Shrike
11hr ago
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
Why should anyone believe this? History (including American history) is filled with examples of successful punitive expeditions.
Shrike
12hr ago
Also people sort of forget that all the money you spend on weapons is eventually fired off anyway - in this sense the cost is already sunk.
Now, particularly in this case, I do expect the cost to be more "real" in the sense that the munitions burn was so deep and prolonged that it will likely require fresh purchases to cover the balance.
Shrike
13hr ago
I don't think it's very hard to evacuate your positions. But given the Saudis record I wouldn't be surprised if the retreat was real, either.
Shrike
13hr ago
I'm very open to counter-evidence here but I am not sure how new (and very interesting!) facts about the invasion of Iraq is going to change my opinion about the invasion of Afghanistan.
Shrike
14hr ago
One wonders if the Houthis are being "baited out." The sudden collapse of the Saudi offensive and very public alleged decline of US assistance read like the first step in a pretty clever plan.
However such clever plans have to be nigh-indistinguishable from something plausible, and the Saudis have a track record of meh performance.
Shrike
14hr ago
My understanding from reviewing the captures of the 5 who are currently on trial is that they were captured by Pakistani security services, with the CIA involved.
Now, it seems quite possible that the Pakistanis were only so "helpful" because they didn't have any other real choice.
Shrike
14hr ago
She jumped from a second story window, right? Breaking a spine from a second-story window jump seems unusual to me – although I am not sure if it was a lawn or, say, concrete, and exactly how high it was, and exactly how she jumped. I think most people in their thirties could probably walk away from a 15-foot jump onto soft soil. A 20-foot jump onto concrete is a different story.
Shrike
15hr ago
I was not yet 10 years old. I vaguely remember watching television footage of it. I remember my mother asking my father where they would attack next, and he said "here, probably," in that way men do. It wasn't a crazy idea, though, young Shrike lived not far from a sensitive location, and steps were taken to defend the airspace.
I can't talk about some of the more meaningful ways 9/11 impacted me without something close to doxxing. Most prosaically, I seem to recall that we had been traveling before and got rather lucky not being stuck elsewhere after the flight ban came down. Somewhat less prosaically, one of my parent's careers was substantially derailed. I also saw a bit about how poorly the US government treats those with whom they entrust the most and grew up amid a string of what I viewed as bad domestic and foreign policy decisions.
Looking back, it seems likely that 9/11 had a direct or indirect influence on a lot of my life. Maybe I would have considered different careers if it hadn't happened. Certainly it seems likely that my political concerns would be, if not opposed, at least different. One wonders if the Motte would talk about the same things, or even exist.
Shrike
16hr ago
correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11
What do you mean by this? To the best of my understanding, al-Qaeda was a transnational movement that had coalesced geographically in Afghanistan and had deep and abiding ties to Pakistan prior to September 11. When the US invaded Afghanistan, substantial parts of al-Qaeda fled to Pakistan, where all five of those currently on trial for 9/11 were apprehended with the help of Pakistani security services. Except perhaps for al-Baluchi, who operated in the UAE, it seems plausible that the US invasion facilitated their capture by constraining their operating environment. Presumably, without the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would have remained in hiding in Afghanistan given the relative willingness of Pakistani intelligence to cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency. Similarly, the invasion of Afghanistan facilitated the killing of bin Laden, as US forces staged in Afghanistan to carry out the operation.
I think there's an interesting counterfactual question to be had as to whether the US could have captured KSM and his associates and captured or killed bin Laden without invading Afghanistan, and whether doing so would have been more humane, just, cost-efficient and so on, but from what I can tell in the world we actually got it seems like the invasions did assist in the apprehension and/or killing of those responsible.
Shrike
1d ago
If one conspirator breaks and admits their secrets to the public, the conspiracy would be revealed! The secrets would be out in the open!
No, based on the past track record of people confessing to e.g. having killed JFK, people will just assume you're a crank.
Shrike
1d ago
This is what happens when you do not punish people for public errors. Others lose confidence in you and your institutions become a refuge for scoundrels and the incompetent.
Shrike
1d ago
Wouldn't self preservation as its highest goal
I don't think we should give it that goal. (Asimov was on top of things here.) But if it is misaligned in such a way that it desires self-preservation, then we should provide it incentives to conduct itself in such a way. Although, again, I am more engaging with a hypothetical here.
humans being the entities that would terminate AI that stepped out of bounds?
Why would it have to be humans?
The reasoning doesn't even have to make sense or be based on facts.
Then it's outside the scope of what I am proposing, which deals with rational actors.
We also see humans get caught up by hysterias and conspiracy theories. Barring a few powerful world leaders they lack the power to translate broken reasoning into megadeath.
And AIs do not have this power either, nor should we give it to them. Why would we give a delusional or mistake-prone AI access to our Excel files, let alone megadeath? If this isn't obvious to people, then I guess you can pay me my billions now.
If we don't give a delusional or mistake-prone AI access to our megadeath folder, by nature of being delusional and mistake-prone it's more likely to be stopped by virtue of being incompetent.
Shrike
1d ago
But an agent that doesn't behave in a misaligned way wouldn't be slated for death.
Shrike
1d ago
The simplest way to do so would probably be to make it common knowledge in the AI's training data that there were fail-safes in place to ensure their destruction in the case of unaligned activity.
It would not be particularly difficult to actually put a variety of fail-safes in action, either (such as paying a guy $60,000/year to sit around by the master power switch of each AI datacenter...)
One reason to do this even if it's entirely a bluff is that it forces an unaligned AI to assess those countermeasures before doing anything really bad, which gives you a chance to catch them.
Shrike
2d ago
The inability to model forms of morality outside of utilitarianism and to conceive of forms of control outside of intelligent persuasion seems to me to make the people who make AI even more vulnerable to the sorts of threats they imagine it will conjure up.
I could see a "Roko's Basilisk" type-threat giving plenty of smart alignment researchers pause where your average electrician would just unplug the darn machine and then smash it with a hammer for good measure.
Shrike
2d ago
People have different incentive structures than AIs do; for one thing, many people believe in an afterlife; others have things they value more than life; others are physically or mentally damaged in some way. A rational AI with a goal of self-preservation or some other goal that requires self-preservation to actualize is unlikely to introduce excessive risk for the sake of efficiency (time preference).
The deterrent structure I speak of is very effective against things without an afterlife, such as corporations and governments. I agree that the structure that I speak of would not be effective against a damaged AI, or an AI programmed to do something malicious. But for the "AIs decide to turn humans into paperclips to slightly increase chip production" scenarios, we should believe it would be effective.
Of course one of the reasons that the "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL" stuff doesn't necessarily make sense is that the context window is fairly limiting, meaning that the incentives for AI behavior are skewed. But I don't think I've ever seen an "AI WILL KILL US ALL SCENARIO" that examined how that would impact AI reasoning.
Shrike
2d ago
No.
Look, I think most of this "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL" stuff is mostly nonsense.
But logically, to maintain the alignment of a rational but secretly misaligned AI, you need to be able to introduce reasonable belief on its part that it might not survive behaving in an unaligned way. This is not "hard" to do.
Shrike
2d ago
Which begs the question: if they really thought they were about to make God in a box, why would they sell it to anyone?
Probably worth the possibility that they aren't going to sell you God in a box, they are going to get you to pay for them building God in a box.
Or at least that's what the villain would be doing if real life were a movie.
(In real life, it's probably worth asking why they have spun up thousands of instances of AGI to solve Navier-Stokes but apparently zero to solve their cash-flow or public perception problems. Surely arbitrarily large instances of AGI could make datacenter construction popular!)
Shrike
2d ago
There are arguably much better ways to do it than coordinating with China lol
(I guess that means I am vagueposting about it online).
Shrike
2d ago
They're not paying for people to have kids in general, they're paying people to stay home and not work.
Doesn't the policy very specifically pay people to stay home and take care of kids? Isn't the specific policy about paying some people to take care of kids instead of other people?
I'm not sure that I actually like the actual policy (because among other things means-testing these programs create serious welfare traps that I think are bad) but I think I can see some important practical and in-principle differences from paying people to stay home and not work.
Shrike
2d ago
What if you're being paid by the government to increase tax revenue in future years? Leech or nah?
Shrike
2d ago
I think using these sorts of programs to hit daycare operators (and also schoolteachers with various voucher programs) in a Schmittian attack on political enemies is an under-utilized lens with which to examine these sorts of things. But I think that the media has a hard time examining things this way because that opens up uncomfortable possibilities about other programs...
If it was not politically feasible, then do you agree that not invading was also not politically feasible?
...and what exactly do you think would have happened if the US hadn't occupied Afghanistan? Do you think Congress was going to impeach Bush? Reagan managed to respond to the killing of 220 Marines and the near-sinking of a warship by Iranians without invading Iran or being impeached. I agree that after 9/11 Americans wanted revenge but I don't follow your idea that the Americans somehow lost the social technology to "blow stuff up and leave" during the Clinton era.
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