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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Writing bills is complex (it's not that far removed from code written in legalese) and boring, it's not that surprising that the job frequently gets fobbed off to true believer activists. Congress and their staff mostly take already drafted bills from outsiders and their job is negotiating to build coalitions of support to get them passed.

Not boring at all but can confirm that electeds and most staff cannot parse things, as well as that legal code is extremely similar to computer code. The amount of trouble I once ran into at a state government where my boss was running a "clean up" bill to update part of the code handling signs in government offices so that a sign warning people that the fine for violating section a.b.c was $x was frustrating because all they saw was a delta of "it used to be $y but now it's $x!". So many people thought that my boss was trying to increase the fine. Got it resolved and removed the necessity of fixing a previous legislature's failure to keep the code consistent by making that section referential instead of literal.

The absolutely fucking wild thing here is not that some particular group of policy wonks wrote a policy.

The absolutely fucking wild thing here is that what is potentially one of the most profoundly consequential geopolitical things to have happened in our lifetimes may have been done with any (much less a primary) influence from EAish concerns/panic over the risk of imminent human-extinction from out-of-control AI.

Also, putting the purported screenshot through another round of broken telephone for (what I'm fairly certain was also @DaseindustriesLtd's primary intended) emphasis:

[...]

-EAs wrote the semiconduct export controls

-this does slow down China, and many people think the point was just slowing down/winning an arms race with China

-that was not the primary aim in writing the semiconduct export controls, though slowing stuff down Generally Considered Good

-of at least equal and possibly greater importance was that a bunch of global governance stuff looks way easier if there is one chip supply chain and no alternatives

[...]

Uh...

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