Not too long ago there was news that CA is about to pass Germany to become the 4th largest economy in the world. (CA press release here: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/10/24/icymi-california-poised-to... original article by Bloomberg)

Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term future, i.e. the next couple of months or years.

People on their deathbed will optimize either for the extremely short term (finishing this conversation) or the extremely long term (the last chance to affect how they'll be remembered).

This suggests that if people lie on their death bed, they'll lie in different ways than ordinarily. Even if you can't take deathbed statements as unvarnished truth, their differences from everyday statements can be revealing.

You are, of course, right in the all specific details you've brought up vis-a-vis the winterizing and the nature of the power grid. I just think you missed the parent's point slightly.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229686

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Your talk on this subject (helpfully posted below) only furthers this when you present a variety of arguments of wildly varying strengths against AI, in the same vein as "37 challenges to evolution". It makes me feel like you have some valid criticism and a lot of bad faith argumentation.

Sadly, I think this characterization is only mostly unfair rather than entirely so. I enjoy your writing and thoughts, and you speak with clarity, but on this subject I think you have constructed a mold of bad-AI-argumentation that you squeeze all AI-argumentation into and in so doing fail to rebut any of it.

Additionally, human nature makes it hard to receive legitimate criticism dispassionately, let alone when it comes in a big pile of stuff that also contains pointless abuse.

There is value in comments, but depending on a project's circumstances it may or may not be economical to extract it.

If you're willing to admit that there are gradations to the inherent unethicalness of government actions then it's at least conceivable to grade them on the same ethical scale as every other group.

You have fundamentally the same position as someone who claims "there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." There may be some truth to that worldview, but people have to live in the world where both governments and capitalism are the status quo. Both sentiments are broad enough to critique a large fraction of human society, and thus can be pulled out as a 'reason' for targeting any particular aspect one may instinctively dislike without having to put in the mental effort to determine why.

Secondly, you say Facebook has governance only over people who have given their consent. Taking second order effects into account this is clearly not true. Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya genocide by UN Fact Finding Mission. Negative externalities exist, and in practice they can be quite common.

Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.

> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).

I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.

I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.

I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.

> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.

I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.

Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from the rest of your sentence is not what you intended. I would not have read it this way from the phrase 'A big mistake, but she owned it.'

> we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, and dangerous lies from credible, verified institutions including the former POTUS, prominent newspapers, and other important cultural institutions.

The NLFSA notes that we've been seeing a new attack on free speech and free thought emerge, namely Steven Bannon 'flood the zone with shit' approach. The classical free speech position is to fight bad ideas with better ideas, fight bad speech with good. We're running into largely unprecedented problems (in the anglosphere, at least) where bad speech is drowning out the good. There are many things we can point as possible causes (say the internet changing communication patterns, information siloing, propaganda, etc.) and there aren't clear solutions.

Conventional free speech absolutism prevents you from being muzzled -- but that's it. Acknowledging you can be silenced by a chorus of people shouting over you requires a new position.

> I don't know how someone can look at American politics and politicians (never mind cultural institutions) over the last ~decade and conclude that these people are fit to regulate Americans' speech.

The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.

I think it's reasonable to see all this, and despite our problems double down on convention free speech absolutism -- that being muzzled is the most dangerous form of intervention, that better speech will ultimately win out over bad ideas. But I don't fault someone for changing their mind to try to combat rampant conspiracy theories.

"The West" as a term is very broad and sufficiently undefined[0] that it makes a great rhetorical cudgel (both for people who support it and those against it). Unfortunately that same slipperiness makes it challenging for people trying to speak clearly. While "the West" has often been loosely aligned with human rights (some defending/embracing them, some merely claiming them as magic words) they certainly have their problems.

Your argument seems to be do the following: substitute an inferior term into rgbrenner's argument, and then complaining that your chosen term is inferior.

rgbrenner:> The sides aren't US and China, they're X and anti-X

you:> You say the sides are Y and anti-X, but Y isn't X

[0]: Do we mean America? America + Western Europe? Are we including Canada? How about Mexico? All colonial powers? Does Eastern Europe count? How about Australia? Or even Japan? You might have a particular definition in mind, but it's likely other people have different understandings.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

This strikes me as a bad analogy. What differentiates your statement from

Theft by itself is morally neutral, [...] it's what you steal that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society.

You might be willing to endorse that statement, but I think most people would not.

I think that if you want to assert that rent-seeking is tool-like, with multiple uses some positive and some negative, then the burden of proof is on you to provide some examples.