Shrike
1hr ago
(That's the only topic they lose on in free speech)
No, (some) European nations also suppress political speech and straight-up ban specific political parties in a way the United States does not. They restrict religious speech and religious expression, and some of them heavily restrict or ban home education. They objectively restrict firearms more heavily than in the United States, and they also generally have higher tax burdens. I'm not even sure you are as correct about privacy as you think – while Europe loves to talk about the GDPR, my understanding is that their government-run CCTV networks are generally much more developed than the ones in the United States. And likewise my understanding is that in some European countries (e.g. Poland or Italy) a judge is not required to sign off on a warrant - a prosecutor can do that, which would be considered a very alarming breach of due process in the English tradition. Some European nations also have mandatory conscription, which is a practical imposition on freedom even if you do not consider it a principled one.
I also am skeptical that you are as correct as you think about European attitudes towards sexuality. Looking at Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Poland, all of them except for Italy set the final age of consent at 18, and Italy sets it at 16 (which is the age of consent in many US states). It is true that Germany, Italy, France, and Poland all shave a year or two off in many circumstances, but I don't think it is as much of a free-for-all as you might think (for instance, as per Wikipedia, "while the age of consent is 14 in Germany, it is illegal for a person over 21 to engage in sexual activity with a person under 16 if the activity exploits the inexperience of the younger person"). I suspect that these laws are likely written to avoid entrapping teenagers, not to allow middle-aged men to hook up with 15-year olds risk-free, even if Europe is often generally more "sex positive" than in the United States.
It is true that the level of freedom in the US (and Europe) can vary tremendously, depending on where you are, and I'm not trying to minimize that. But as far as I can tell, your gloss is directionally wrong. Where I think Europe as a whole probably has a comparative advantage versus the United States is in consumer rights.
Shrike
1d ago
At least for the time being, we can say that ended with Epstein until they find the next pedo ring somewhere.
How does that follow?
What you are describing is an organized criminal conspiracy of which two members were arrested. If that is a correct description, what happened to the other members?
Shrike
2d ago
This is actually - for maybe the first time ever - a case of "the innocent have nothing to fear". If you're not passing off AI work as your own, and being honest about the role of AI in your creative process, then a watermark isn't a problem.
I don't know that this is entirely true. Anthropic also said that they were going to be noting AI generation in metadata. This means that if I paste in a text (that I wrote) into AI and tell it to produce it as Word document with any typos or errors redlined, and then I download and save that Word document, people may be given the (false) impression that it was wholesale produced by AI, even though I was only using it to proofread.
Similarly, even though in any individual case the odds of the watermarking process (which is just word selection) resulting in a false positive are low, the are greater-than-zero odds that someone gets unlucky (initially I wrote "unlikely," heh) and writes a sentence that has all the right (or wrong) words to flag it as AI generated.
Shrike
2d ago
If you just copy the conversation and say: argue against person X, then that seems fairly meaningless for a discussion forum.
Correct.
Using the AI to do something like summarizing some data relevant to the discussion seems like an unambigously good thing for the quality of discussion.
Yes, I agree, as long as you can check and cite to the output. I've used AI to do research before for some of my posts on here; at this point it's pretty much a better search engine (in part because search engines have gotten worse). But I don't let it write them.
Then you could outline some points against against some argument and ask the ai to flesh them out a bit and then lightly edit the output. Is that worse than someone not posting at all? Is it better than just a list of bullets points?
I think this is lazy and based on my experience of when people actually do that in here, worse than someone not just posting at all.
What if someone has a long conversation with an AI trying to refine the point of their post before posting, is that good or bad?
I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's on the top of a slippery slope to posting a lightly-edited AI-generated text, which I don't like. If an article that you read or a conversation you had serves as a jumping-off point or ideation focus for a Motte-post, I think that's fine, and an AI text may happen to do that, although I would use a lot of caution. AI fact-checking your post may also be good. I don't think quoting from an AI (as long as it's treated the same way as any other external source, e.g. Wikipedia - put in a quote box or with quote marks and noted as a source) is necessarily a deal-breaker: if your post is mostly Wikipedia I think it should be treated the same way as a post that is mostly AI unless you have a very spectacular way with words. But generally speaking I want the words and thoughts to be yours.
Note that I am not trying to invent rules, just lay out what I am looking for in this discussion forum personally (and in discussion generally).
Shrike
3d ago
Claude deserves the credit in the same way that an earthmover deserves credit for moving a pile of rock.
I think this is a good way at looking at it, but people who use earthmovers to move piles of rock get credit for that work. They get paid for it, and they can say, honestly, "I went and moved those rocks." As long as everyone understands that they are not claiming to have done it by hand, it's a perfectly fine thing to say and take credit for and get paid to do. Of course, if someone does actually move all that earth by hand we hold them in a different level of esteem.
However if you said "I benched 250 today" and it was actually your tractor that did it, you'd be taking egregiously false credit. And I think that using AIs to do your writing is bad for the same reason that getting a tractor to do your exercising is bad. Sure, taking credit for something you didn't do is bad, but also you're not really improving by it.
If you are accomplishing a goal-oriented task, you want to use the best available tools for the job. There are some jobs for which LLMs are the best (or one of the best) tools to accomplish that task. I don't think that there is anything wrong with using LLMs and taking credit for the work in that situation, if there is an understanding that you're engaging in a field or a task where an LLM is an acceptable tool.
However there are other tasks where the task is the goal. Nobody is getting paid to post on the Motte, and the point of this forum is to discuss and sharpen ideas with other people - if anyone wants to talk to an AI, they can do it themselves on their own time, but perhaps more importantly, if the forum devolves into AIs shouting at each other, nobody's really improving by it.
Shrike
4d ago
Only officers get to fly planes in the military, and you need a college degree to be an officer, and college admissions are stacked against white men.
If you're a little lucky and talented and have an in to your local congressman, the military will also pay you to get a college degree. Failing that, if you're smart and otherwise physically and mentally whole enough that the military will let you fly a plane, you'll probably be able to get into college somewhere regardless of what color you are.
I would be very surprised that airlines would want to hire fewer military pilots.
From what I gather it's for DEI or DEI-adjacent/like reasons.
Shrike
5d ago
Yes, I think this is exactly right. I find the claims of victimhood to be extremely revolting coming from elites, not because I think elites definitionally have it cushy, but because I think elites definitionally have obligations. What the Ivy league schools (and any school that is trying to give their students a liberal arts education so that they can be cultural leaders) should do is inculcate a sense of responsibility.
And I agree with you that righties can do the same thing. Righties usually couch it in terms of group oppression - not "I personally am oppressed" but rather "my group is being discriminated against by the great and powerful." Which does happen, and does need to be called out. But there is a fine line there and I think it's dangerous to emphasize it too much. In particular, I think right wing media spends too much time pushing "look at how we are being mistreated" stories instead of simply doing good gumshoe work.
Shrike
6d ago
The system can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive, or whatever variant of that saying you prefer.
If you're not preparing to fight over a longer time-span than your own life, you're not preparing to win the culture war.
Shrike
6d ago
Perhaps that's a bad word given the historical use. What I really mean is "job preparatory training," which can look like certification, a college degree, or just on-the-job training.
Shrike
6d ago
I definitely think that AI might have an impact, but the Internet didn't have quite as big an impact as one might have predicted. If AI does make a big difference, I wonder how much of it will be because of the tech and how much because of the state of the university.
I am largely all right with colleges understanding that they are something like a finishing school.
Shrike
6d ago
I think "attacking woke colleges" is the sort of thing red states are more likely to do under a blue federal administration.
I'm inclined to agree with you about the lack of impact on such efforts so far, I just don't think it's right to assume that after Trump, nobody will pay attention to colleges ever again.
Shrike
6d ago
I am directionally pro-removing college from its entitled position as a signifier of talent, but I think (specifically for the right wing) that it still retains a lot of merit for elite formation purposes. Part of elite formation is enculturation, and part of it is networking.
What I think isn't needed is for college to be the bottleneck through which job privileges are awarded. Most professions would likely be better off with something like a guild system that does on the job training. Colleges in some professions can slot easily into this, of course.
Shrike
6d ago
You need an actual alternative to academia though.
"The right" as a political movement needs right-wing or "neutral" colleges and universities to engage in elite formation. It probably already has enough institutions to fulfill this function.
Otherwise it wants research labs to help with things like growing crops and building better bombs. These functions of academia are likely to survive (even if the rest of academia is hit pretty hard) because they have a steady demand that exists outside of the student body size.
it is also still the main source of actual good public knowledge.
I don't think this is the case, if by "main source" we mean the source that is getting used. The press and advocacy/special interest groups have the ear of the public much more so than academia, which communicates with the broader public via the press. And the press covers issues that doesn't really get processed via academia, whereas a lot of even the best academic stuff nobody in the public really cares about (except maybe to look at pictures from Hubble or w/e). It's true that there may be university-affiliated think-tanks that do good work, but if I want to know something like "how many munitions did the US fire off in Iran" academia is not going to help me out (CSIS hasn't been affiliated with Georgetown for 30+ years, apparently because Georgetown booted them out precisely because they were so focused on the press and not "scholarship.").
Shrike
6d ago
Actually having wokeness receding would mean something that doesn't just depend on one individual
I agree with this very strongly (and have pointed this out several times) but state-level right-wing governments (notably Florida and Texas, if memory serves) have decided to get in on the action and they aren't going to go anywhere when Trump goes away.
And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia.
I can't use X The Everything App without it telling me that Fauci knew ahead of time that COVID vaccines could cause miscarriages. That sort of hit to institutional trust hits the upstream academic institutions by association.
Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that things have gotten worse for them recently. I broadly expect right-wing demographics to somewhat offset the general demographic decline that will hit schools, but I could be mistaken.
Shrike
6d ago
The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.
I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.
Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.
I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.
Shrike
7d ago
There's a steelman that getting genuinely into paid aviation pilot work is either for the rich or the lucky
Any kind of paid aviation work has to be a certain degree of lucky as they will screen out people who can't see and such, but for folks with good eyesight and general aptitude every single branch of the US military (except for maybe Space Force?) will pay you to get good at flying, and then you can take those skills into the private world with (hopefully) a solid track record (although based on what I've heard that in recent years the prime airlines may be trying to hire fewer military pilots, so it might be less of an EZ career path now than in the past.)
Shrike
7d ago
so it can shift their politics to be more realistic and neutral.
I don't want AI companies to try to shift my politics any more than I want KitchenAid to. If they want me to be more realistic and neutral they can bring about widespread material prosperity and try not to be polarizing.
Shrike
7d ago
See, I guess I am hoping for a nice middle ground where we keep artists around for conceptual and perhaps initial design work. The people I suppose I am endangering with this plan are animators/CGI artists.
If AIs end up Being All That, though, people will likely start turning to human artists specifically as an example of conspicuous consumption. So they've got that going for them!
Shrike
8d ago
Yeah I get the impression that a lot of AI power-users are using them precisely to write the deterministic programs that will give them more reliable answers than the AI.
(I've actually been specifically advised by an AI to do this, once.)
Shrike
8d ago
Film is an interesting example, and I agree with you. I think that if a Blender-produced movie was made with:
- Human-designed character and setting art
- Human script
- Human voice actors (at least for main roles) And AI that
- Adapted the art designs into Blender characters and background
- Designed and executed the scenes according to human direction
- Was able of being easily overridden (e.g. the humans didn't just let the AI do everything, but would manually place the camera and say "now I want the scene to start here, and the camera pan slowly over 20 seconds to here," or "no I want this shade of green for this guy's shirt")
It would come off as a human movie, with a non-generic human vision, but could plausibly be made much more quickly and cheaply than manually animating all of it. I'd find that much more palatable as an artistic work than telling an AI to "one-shot a movie, sci-fi, 1980s retro, synthwave, make no mistakes" or what have you.
Shrike
8d ago
Fable makes many important choices
Sure, and maybe this was a bad example, but you're aware that you're making those choices if you do that. If you aren't you quickly will be when you try to play the product. People delegating things like font choice to AI (even unwittingly) isn't as big of a deal, civilizationally, as people unwittingly being pushed in a particular social, political, or cultural direction.
And I do worry, in particular, about the latter. AIs are more homogenous than humans and if humans interact with them in significant degrees I think it will reduce the diversity of human creative output.
But simply make it much more intuitive, easy, and fast for the user to refine. Then you wouldn't need a GA for creative work, but it would still help by automatically configuring subtle details that a centralized LLM wouldn't know.
Sure, I like this idea. And to my point, you could make it easier for the user to refine by letting them talk at the screen (much like how people to today, and how Deckard does in Blade Runner) and if the screen won't respond to "what should I do next" or spit out "that's a genuinely interesting direction to push this project" then it would be much different than AI today, and I think alleviate some concerns about outsourcing opinions.
Shrike
8d ago
I do think this could help with this angle, but a slower response is probably not as important as one that does not seem like a person on the internet.
Shrike
8d ago
I've got access to higher end stuff from work and I've found that Sonnet on the free plan is basically golden for most anything I want from it in my personal life. The main things I would get out of paying for a model aren't "better model" it would be things like better integration with my desktop files (since on the free plan you can't give Claude access to a folder) and longer uninterrupted sessions.
You're probably thinking of Geert Wilders, although there are plenty other interesting cases.
More options
Context Copy link