(1) Animal welfare. The researchers are aware of the animal welfare issues at stake, but a collection of metrics around pod culture, stress, and reproduction should be tracked across experiments to make sure we're not hurting the animals. If thresholds are exceeded across multiple experimebts with this tech, the research should stop.

(2) Acoustic -> semantic gap. There's a green lumber problem with this research. We may be able to predict animal responses in playback tests, but we don't have a way to map that back to semantic meaning. This is probably fine for now, but if we don't have adequate semantic theory or if we have multiple competing semantic theories that all explain the patterns equally well, the we're just manipulating the animals, not communicating with them. (eg, It's not even really clear to me that "whale concepts" and "human concepts" would be commensurable.)

(3) Bad incentives. Between media sensationalism, the normal problems and biases that come with funding science today, and potentially terrible usages of "whale tech" (eg, clearing out shipping lanes, warfare), it seems to me there are some extra ethical considerations with this research such that there may be a point where the outcome space is overwhelmingly negative. It would be nice if mechanisms existed such that research could be stopped if these bad incentives activate.

I think Nietzsche is broadly right, that Christianity and enlightenment are brother-enemies. The belief that Christianity was Anti-Science and then the Enlightenment came and saved the day is a plainly falsifiable myth. From The Gay Science:

"It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in knowledge rests—that even we knowers today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine."

Or what constituted "enlightened, scientific, progressive" opinion on eugenics until WWII.

History is not a superhero comic.

the categories i like to use to describe what llms are capable and incapable of are: instrumental reason, which is reason as a tool for achieving a goal; and objective reason, which is reasoning about which goals are good or bad, or worth pursuing.

llms are, i think, approaching or have achieved better-than-human performance on the former category in a wide variety of applications.

the latter, not so. leaving aside that there are schools which claim (dogmatically, imho) humans don't or can't engage in objective reason, i dont believe llms are structurally capable of it. their goals can only be imposed on them from outside, coming from prompts, implicit value assumptions in training data, loss function, and rlhf. there is something about human interior experience of an objectively existing world that lets is evaluate true/false/good/bad in a way that is unique to humans among other animals.

llms can't do it. i dont just mean on ethical, epistemic, or aesthetic judgements, but even in practical circumstances like the ones engineers encounter. the reason engineers still have to work alongside llms, even though lllms are (imho) far better programmers and technicians, is that even when given a goal, there is always a graph of evaluations that lead to that objective and llms routinely fail to evaluate the tradeoffs and land in states in outcome space that are subtly (or not so subtly) wrong, even though the objective is complete!

forgive typos, i am on mobile.

Something that I noticed that might help clarify things: I think the author mixes two phenomena together: (1) Rents and (2) subjective vs objective property rights.

Rents were pervasive in the middle ages. There are lots of black legends about medieval Europe, but we don't have to tell golden legends about it either. The whole economy if medieval Europe relied on people controlling land, then demanding goods and service in exchange for its use. That is Rent! It was often exceedingly exploitative and harsh!

What changed in the modern era was a the decline of objective property rights. The way property was treated in law and fact went from "this is my farm, which is mine for farming, and it comes with these rights and obligations. That's the commons. I have these rights to it and these obligations to my lord and his other subjects in how I use it." This changed to "this is my property with which I can do what I see fit. I have no objective obligations to anyone else." Subjective property rights also existed before capitalism, but they completely eclipsed objective right in the early modern period. This increased economic productivity and growth on a scale that was not thought possible, but also, as the author notes, had serious negative consequences.

The reason that this distinction matters is that you can absolutely abolish subjective property rights and still have rents. You can actually make them worse. If people are being extorted for access to some good, they will not care if it's done by a private company or a public administrator. I don't see how the author's framework of "personal property" overcomes the issue.

This book gives a conceptual groundwork for what I believe to be both the promise, and crisis of AI. AI excels at, and either will soon or already has surpassed humans at a kind of reasoning that Horkheimer calls "instrumental reason." This is reason as a tool for achieving ends. AI will, I think, surpass humans at writing maintainable code, as this falls within that domain. The writer is thoughtful, but the obstacles listed in the article are technical, and they will likely fall.

A second kind of reasoning, which he calls "objective reason," is reasoning about which ends are worth pursuing. Our contemporary pragmatic, positivist culture in the West has a hard time reasoning about ends. We tend to just see different perspectives, competing power networks, etc. We are skeptical of capital-J Justice, for example. We tend to see it as historically and culturally contingent, or else as a mask for powerful interests. Horkheimer believed this learned relativism was responsible for new forms of domination and control that emerged in the 20th century in both totalitarian and putatively free societies.

I think the author's thesis would be correct if it had focused on AI's inability to discern ends. But that then raises the question: can we discern ends? Horkheimer never settled on a way to rehabilitate objective reason. He focused on critique, and his critics suggest he ended up with a tangle of negations that couldn't hold up any objective ends. I think rehabilitating objective reason is the task that faces us whether we like it or not, given our moment in history with the advent of AI. It's something practitioners need to think about. Either we recover the philosophical tools of objective reason in light of the critique which caused them to be discarded in the first place, or ends will be imposed arbitrarily by any and everyone with the means to do so.

I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.

Measuring developer productivity should, in my opinion, have one dimension for speed, one for quality, and one for user impact. LOC can be fine as a measurement for speed, you just don’t want to look at it in isolation. You would want to also measure, for example, escape rate and usage for the features the developer worked on, and be willing to change or refine these if circumstances require it.

You also need to look for different profiles based on the developer’s level of seniority. A senior dev probably shouldn’t be writing as much code as a contributor, but their user impact should be high, and escape rate low. Analyzing differences between teams is important, as well. A team that has a lot of escapes or little user impact probably has issues that need management attention, and may not have anything at all to do with individual developer productivity or ability.

In brief, the numbers are there to help you make better management decisions, not to relieve you of having to make them.

While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).

There was no liberal freedom or value of toleration as we understand it prior to the resolution of the wars of religion. There was, however, a variegated patchwork of ad hoc arrangements based on custom, convenience, common interest, charity, forbearance (notably NOT liberal freedom or toleration) that allowed people with different religious beliefs, practices, and levels of commitment to live together in relative peace over long periods of time.

He also gives material evidence of how the reformation, counter-reformation, wars of religion, and the emergent nation state systematically destroyed these intricate arrangements.

[0]https://books.google.com/books?id=wGJjSvehY5MC

That said, I stand by every word of my argument.

I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).

When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.

As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.

(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.

(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves. The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.

(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.