics being investigated (e.g. the Higgs) is the tip of the iceberg, with most of the work being in the underwater part -- detector physics, vacuum and cryo tech, magnets, control systems, calibration procedures and so on.
Rule of thumb for fundamental physics: if your experiment can easily be built using off-the-self components, then someone would already have done it. With all of the instrumental physics/engineering required to get to your physics of interest, LLMs can help but will not accelerate the process by 10X, I feel. Take the Helium leak detector, for example. A good AI might come up with the idea of using noble gas mass spectroscopy for leak detection on its own, and it can help you design the MS, but likely most of the challenges are practical ones where you simply need to build a prototype and test if it works.
People seem to have made this assumptions that we’ve hit the limits of new physics. Anyone claiming interesting effects or results is a crank and it’s all fantasy.
I think that we have definitely picked the low-hanging fruits of our current paradigms. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1903 (using COTS components no less -- photography was already mature by then). This kicked off a series of discoveries which lead to the standard model, nuclear power, etc. The last piece of the puzzle so far was discovered in 2012 at LHC, at costs absolutely astronomical compared to what earned Becquerel his Nobel.
I think the physics community has roughly the right priors on someone making a revolutionary experiment in their garage. And even if individual members are not always amendable to evidence, eventually the physicists would come around. If your cold fusion is providing energy to cheap to meter, if your conservation-of-momentum-violating space drive is getting you to Mars, the physicists will be very interested in figuring these out. The problem is that so far, it seems like the alternative proposals are exclusively by cranks and snakeoil salesmen.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
They will coexist, rather than the later being obsolete. Overall, mathematicians don't have to fear losing their jobs anytime soon (unless of course you happen to have the precise problem you are working on scooped by AI, and even then, your skills would presumably transfer to new problems.
The right question to ask instead is what moat mathematicians have, what skills they have which are immune to being encroached upon by AI. Three years ago this was easily answerable: LLMs sucked at basic math.
Today, it is a lot less obvious to me. Sure, at the moment the models might mostly come for proofs which rely on heavy numerical computation efforts, because software development is a capability in which they were trained quite a lot for unrelated reasons, but in the end the domain of mathematics seems quite susceptible to RLVR.
Human mathematicians might be better at identifying interesting areas of mathematics, but even that is not given. A model might need orders of magnitude more training data to get which math is interesting than a human would, just like a model requires orders of magnitude more training data to learn English than a human, but this does not matter if the training data is available. A model can trivially be trained on every math publication published in the last hundred years, while a human can see only the tiniest fraction of them.
I am sure that once upon a time the best way to solve chess problems was to have an expert human player working with a computer, but today the human simply has nothing to offer which would improve upon the machine. This does not mean that it will be similar in every domain, but at least that this outcome is possible.
I am in experimental physics, and I feel that for the moment, we have still a bit of a moat in that unlike the models, we have hands. Even if you give the models biodrones (i.e. minimum wage labor wearing AR goggles), I think the sensory feedback quality would be worse than what a skilled human can get.
Still, I liked my situation a lot better when our moat was our ability to think rather than to use our hands.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Joffrey sat on the thrown but the true power was Tywin.
Not really. The decision to
Sure, all the GOP positions are selected for loyalty to Trump personally, but there is no Blood Bond binding Senators to Trump, nor do House candidates have a tadpole inserted into their brain upon winning the primary (to my knowledge).
Unlike an absolutist kingdom, the US has a constitution and it gives the president a lot of formal powers. The default assumption is that the president is the most important politician in the US. At the end of the day, he or she decides who gets investigated by the DoJ, which bills get vetoed, what the policies of federal agencies are.
Trump's cronies might be Trump's, but they are also cronies. Some might be willing to lay down their live for him until the moment he dies, but most are probably loyal to him because at present, it pays to be loyal to him. When Trump leaves office, it will be common knowledge that he will never again hold public office, nor be in the position to repay favors much longer. That is not a great position to be in if you want to be the power behind the throne.
Basically, my assumption will be that he will go back to just being some guy with a twitter account full of bullshit.
Though a bit also depends on how he leaves office. If in two years he gets Vance or Rubio elected by a landslide, that will net him some informal influence -- a lot of congress candidates will owe him for endorsing them. On the other hand, if he manages to lose (as I imagine he will), future generations of Republicans are unlikely to cling to the MAGA platform.
The fact that he was elected twice is already weird enough. But a huge part of him winning a second term was due to unforced errors of his opponents. In six years, even the Democrats will be hard-pressed to find someone more senile than Trump to run against him
quiet_NaN
7d ago
An indictment on the system
Hard disagree. Obama or GWB or Clinton could have all gotten honest capability assessments from the military/intelligence community. So could Trump, if he wanted. I am not a fan of the CIA, but I do not think they would push a president they dislike into a bad war just to harm him domestically. I also do not think their median employee is a pink-haired lesbian with a gender studies degree.
While Obama and GWB have fired some high-ranking generals, under Trump 10% of the top brass was fired or sidelined. I surmise this is not conductive to an atmosphere of honest feedback. "Mr Hegseth, I think engaging Iran on this scale will not result in regime change, but drag the US into a long-winding and unpopular war" is unlikely to be received very well -- probably he would tell you to get your testosterone levels checked because you are lacking the Spartan warrior spirit or something.
Trump got the presidency twice because he is good at influencing public perception -- who cares if his claims are bullshit as long as the people believe them. Unfortunately for the US, neither the economy nor the military run entirely on vibes.
The system which really failed is not the US intelligence apparatus, but the electorate which decided to elect an egomaniac who believes he is better at everything than the long-serving domain experts.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
If both the wokes and MAGA converged on using minors as suicide bombers to attack the other side, that would not make it okay to do so simply because the other side does it.
Someone who would willfully lie to the public merely to prevent a Romney presidency is clearly a piece of shit. That does not mean that Trump is not also a piece of shit for lying about Obama's place of birth.
Despite what the culture war feels like, we are not actually in the middle of a civil war where the left wants to string up all the SUV drivers and the right wants to string up all the LGBT* folks. Even if Trump had a plan to seize power on Jan 6, trying to prevent his election through lies would backfire and further erode civil norms.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Nuremberg (which was, basically, to legitimize killing off a bunch of German elites)
This seems an odd point of view. If the purpose was to legitimize killing German elites, then at 55% success rate they did not do a very good job of it.
The subsequent trials were even less effective at eliminating Germans:
489 cases went to trial, involving 1,672 defendants. A total of 1,416 of them were found guilty; fewer than 200 were executed, and another 279 defendants were sentenced to life in prison. By the 1950s almost all of them had been released
About 212 people executed (in the West) is a tiny number compared to the number of people murdered by the Nazis. Even when just considering the Shoah, we get around one death sentence per 25k victims. The real number of people who were guilty of the crime of genocide (and thus should be punished like a common murderer) was obviously orders of magnitude higher. I maintain that hanging all the about 22k members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (unless they could prove how they had been working against the regime, like Gerstein) for starters would have resulted in a much better approximation of justice.
Edit: fixed formatting bug.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
The US and Israel both have bona fide systems in place to prosecute war criminals. Therefore, even though we don't necessarily agree with all of the decisions of these countries, under our charter we lack jurisdiction over them
This is not how it works. I am sure that Milosevic had a military court system which was also responsible for dealing with war crimes.
Instead, the relevant test is in Article 17 of the Rome statute.
The conduct in Gaza which the ICC found objectionable was for the most part official state policy of Israel. Likewise Hegseth's decision to sink suspected smuggling boats and then kill any shipwrecked survivors. A government which orders conduct generally does not criminally investigate fulfilling these orders.
The real restriction on the ICC is territorial jurisdiction. Fortunately, Palestine was admitted to the Rome statute as a state party, thus the ICC has (arguably) jurisdiction in Gaza.
By contrast, the ICC would not have any authority to try the Pretti shooting: it happened on US soil by an US perp, and the US has withdrawn from the Rome statute, thus they would need voluntary cooperation of the US.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I recall exactly one case in which a US citizen was arrested by the US government and sent to be imprisoned by an unrelated third party country without due process. That was under Trump II.
The ICCs mandate is rather narrow, mostly involving war crimes and crimes against humanity. While I am sure that there are some wokes who would dream of sending every Republican to the Hague, the SCOTUS will very much not let them, nor would the ICC convict them of anything.
The steelman version is that at the end of his administration, Trump (or Vance) give Hegseth a full pardon for any conduct he did while in office, thereby making it impossible to try him for the conduct he had ordered during subsequent administrations. Sending him to the Hague would bypass that pardon. (Of course, arresting him while bypassing the US court system would be tricky. I mean, the SCOTUS has already established that the next Democratic president will not have to answer criminal charges for any official conduct, but if a president orders a US citizen kidnapped and sent to the Netherlands he might as well order him kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter.)
However, I do not believe that this is likely to happen. No resident of the White House wants to normalize criminal investigations into official conduct of administrations, for reasons which are plenty apparent. Nor were the Democrats historically very much against what might be considered war crimes, so far.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I have to admit, crying foul over national sovereignty and international law is a bit rich coming from the US. After all, the general position of the US for the last quarter century or so has been that US law applies within the US and to US citizens, and the US president has unlimited jurisdiction over the life of freedom of anyone else. If you annoy the US (or get mistaken as someone who did so), perhaps you will get blown up in the middle of a wedding reception, or you will get kidnapped and brought to some torture prison the US runs where their constitution does not apply. I guess if you are really lucky, you will merely get kidnapped and brought within proper US jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, the US military is very reluctant to investigate possible war crimes of their soldiers, because the civilian leadership has no interests in doing so. The officer who mis-id'ed that school in Iran will obviously not face a military tribunal on charges of negligent manslaughter. The sailor who decided to shoot the shipwrecked survivors of a strike against a suspected drug smuggling boat will likewise never see a court martial.
I do not know how Trump would have handled the judicial aftermath of the Yugoslavia war. I doubt he would have cared much about foreign war crimes, so likely the accused would have gotten a presidential pardon in exchange for 'investing' in one of his shitcoins. Perhaps he would also have made up some ad-hoc military court to try and hang them. Perhaps the soldiers arresting the suspects would have been simply under orders not to take anyone alive, as they were with Bin Laden. Perhaps he would have let the Bosnians try any Serbs accused of crimes against humanity, with predictable results.
But it seems clear to me that all of these options would have been worse than just trying the suspected war criminals in the Hague, where they got their day in court, and if their guilt was proven beyond reasonable doubt, and they mostly got just sentences by judges who were non-partisan.
The ICC is just the generalization of that tribunal. I do not think it is very hard for a country to keep out of the crosshairs of the ICC -- simply conduct your wars (if you have to) while taking proper precautions to protect civilians, and if indivdual soldiers break the rules of engagement and commit crimes against civilians or PoWs, give them sentences similar to what civilians would have gotten for doing the crime against other domestic civilians.
A lot of the US courts are thoroughly politicized, starting with the SCOTUS (Roe vs Wade, among others) and continuing to the lawfare first against and then by Trump. My feeling is that the ICC is no worse than that (and likely a lot less political), despite Israel's whining to the contrary.
The US strategy for dealing with Hegseth, if he was working against rather than for the US, would be to blow him up and accept any bystanders as collateral damage. I am against this, not because I think he is especially deserving of legal protections he denied his enemies, but because legal protections should apply universally. So I would much prefer him and the people above and below him in the chain of command getting their day in court in the Hague, thereby strengthening international law rather than further weakening it.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Trump should have been in contention for the Peace Prize
That might have been something to argue during Trump I, but in 2026, after Trump has been spending most of the year fighting a war with Iran his prior achievements towards world peace will not amount to much. They might as well give Putin the Nobel as well, or Netanyahu while they are at it.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I can't comment on how @Clavicular meant that, but personally I parsed it as "historic defeat at the ballot box".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I'm genuinely confused about why the Iranians (apparently) care about the midterms.
The goal for Iran is to establish that attacking them is a mistake which will cost the ruling party their majority.
From where I stand, this is very sound reasoning with regard to their long-term interests. They correctly model both US parties as being more interested in clinging to power than following the long term interests of the US (whatever these may be) in foreign policy.
If Trump had known how messy his special military operation would get, he would not have attacked Iran. (Unless Bibi has way more dirt on him than I think.)
While it was psychologically important for Trump to negotiate a better deal with Iran than Obama's deal, he will not sacrifice his presidency on the alter of keeping Iran from having nukes. The plan was clearly to bomb Iran, hopefully get a regime change, or at least shock and awe them enough that they will agree to terms which Trump can easily sell as a victory. "Look at me, I am a decisive Republican president who gets shit done, not some pussyfoot Democrat who is too chickenshit to bomb our enemies in case the bombs have a disparate impact on minorities." Only it turned out that Obama had good reasons not to go to war with Iran -- squeamishness about bombing Muslims was certainly no fault of his.
It is also in the short-term interests of Iran to get the Democrats back into power. They do not own the war, and they can probably concede the strait to Iran without the Republicans making a stink. By contrast, Trump needs the war to continue until he gets out something which he can sell as a victory or he dies, whatever happens first.
Traditionally, both the Republicans and the Democrats have been against a Russian hegemony, but Trump was always lukewarm in his support of Ukraine. Presumably because he thought him negotiating a peace deal would win him the Nobel, but also MAGA is politically closer to Russia than to Western Europe. Besides, while the Western leaders treat him with disdain just because he threatened to end the Persian civilization, the non-democratic leaders take him as serious as anyone.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
From a game theory point of view, it would be really bad to try to appease Trump in the hope that he will behave more nicely. Even if it works for a year, then next year you have to give the medicine Nobel to RFK Jr for not outlawing all vaccines and the peace Nobel to Putin for refraining to nuke Kiev. And find another one for Trump lest he feels neglected.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Life is full of disappointments. Trump again did not win the Peace Nobel, and appears visibly upset:
“The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision,” Trump said.
I am a bit surprised that Trump was surprised. If you told me that he would win next year's Nobel prize, my best guess would be that he had occupied Oslo and forced them to give him a Nobel at gunpoint.
So far, there have been two Norwegian lawmakers who have nominated Trump over the years, out of a parliament of 169. The parliament determines the Nobel committee, generally in proportion to their party strengths. Three of the five members will be replaced at the end of the year. There is no way in hell that the current parliament will vote in people who are receptive of Trump getting the Nobel for bombing Iran, and they will dominate the committee for six years, so even if some MAGA fans won the next election in a landslide, it seems very unlikely that Trump would get a Nobel before he croaks.
Even less likely is that Trump will do an 180 which will convince people that he deserves the Nobel. In his first term, he was not especially belligerent, but this time, he has taken actions which bar the Nobel unless he give some very costly signals renouncing his previous behavior. Which he obviously won't.
All of this is common knowledge. So the surprising thing about Trump is that he is actually surprised, that he had a world model in which he was more likely to win the Nobel than win Miss China.
Last year, the Nobel committee at least took Trump's feelings into account by awarding the prize to Machado, a democracy activist in Venezuela who was allied with Trump in fighting the Maduro government (and subsequently gifted her medal to Trump). Per WP, she is currently denied entry into Venezuela, seems the Rodríguez government has no interests in letting her in and Trump does not care either way as long as the US gets the oil. I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
This year, the picked laureate is a bit less reconciliatory towards Trump. Pillay seems like the antithesis to Trump. Not only is she a black woman, but she has made a career in international law. She was part of the International Criminal Court, whose members are currently under sanction from the Trump administration for going after Israeli politicians accused of war crimes. Later, she was a UN high commissioner for human rights and a member of the International Court of Justice before finally heading the Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory which determined that Israel had indeed committed genocide during the Gaza war.
It the committee had wanted to pick a candidate to signal "fuck Donald Trump in particular", they could hardly have done better short of awarding it to Harris or the Ayatollah.
In a better world, Pillay would not be considered worthy of the Nobel. "Yes, she is part of the justice system which deals with terrible atrocities which have been committed in Rwanda or Myanmar, but that system is already universally supported by the civilized world. We would prefer to make a statement a bit spicier than 'war crimes bad' with our prize."
Instead, we live in times where everything Pillay stands for is under attack, where the theory of international relations endorsed by the most powerful country on earth can be summarized as "the strong will do what they wilt, the weak will suffer what they must". In this world, it makes total sense for the Nobel committee to throw their support behind international law.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
People need to see it happen, and they need to understand that this is not something they can overcome with language games and infinite isolated demands for rigor.
I do not think this will help deter anyone. It will not deter a single jihadist. It will hardly deter any normal criminal -- the ones who don't have the stomach for it will simply not watch. And the ones who will watch will not decide that the threat of getting shot after a few decades of prison will make it not worth it.
And it will very much not be a grim if dignified affair like Ned Stark beheading someone. People will watch it on TV in bars. School boys will make bets if the condemned will shit himself before or after being shot.
Let me try an analogy. Many parents want grandchildren, and many royalists want a royal heir. However, this rarely means that either group would be very interested in observing the process of the baby being conceived or born on live TV. As long as the processes are handled competently, most parents and royalists will prefer to see the end result without the various fluids involved along the way. The ones who would prefer to watch everything are probably perverts.
With a public execution, most of the public in favor of it will decide that as long as it happens, they do not need to see it done. A few will tune in because they feel it is their duty as citizens to bear witness. The main audience will be people watching out of morbid curiosity. Some will watch to confirm their opinion that the death penalty is barbaric.
And MAGA will obviously turn this into a media circus. Hegseth has a day job, he is in charge of the most expensive military on the planet. The particulars of the implementation of the judgments of military courts are only a tiny part of that job, in most administrations they would be handled three layers of management below him. Instead, the former Fox News moderator decided not only to make the execution public, but also to personally announce it.
Can I be sure that he does not share my aesthetic revulsion regarding death by shark? Not really, it could be that for once our aesthetics and moral judgments would agree. His previous readiness to embrace war and warrior aesthetics would make it surprising, but you never know.
Still, I concede that attacking MAGA over what I think they might want to do was bad on my part. I am confident there will be enough for me to criticize after their circus without me having to speculate what the distasteful particulars might be beforehand.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I do not get it. Even for pro death penalty people, I do not think there is a bigger point in making the execution public. If the US says they have executed someone in prison, few people will doubt them, so even before AI made video evidence unreliable establishing common knowledge would not have been a great reason.
Nor do I think that the shock value will scare people straight. It does not work too well with the shock pictures the EU puts on tobacco products either.
I think the most coherent reason is that MAGA wants a spectacle.
But then why go for something as tame as a firing squad? Where is the suspense, the thrill? The obvious baseline for RETVRN-leaning MAGAs should be pagan Rome, they knew how to put on a show. Wild animals, fighting, messy deaths. Crucifixions are right out though, not only because they would offend the Christian right, but also because two hours in viewers will get bored and start scrolling TokTok.
Presumably Seaworld was not willing to let Hegseth drop him into a shark tank? Or have him fight for his life with a dagger against an angry polar bear? Perhaps Hegseth could fight him bare-handed to the death, thereby proving his manliness? The horror genre is full of ideas on how to make the spectacle last longer. Is there nobody in the administration who would want to channel their inner Mason Verger by having a jihadist being eaten alive by pigs? Or it could even be episodic, where the convict gets to face some deadly threat every Tuesday at prime time, sometimes getting maimed, until he finally succumbs to one. Think of the money Trump could make on prediction markets by rigging that game!
Presumably Hegseth was advised that the SCOTUS would declare most of these options cruel and unusual, but even the boring firing squad thing would offer the potential for some excitement. Think about it: if execution by firing squad is legal, then execution by a firing squad chosen in a particular fashion is legal. Trump could run a weekly casting/game show where would-be members of the squad compete against each other for the honor of firing the shot. The courts might even allow bringing the convict along for every episode. Fox could make a killing. Bait the left: let Trump's kids and the ICE goons who shot Hope and Pretty compete.
Obviously, the key question would be if Trump would want a woman and black guy on the squad to increase his demographic appeal or if that would be too DEI.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
For Scott to catastrophize off this paper strongly diminishes my respect for his analytical knowledge, and this proposed rationality of the movement he claims to be a core participant of.
I did not read him as "the paper did conclusively prove that AIs can feel pain", and more like "engaging in behavior which is evil if it works but most likely just pointless is bad".
This is a fully coherent position to have. It covers anything from using 'voodoo' dolls to harm people you like over throwing rocks at birds to tricking people into breaking the tenets of their religion so they go to hell.
If Scott believed that there was a high likelihood that model torture was succeeding, he would invest a lot more to stop it.
Just because we can't justify putting the ceiling below AGI doesn't also mean we can justify putting it above it either. Uncertainty about the ceiling cannot substitute for evidence about where it lies.
Scott has you covered. Nobody is arguing that intelligence will scale indefinitely -- if nothing else, there is likely how much computation you can do on a question posed at a point (x, t) if you have to answer at (x, t+Delta t).
But not every limit is practically relevant. Speed has a fundamental limit, but it is so high that this fact is utterly irrelevant in running competitions.
Likewise, "absent new physics, the size of a machine which answers a question in a minute is fundamentally limited to a (quantum) computer with a diameter of one light minute" is not a very relevant constraint.
Like most people, I think it is unlikely we will sail smoothly from present LLMs into that limit, it seems likely that we will hit some bottleneck long before that. However, not every limit is practically relevant. It is certainly possible that LLMs will hit a wall really soon and not even make any significant headway even if they invest 1000x the compute. It would be surprising, but not impossible. Likewise, it it possible that OpenAI will publish GPT-10 in seven years or so and that the capability ratio between GPT-10 and GPT0-6 will be like between GPT-6 and GPT-2.
The truth is we do not have a coherent theory of intelligence and alignment. Eliezer has made this point eight years ago when he talked about the Rocket Alignment Problem. It is possible that AI alignment will be trivial, just as the people in that dialogue might find that the effects of gravity decrease on their spaceship in proportion to the decreasing drag of the atmosphere, so that once you have left the atmosphere you indeed only need to lead the moon a bit to intercept it. However, it is also entirely possible that this is not the case, just as any attempt to reach the Moon without Newton's theory of gravity would be foolish in our universe.
I get that from the outside perspective this sounds like Pascal's Mugging. "Everyone has to stop having anal sex, or god might destroy our world with a volcano. Sure, some people say that volcanoes are not a punishment from god, but in the absence of a coherent theory of what causes volcanoes we should err on the side of caution and abstain from anal sex."
My counterargument is that in the space of possible causes for volcano eruptions, anal sex is a null set. It is just as plausible that abstaining from it leads to extinction through supervolcano.
By contrast, in the space of all utility functions an ASI could have, the functions which are compatible with human thriving are a null set. Obviously that does not mean that p(doom|ASI)=1, because it is entirely possible that alignment ends up being easy, so a Culture future seems far more likely than an ASI bent on filling our light cone with Venlafaxine.
Before Castle Bravo was detonated, there were some worries that it might cause a fusion chain reaction in the atmosphere. I think both this and worrying about ASI being unaligned before attempting to create it is entirely rational. Only in the case of the hydrogen bomb, we had a lot more theory to predict how it would behave.
Sorry, native German speaker. The word "Justiz" in German means the legal system, with no particular claims that it is just ("gerecht").
I am unclear if he was indicted by a grand jury, and if they had any evidence besides her testimony.
My understanding is that generally, prosecutors do not want to lose court cases, so I suppose that the median tale of "my step-dad totally raped me" would not go to trial.
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