Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285360

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

You seem to be arguing with yourself, not with me. If you are satisfied with a cop only facing criminal liability (often from the same prosecutors that rely on police to make other cases, among other issues as you pointed out) fine that is your prerogative. Don't file a civil case. But don't misrepresent my position. Criminal prosecution does not preclude civil, nor the other way around. Citizens should not face such hurdles to file civil suits, irrespective of whatever happens re a criminal case. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Surely your comprehend that one can be found liable both criminally and civilly in many cases. Or tried for both but subject to different penalties (including none) depending on how each goes. Why are your LEO buddies so special as to be largely exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us?

The fact your comment history is riddled with these continued misrepresentations on this topic while you claim to educate is simply galling. Have a good day, I don't think I can continue in good faith with someone who seems to predicate engagement on this topic with unfounded assumptions about others education on the issue. Your own comments on this topic indeed are indicative of a severe projection in this respect.

This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.

I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?

I'm supposed to conclude from this election that the electorate didn't support the current president?

Your post is really unimpressive. You care about these things yet you need me to provide you the name of progressive politicians? You want to take agency away because of redistricting and voter suppression yet immediately claim that the "median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising"? So do they have agency or not? Did the politicians program their revulsion too? Or was that the corporations? Maybe they need to hang out with you for a few weeks to be sufficiently deprogrammed.

I'm sure it will look like many other such ventures in that domain. I can see the people desperately trying to crawl over the walls now as you go into another second paragraph non sequitur.

I think what is clear is you don't believe in democracy. How can you given the obvious contempt you show for the American electorate.

Unlike you I know the difference between someone who doesn't have agency and someone who isn't worth my time. Have a good day.

Excellent standards for people authorized by the state to run around with a badge and a gun in a free society. Your comment history on this is so unimpressive. Would you countenance the same excuses in anyone else? A man puts on his police uniform and suddenly you think he should be immune from civil prosecution because "my boss told me so" and "I didn't know"?

I wonder if you will make similar excuses for robo cop. Or if your principles merely extend to whatever human you can find in uniform willing to tolerate your friendship.

The same intuition applies if you walk into McDonald's and a person there mistreats you. You want that person held responsible.

But the LLM is not a person. What is there to even sue? It just seems like it would simply pass through to the corporate entity without the same tension of feeling like we let a human get away with something. Because there is no human, just a corporation and the robot servicing the place.

Put another way - if the LLM is not a person, what is the advantage of a personal lawsuit?

Just sue the McDonalds. Even in a case where the LLM is extremely misaligned and acts in a way where you might normally personally sue the McDonald's employee, I'm just not sure the human intuition about "holding someone accountable" would have its normal force because again - the LLM is not a person.

So given we already have the notions of incorporation and indemnification it doesn't make sense to say what is precluding LLMs from running McDonald's is they can't be sued. If McDonald's can still be sued, then not only is there no problem, there is very likely not even a change in the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

Assuming you can still sue McDonalds I am not sure if this is a problem in the robotic llm case. I'm also trying to imagine a case where you would want to sue the llm and not the company. Given robots/llm don't have free will I'm not sure the problem with qualified immunity making police unaccountable applies.

There already exist a lot of similar conventions in corporate law. Generally, a main advantage of incorporation is protecting the people making the decisions from personal lawsuits.

My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.

You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?

What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?

Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.

The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.

Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.

Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.

Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

Thanks for the back and forth.

You can almost never hold anyone in government accountable. You are forced to sue your own community to get some shred of justice while the actual people who violated your rights face zero accountability.

Tell lawmakers who want your vote this November that you want an end to qualified immunity. Agents of the state should not be less accountable to the laws of the land than regular individuals.

The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.

The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.

A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?

Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?

If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.

Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.

This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183076

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.

If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?

You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?

Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.

As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish