vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.
The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
The thing you're missing is that Congress kept delegating rule-making authority to "independent agencies" under the executive, while also creating rules the executive branch had to follow while exercising the delegated authority. The fear from those who are concerned by this move is that Trump will keep the delegated rule-making authority, while ignoring the rules for exercising that delegated authority.
In theory, if Congress wanted to, they could seize power back with unvetoable majorities in the House and Senate, and remove both the delegated authority and the rules for exercising it. But with the split between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans, and Democrats, that is unlikely to happen. So the end result is a massive power grab for the executive branch because of unwillingness to act on the part of Congress and the Courts.
I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:
- A time period was the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities have four.
- In the same time period, mobs destroying printing presses that circulated ideas people didn't like had a chilling effect on the way people chose to exercise free speech.
Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I agree wholeheartedly. Copyright in its current shape is a travesty.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Well Im glad that youre so principled, but... calling for literal, legal-definition murder is not the same as saying that e.g. men and women are different.
I think there's a big difference between wishing someone's death, and calling for someone's murder. Don't get me wrong, both are ugly, but saying "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" isn't that different from saying, "I wish the private jet his plane came in on crashed" or "I wish someone had strangled him as a baby in his crib."
There's plenty of colorful ways to say, "Boo X", and wishing their death is one of them. I do think after an assassination attempt we should ideally show more decorum, and hold off on such rhetoric, but again, I don't think it is worthy of firing if someone fails to show such decorum. And I definitely think it is a stretch to say that it is literally calling for murder.
If this is where you lost hope, you might as well never have hope - and I have my suspicions if you actually apply/ied that standard to the left in practice.
The woke left was the culturally ascendant group at the time. It was natural for me to look towards the anti-woke people on all sides of the aisle for the hope of a different set of cultural norms that encouraged engagement with ideas. In some ways the Motte really does model a lot of the discursive norms I wish existed in normie spaces, though I get that it is far too rarified and self-selected to truly serve as a model for society at large. Even so, I did have hopes of a more open society that embodied the virtues of frankness of speech on the one hand, and curiosity and charity on the other.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
The United States was never a "real democracy," and that was by design. The United States is a republic with democratic elements.
There were founders like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the democratic element to be more expansive, and amendments like the 13th, 17th and 19th have pushed the United States in a more democratic direction, but in theory we still retain most of our republican institutions, at least formally.
Personally, I would tend to be against destroying printing presses. Seems like it would have a chilling effect on free speech.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.
I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.
While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.
If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.
Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.
I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.
I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.
EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I mean, anglophone people used to call Marcus Tullius Cicero "Tully" - leading to his most famous book, De Officiis, being known as "Tully's Offices", so there's plenty of underwhelming exonyms to go around.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
My instinct is that MFSP is just a form of the chinese robber fallacy. There are enough male feminists who also happen to be sex pests, that when presented one after the other and subject to the availability heuristic on recall, people erroneously conclude that it was because there's something up with male feminists.
This is similar to your "salience" bullet point, but I would consider it part of a more general phenomenon of "Good Guy Sex Pests." How many interviews are there with the next door neighbors of malefactors who say things like, "He always seemed like the nicest guy"? I don't think "male feminists" are particularly special, except insofar as it is one of many ways to earn some people's automatic trust. But I think there are many categories of "good guy" that this applies to: pastors, police officers, a wholesome actor, etc. Different communities have different roles that confer automatic trust, and so every community is going to have problems with malefactors who take advantage of such trust in some way.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
But I don't think basically anyone is claiming they value foreign lives at a 1-to-1 ratio to domestic lives.
Given that the programs were 0.2% of the federal budget, I'd be okay with saying that I value America lives the ~450 times more than foreign lives that that implies, at least as far as US federal foreign policy goes.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
That still sounds similar to John Bohannon's hoaxes, where he fabricated fake studies with serious issues that got through peer review. But the problem with those studies was not as obvious as the Sokal hoaxes (where a cursory reading of them is enough to show they're nonsense), the problem is the peer reviewers were obviously doing a shoddy job and not actually engaging with the studies or numbers they were asked to review.
The problem with the idea of "within the spectrum of sillyness" thinking, is that there's always the possibility that a lot of the evidence is bad or misrepresented in the first place. You see a similar phenomenon in the way some online grifters present lawsuits against themselves to their audiences. To hear the grifters tell it, they're always persecuted martyrs, but often if you actually dig up trial transcripts they're being reasonably charged with a crime they actually committed. (I am not suggesting that no one is ever targeted politically, or unfairly charged with things that someone on the other side of the political aisle wouldn't be. I'm just saying that the pattern I observed occurs a lot as well.)
I'm not that committed to defending TWG here in any case. If the consensus is that he acted as a partisan hack, and that his stress test was badly conducted, I'm happy to accept that judgment. I just think that there are ways he could have done something similar to what he did that would have been defensible, and for the epistemic good of everyone involved.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I think TWG's actions were nakedly partisan, but aren't they arguably in the same camp as things like the Sokal Affair or John Bohannon's fake chocolate diet and anti-cancer drug hoaxes? I think it is worth testing the standards of outfits that people are relying on for information, if only to make sure the pipeline isn't broken and flawed in some way.
Ideally, every side should be testing their own information pipelines, and creating robust fact checking operations. But one of the good things about agonistic pluralism is that you can be assured that even if a side isn't testing their pipeline, the other side will try to do so at some point. The end result is that all of us observers watching from the side can get accurate damning information on both sides, if we're willing to wade through the words of partisans of either side.
That is all assuming such stress tests are well conducted, of course, which is no guarantee from partisan hacks.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I would have guessed the Covid Hysteria would have been when you were worried about "democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances" given the rule of law was thrown out the door, judges refused to do anything to help, and tens of millions of people were seriously harmed. Were you opposed to and outspoken against those vast power expansions and legal, constitutional, and civil rights violations?
I've written a little bit on my views on the Covid response here.
Free speech, rights, etc., only exist as long as the people who want them have enough power. When they don't have power, they are ran over irrelevant of whatever law or constitution or anything else.
Sometimes, I view it rather differently: A society allowing free speech is often a sign of the ruling coalition's power, and the weakness of its citizens.
China needs to control speech because they are weak. The speech of their people actually poses a threat to them.
The United States doesn't usually need to control speech because the ruling coalition is strong. The speech of its people poses no threat to its overall stability.
COINTELPRO is the kind of thing that happens in the US when a group poses an actual threat to the United States, and has moved from words to actions.
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
- There are similar lawless acts carried out by more left-sympathetic perpetrators that should have been prosecuted more vigorously than they were.
- Many peaceful January 6th protesters were treated unfairly in some way, and it was appropriate to pardon them.
- Many violent January 6th protesters probably should be in jail in a fair and just world.
- Trump acted irresponsibly in pardoning the vast majority of the protesters and commuting the sentences of 14 others.
- Biden's pardons were worse abuses of power than Trump's.
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused.
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?
Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.
I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.
If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.
I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.
I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)
Funny, my reading was just that she was a troll, especially because her bio has "[...] you can call me a troll until your throat hurts." My money would be on "cis male troll" before it would be on "good faith trans woman", but only because a username like "just a woman" feels like something neither a cis nor trans woman would make, and certainly not in this space.
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