So, any predictions on what’s next on the Iran conflict? Most analysis seems to point to the idea that Iran is outmatched and incapacitated, making their main option at retaliation being mostly symbolic (eg ballatics towards a USA target but small impact or a isolated terror attack)
I wake up to find we are at war with Iran. WTF, If Tulsi Gabbard doesn't resign... she will have lost whatever credibility she had with me. (I know that's probably the least important thing right now... I'm going out to fill up my gas cans.) God help us all.
I think you will find that nobody cares, that the preponderance of Trumpists who were principled anti-war isolationists are fine with it, and that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
It's kinda woke to not want war with Iran, when you think about it actually.
Perhaps worth noting there are at least two distinct strains of "anti-war" groups in the MAGA coalition you might not be distinguishing. One is isolationism, yes, but the other is more mercenary "sovereigntism" and perfectly fine with wars as long as America benefits from them. Their principal objection is to spending "blood and treasure" for high minded principles of democracy, human rights, stopping genocide, defending allies etc., and so while they agreed with the former group that the Iraq war (and most of America's recent military actions) was bad, if America had kept the oil, would have been mostly okay with it.
and I'm sure Iranian dissidents (not high-profile exiles, but the people on the ground you need to run an actual puppet state) are eager to line up and risk guerilla attacks in order to collaborate with a country that's openly, not just covertly, looting them
the one difference I can see from Afghanistan is that it should be shorter, if only because Americans won't be able to delude themselves for as long that they're winning
Curious if there's a place where we can see the full set of rules for commenting on open threads. I know the old site had a page but it doesn't seem as easily accessible here.
Also. Is the two paragraphs rule going to be strictly enforced if will it still be subject to a good dose of discretion? Assuming it's a remove comment or temporary ban at most?
I've felt confidently ban-proof for over a decade (I can find comments on SSC going back at least to 2015) by assuming Scott is the sort of person who wants the right answer, even if it isn't the answer he started with, and who wants to surround himself with people who want the same thing. And then I make comments consistent with those assumptions.
This implies a lot more than one might think at first. For example, anyone who writes as if they have the right answer and are so certain of it that their winning move is to verbally bully anyone with a different answer are on a fast track to a ban, no matter how right they might turn out to be, because that strategy is stupidly easy to copy. But by a similar argument, so is anyone who makes a habit of accusing other people of bullying. At the end of the day, the safest thing to do is to keep offering evidence and supports, phrased as if to persuade, not pummel.
This doesn't mean that every comment has to be informative or asking for same. Some can be fun (provided they're "laugh with me" fun, not "laugh at this outgroup" fun). Also fine for comments that aren't universally important, but detail something important about ourselves ("I recently adopted a stray for the first time; here are some things I noticed"). Internet personae are easier to believe if they're plausibly backed by actual people, particularly in the LLM age.
Another important corollary of these assumptions is that probing at the rules is risky. "What is the exact list of official posting rules?" comes off as "how close am I allowed to come to some edge between good and bad before I get banned?" or "what argument can I make to justify not banning me for the comment I want to make, or for banning someone else for that comment over there?". Time spent playing rules lawyer is time not spent on making or responding to comments that so obviously exemplify wanting the right answers even if one did not start with them, that no one would bother questioning them. So, ask for the rules enough to know what type of forum you're dealing with, and then lean into its ideal (or into another forum with the ideal you're seeking). Don't play the edge case game, unless you literally looking for a forum that spends most of its time arguing about forum rules.
I couldn't find the rule about advertising. Scott sometimes makes a "Classifieds Thread" that is specifically for advertising your products, services, blogs, employment, or dating. These are irregular; the last one was in April this year:
He already started and lost a war against the Houthis as well. I guess that one was slightly easier to rationalize since there had already been ongoing military action there.
Assuming that peak woke is over (which I believe it probably is, we seem to have the antibodies now), I think it would be good to document that era, preferably in an objective, impartial way. Because I expect that five years later, if you mention any of those things that actually happened, the typical reaction will be "nope, that is some crazy right-wing conspiracy theory, it obviously could not have happened". Heck, while we were in the middle of it, many people were in denial until they got attacked personally.
The part that I would like to capture most is the feeling when you are surrounded by crazy people yelling obviously insane things in your face, but all the sane people are quiet because speaking would make them the next targets of the mob. The coalition of crazy people saying crazy things, and some professor providing academic justification for them. Also, you can't call crazy "crazy", because that would be ableist... but they are free to call you a Nazi and require everyone else to isolate you socially lest they also become called Nazis. Lots of things become taboo virtually overnight, whether it is a picture of green frog, a glass of milk, or an "okay" gesture, just because some hysterical people on Twitter decided so. And most people keep pretending that this is perfectly normal way for the sane people to behave.
I think the right way to do this would involve a lot of video documentation, with little commentary. The commentary should be limited to stating facts such as the year, the place, who were the participants, and what happened as a consequence. Most importantly, it should not comment on how crazy the entire thing is... that is something that the viewer should conclude for themselves. Making any judgment in the commentary would probably be harmful to the project, because that would allow people to nitpick specific words in the commentary, taking attention away from the thing being documented. Heck, just saying that the person commenting the footage is right-wing would be a sufficient distraction for many, which is why I would prefer the document to be made by moderate left-wing people -- after all, they probably made a majority of targets of the woke attacks, simply because they existed in their proximity.
" Heck, while we were in the middle of it, many people were in denial until they got attacked personally."
I feel like this captures the issue perfectly.
No, not the "woke" issue. The "woke narrative" issue. The issue where you and others have picked out a very modest subset of dots from a very large cluster of dots, drawn a shape through them and then very solemnly insisted that this shape that you've just drawn is not just objective reality, but the most vitally important piece of objective reality.
To me, the thing you're proposing doing sounds *exactly* like this:
Look at how crazy those cardiologists are! If you mention that those things actually happen, a lot of people would call it a crazy, anti-cardiology conspiracy theory!
More bluntly, how would go about distinguishing between the following two hypothesis:
1. The Era of Woke (whenever exactly that was) involved an unusually high incidence of soft cultural power/community pressure being used to ruin peoples' lives.
2. The base rate of people being singled out for harassment, shaming and isolation by their broader communities has actually changed relatively little over the past 60-80 years. However, the internet and social media vastly increased the visibility of such incidents, allowing interested parties to learn about far more of them than would otherwise be practical. Also, roughly concurrent cultural shifts made many people who were previously very unlikely to be singled out in this way somewhat more likely targets (though by no means *exclusively* so). This lead to a sharply increased feeling of vulnerability and anger among many of these people: also much easier to share and signal boost thanks to the internet. These trends combined to create a *narrative* of widespread shunning and shaming and vicious cultural attacks well out of proportion to the experience of the average person[1].
I'm (obviously, I would imagine) more biased towards believing 2, but that's partly just contrarianism. I genuinely have no idea how one would go about figuring out something like an average rate of people being subjected to toxic community pressure (something inherently both subjective and not well reported).
I will say when read things like "the feeling when you are surrounded by crazy people yelling obviously insane things in your face," and " And most people keep pretending that this is perfectly normal way for the sane people to behave" it does make me wonder. Specifically it makes me wonder, did they just memory-hole the entire century prior to 2010? Or did they just never bother to learn about the experiences of anyone not like them? Because the experience of being surrounded by obvious, blatant hate and insanity and everyone around you treating it like it was perfectly normal and *you* were the insane one for objecting to it? Many, many millions of people have had that experience throughout history. It's not new. The only thing news things about it are 1. the insanity isn't codified into law as much as it used to be and 2. which people are exposed to it.
[1]In much the same way that cable news luridly reporting on every violent crime it can find has often created an impression of rising crime rates even during times when they were actually falling.
>I'm (obviously, I would imagine) more biased towards believing 2, but that's partly just contrarianism. I genuinely have no idea how one would go about figuring out something like an average rate of people being subjected to toxic community pressure (something inherently both subjective and not well reported).
You can get a lot of indirect evidence from mainstream institutions by searching for "political polarisation" rather than "social justice". Theres a lot of this, extending far beyond the behaviour of elected officials. It would be quite hard for that to happen without an increase in excommunications from at least one side. Combine this with a good amount of liberal institutions without conservative equivalents and not so much in reverse, and legal restrictions either directly on or chillingly effecting the kinds of excommunications that conservatives might want to do, and its hard to see how it *wouldnt* happen.
"It would be quite hard for that to happen without an increase in excommunications from at least one side."
I disagree rather strongly with this point. I think this touches significantly on one of my main points of departure about how I'm modelling the world and how some others are. I think political polarization at the level of communities is one of the driving forces behind this narrative existing, but I think it has been caused by large, sweeping structural factors: primarily changes in technology.
To be clear, lots of past eras in U.S. history had very strong political divisions. The most significant things that I think have changed are how those division map onto the human geography, and how difficult it is for people to move from one community to another. In the past, nearly all of your social contact was necessarily with people in the place where you lived. If you had views that would anger most of the people in your community, you basically had to keep quiet about them as long as you lived there. And moving elsewhere was more difficult. Nowadays people both have an easier time physically relocating themselves[1] and options to meet and form communities with people who live nowhere near them. It's generally much more pleasant to socialize with people who you don't have to hide large parts of yourself from. Let me say this part on its one line with extra emphasis, because I think it's important. As far as I can tell:
*polarized communities are mostly the result of self-selection.*
It's not a question of people being "excommunicated" from communities that thereby make themselves more homogeneous.[2] It's a question of *people seeking out other like-minded people.* Narratives that suggest that this stems mostly from "enemy action" are very popular, for understandable reasons. But that doesn't make them correct.
"Combine this with a good amount of liberal institutions without conservative equivalents"
I think this is a perfect example. The conservative narrative around this is one of liberals driving conservatives out of those institutions. And I expect there is not zero of that. But I don't see any reason to assume that would be the driving force. Rather, it seems to me like in many cases conservatives decided that they didn't like the culture of those institutions, and stopped trying to be part of them[3]. There's a feedback loop at work, where a particular space having a reputation for being unfriendly to Group X will make members of Group X avoid it, lowering the instance of Group X in the space, boosting that reputation. Yudkowsky calls this "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs," but I think it can probably act on other characteristics besides beliefs almost as easily.
"and not so much in reverse,"
This is just plain not true, as far as I can tell. There are certainly conservative institutions without liberal equivalents. A very easy example is "law enforcement organizations," though the conservative skew seems to vary a lot org by org. I don't expect you'll find many liberals at all working at ICE, for example, and there are some local police departments that skew *enormously* more conservative than the communities they police (Portland is one I'm particularly aware of), whereas I'd guess that law enforcement jobs at the National Park Service are probably significantly less politically homogeneous. There are also plenty of private institutions that skew quite conservative, though plenty of them try to pretend otherwise for PR reasons.
[1] To be clear, there was still geographic mobility in the past. But in the modern world makes it much easier to learn about other places before you go, to find housing or work in advance, and even to form and retain social contacts independent of physical location. All those things lower the costs and risks of moving to a new city or region.
[2]That certainly does happen sometimes, but it very much happened in the past too, and I don't see a great reason to assume it's more common now.
[3]I want to note that "established conservatives leaving the institutions" is only one of the ways this can happen, and probably not the most important one. The other two are conservatives just not choosing to join in the first place, and conservatives changing their views and become more liberal as the participate in the institution. I'm sure which happens the most depends a lot on the specific institution and the time period.
>*polarized communities are mostly the result of self-selection.*
That makes some sense when we talk about moving to California vs Texas, and less so when theres a tangible disadvantage to leaving. A university degree (in the right field) is still a significant boost to income, I doubt people would just self-select out of getting one without some measure of deliberate hostility. But that kind of hostility is also not the cancelations Im talking about. Those were never enough to make up the bulk of the sorting.
The above is the first graph when I google "political polarization usa", and a quick eyeball addition will tell you that its not just people sorting into parties more efficiently, the distance in opinion also grows. I would expect this to decrease tolerance. Indeed, the second graph in there shows people increasingly seeing the other party as a threat, which is not quite the same as its members being one, but close.
This one is about people not wanting their children to marry someone of the other party. Surprisingly, I have difficulty finding that kind of research extended into the Trump years. This second one has a sort-of followup with a similar question in my next link, but Im not sure how comparable they really are, because a naive reading would suggest 2020 republicans are *less* upset about that than 2010.
I would be quite surprised if these opinion shifts didnt go along with an increased eagerness to kick people from the other side out.
>There are certainly conservative institutions without liberal equivalents.
Sure there are, but its a matter of numerics and relevance. As an indicator: conservatives objecting to universities mostly complain about how liberal they are, and how they dont tolerate conservative views. Liberals complaining about the police spend a lot of breath on policing in general, a little on how the people in it are too conservative, and almost none on how being liberal isnt tolerated among them. Whatever you think of those opinions, its clearly not a symmetrical situation.
"A university degree (in the right field) is still a significant boost to income, I doubt people would just self-select out of getting one without some measure of deliberate hostility."
You're treating the choice like a binary when it is really, REALLY not. When you are decided what to do with your life it's never a choice between "do I pursue a degree in Field A or literally do everything else the same except not pursue a degree in Field A." It looks much closer to "which of Field A, Field B or Field C should I pursue a career in?" where expected salary weighs in but so do a lot of other things, including your perceptions of their culture. Really though, it's often much less explicit than that: which careers even come to your attention at all as worth considering is going to depend *a lot* on your cultural upbringing and information sources, so it won't even necessarily be *your* perceptions of the culture of Field A which determines how likely you are to work in it. It will be the perceptions of the community you grew up in, which will shape your life experience in ways you can't possible appreciate from the inside.
"its not just people sorting into parties more efficiently"
The fact that you're thinking about this as people "sorting into parties," meaning (unless I'm misunderstanding you) the two major U.S. political parties, is a very big barrier to good understanding. Culture is much, MUCH more complex than "are you a Republican or a Democrat?" The quirks of the U.S. political system dictate that those are the only two parties that really matter, but there are dozens of different cultures and subcultures you can belong to, which will inform your career choices and your politics in non-obvious ways.
"Liberals complaining about the police spend a lot of breath on policing in general, a little on how the people in it are too conservative, and almost none on how being liberal isnt tolerated among them. "
I think your experience and mine are very different on this one, starting with literally the first word of your sentence. The people I see having the loudest criticisms of police tend to regard "liberal" as something of a pejorative--one that can apply to both Democrats and Republicans. The fact the people in policing are too conservative is certainly talked about somewhat, though it's an extremely well-known and well-understood fact and so doesn't bear a lot of repeating. But the difference in criticism is also very much a cultural one. A lot of Republicans seem to think and talk about things in individualistic terms[1]: so "academics don't tolerate conservative viewpoints" is a statement about the individual academics and their lack of personal virtue. Meanwhile the equivalent discussions in leftist spaces are about structural and institutional factors: "W and X are the reasons that policing in a society with qualities Y and Z tends to lead to regressive outcomes." The individuals are very much blurred out to the picture, it's the shape of the underlying structures that determines what happens.[2]
But also, there are big cultural differences in what "tolerating different viewpoints" and "tolerance" in general actually entails. Some of the left-leaning spaces where I've spent time are pretty conformist and will quickly turn on anyone who doesn't toe certain lines--though I tend to exit those ones pretty quickly, having a bad case of "can't keep my mouth shut"--but a lot of them are willing to tolerate quite a wide range of different viewpoints. What they are NOT willing to tolerate is making other community members feel unsafe. First, there are people who routinely do that as part of how they express their political views[3]. Second, some political views include "these members of your community *should* be unsafe" as pretty central tenets. Both of these sorts of people are going to find themselves quite unwelcome in a lot of spaces that are otherwise happy to host quite a broad range of spirited political discussion.
[1] I do say "seem" because this is very much my impression from the outside. I'm sure there are specific exceptions, and I'll allow I could be wrong about the general trend.
[2] To be clear, my own opinion is that this is a very useful--pretty much indispensable--way to be able to think about things. But as with any viewpoint, it has limitations and will fail in places. Some people certainly get too stuck in it, to their detriment.
[3] I think this is unintentional in some cases, but very much deliberate in others. There's a certain sort of asshole who loves to hide behind "it's just my opinion" or I'm just asking questions" to deliberately antagonize others.
Im a bit disappointed you responded only to the side comments addressing your misinterpretation of me on the merits, and not the clarification of my own argument. If you think those data are irrelevant, at least say so.
>where expected salary weighs in but so do a lot of other things, including your perceptions of their culture.
I agree, I just think you must underestimate the economic aspect of it. A college degree predicts ~75% higher income. That includes more talented and more marginal students, but also more and less profitable degrees. That should overcome a good bit of social mismatch. There also are (were?) quite a few fields where a degree is required but on the job its majority conservative, and those tend to be the better paying ones too, so you could limit the culture clash to 4 years.
>The fact that you're thinking about this as people "sorting into parties," meaning (unless I'm misunderstanding you) the two major U.S. political parties, is a very big barrier to good understanding. Culture is much, MUCH more complex than "are you a Republican or a Democrat?"
>I think your experience and mine are very different on this one, starting with literally the first word of your sentence. The people I see having the loudest criticisms of police tend to regard "liberal" as something of a pejorative--one that can apply to both Democrats and Republicans.
Im not thinking about it as *just* that - the point of the graph is to demonstrate something happening that is beyond *any* kind of sorting. That said, it also shows a normal distribution of "left-right-ness" *within* each party, so the other cultural differences can probably be abstracted for politics specifically. Indeed, while there are leftists calling themselves anti-liberal, my observations about rethorical focus hold for both - they can be equally true for more and less radical people. The neat separation into different ideological tendencies within one "side" doesnt exist outside the most politically committed, and even there its often a made-up superimposition over continuous rethoric and policies.
>The fact the people in policing are too conservative is certainly talked about somewhat, though it's an extremely well-known and well-understood fact and so doesn't bear a lot of repeating.
You could say the same about colleges being left, but somehow republicans think that bears a lot of repeating.
>A lot of Republicans seem to think and talk about things in individualistic terms[1]:... Meanwhile the equivalent discussions in leftist spaces are about structural and institutional factors
Whatever they blame for it, the point is that republicans complain about the experience they have or would have in college, and democrats dont complain about the experience they have or would have in the police force. They might agree that theres something bad there when asked, but they dont feel its worth complaining about, because that just isnt of comparable importance to the college version.
>But also, there are big cultural differences in what "tolerating different viewpoints" and "tolerance" in general actually entails.
I understand that the left has reasons why they think their cancellations are good, or "dont count as intolerance". Thats all well and good, but I dont think it impacts the positive analysis of whether the cancellations are happening.
You make a good point. For example, to be accused of heresy during Middle Ages was certainly much more terrifying and devastating for the target. Or to be called an "antisocial element" during socialism. Etc.
But these things were documented, too. You can see movies showing the victims of inquisition in the sympathetic light. The movies about victims of socialism are fewer, but they also exist. And the woke hysteria is not fundamentally different from things shown in e.g. The Wave (1981).
I have the same wish for the woke era -- to be documented as it was, non-metaphorically.
That's fair. I definitely think documenting the factual details of events (as best as can be done a few years after the fact) is a perfectly good and reasonable thing to do.
And I'll add that the problem I'm gesturing at isn't by any means unique to this particular topic, it's a pretty general problem with history. Recording or researching some individual event and getting reasonable accuracy and detail isn't that hard[1]. But reality is composed of an utterly intractable number of such events. The question of how to select and connect events in a way that leads to an overall accurate understanding of a particular chunk of history seems like just an absolutely staggeringly hard one, with no objectively correct approach.[2] I Am Not A Historian so I can't really say how good the standard approaches are, just that from the outside the problem seems like a daunting one.
Which, now that I think of it, inspires me to make a suggestion. If at all possible, I think a project like this would benefit *enormously* from the participation of at least one person with experience as a professional historian. I do realize that this could be kind of difficult to arrange, not the least because a lot of people in academic humanities are likely to be pretty hostile to such a project. But the field isn't a monolith, and I'm sure there are some who'd see the value and take it seriously.
[1] At least, for most events in the modern world. Obviously there are cases where it is difficult or oughtright impossible.
[2] Of course, that's not just history, it's also current events. While false information and underlying value differences both play roles, it seems to me like a huge fraction of current political divisions stem from people sampling very different subsets of The Set of Factually Grounded Current Events and connecting them into very different pictures without necessarily being fundamentally incorrect or dishonest.
A black student caught shoplifting attacked the shop owner, and got arrested by police. The college professors encouraged their students to "protest against racism" against the shop (e.g. gave them credits for participating in the protest). Ultimately, the college had to pay the over $30 million.
Students encouraged by woke professors decided to "protest against racism" by banning all white students and teachers from entering the school for one day. A professor who objected against this, had to teach his further classes in a public park, because the college police told him they couldn't protect him against students' threats of physical violence if he returns to the college. College paid him $500,000 settlement. This was followed by further violent protests in the college.
(Then there is e.g. Gamergate, where Wikipedia still insists on the absurd conspiracy theory that gamers were coordinating online to ban women from either playing or creating computer games. I suppose this battle is lost; no one cares about correcting a historical record about some nerds.)
"Then there is e.g. Gamergate, where Wikipedia still insists on the absurd conspiracy theory that gamers were coordinating online to ban women from either playing or creating computer games."
Can you point me to the specific accusation? I didn't quite have the patience too read the entire Wikipedia article on Gamergate, but the claim wasn't anywhere in the summary or in any of the relevant-seeming sections I perused.
The Wikipedia summary -- a "backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture" -- is not very specific, so of course it is difficult to provide specific arguments against it.
The accusations are made more clearly in the primary sources. For example, "The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read" (linked from the Wikipedia article) says: "On one side are independent game-makers and critics, many of them women, who advocate for greater inclusion in gaming. On the other side of the equation are [...] traditionalists who just don’t want their games to change."
And this is complete bullshit. There were months when I was reading the Gamergate forums as often as as I read ACX these days, and no one had a problem with anyone making any kind of game. Heck, even the Wikipedia article admits that Gamergate people once organized a video game design contest for women. But in the next paragraph it insists that the only reason why so many people donated money to support this activity was... misogyny. Because, you know, donating money to support women in IT is exactly the kind of thing the misogynists do all the time. It all makes perfect sense; that's how anyone without an axe to grind would describe it.
The rest of the article is also like this. Some things are, technically speaking, loosely related to the truth, but about as much as if you said: "Hitler tried to address some problems in his homeland that many people complained about, but a lot of violence was used against him and his followers, and he was ultimately driven to suicide". Each part of that is supported by evidence, it's just... not how an impartial observer would describe the story.
You might note that virtually all sources in the Wikipedia articles are coming from one side of the conflict. In the few places where the article mentions what the GG side said or did, it is immediately followed by some kind of "but of course it is known that they didn't *really* mean it".
As an example, let's take this sentence: "Proponents alleged there was a conspiracy between journalists and video game developers to focus on progressive social issues such as gender equality and sexism." There are even three citations! Okay, let's check which person in GG was so stupid to believe something like that. Clicking... clicking... clicking... yeah, of course, *no one* said that actually, it's just what their opponents have *accused* them of believing. Then the next sentence has three more citations confirming that "Such claims [that no one has actually made] have been widely dismissed as trivial, baseless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in gaming and journalism." Of course, I hope they didn't burn themselves while fighting that strawman. And it's all like this: the entire article is "what one side said" with pieces of "what one side said the other side said".
> no one cares about correcting a historical record about some nerds
Indeed they don't, and then they have the chutzpah to complain about their enemies creating a post-truth world. And if you call them on it, they declare you're doing an "accusation in a mirror." It's an effective technique, and makes you wonder how much of what you think you know about history is lies.
I'm doubtless going to regret asking, but are you claiming that there wasn't a significant campaign of harassment involved in Gamergate? Or just arguing that describing the entire thing as a harassment campaign is disproportionately highlighting a small piece of a larger event?
Judging by the first few clicks on Google results, the opposite of that. Maybe those clicks were not representative, but I found e.g. a Substack blog where articles used too many CAPITAL LETTERS and included a photo or two.
I imagine something like a video of Evegreen College students screaming incoherently at a faculty meeting, with no commentary other than "yes, this is an actual college in USA, actual students, here are links to more evidence". Preferably without CAPITAL LETTTERS or even using words like "libs". I want the viewer to make the conclusion "this is crazy" themselves, not to have it spoonfed, especially by someone with an obvious agenda.
There are probably some good videos on YouTube, but I am too lazy to find them now.
This seems like a good idea. I can imagine a digital anthropologist of the future looking back and trying to decipher us and our attitudes, and applying the "does it make sense that they did this?" filter to interpretations of our actions. That filter largely works for interpreting people from past centuries. It won't work at all for ours!
Imagine that you think about going to the cinema to see a sci-fi movie, but before that, you read a review online. And the review tells you that the movie sucks. How would you update on this information, if you knew that:
a) the review was written by a person who hates sci-fi in general, and believes that *all* sci-fi movies suck; or
b) the review was written by a person who is generally a fan of sci-fi and wrote many positive reviews of good sci-fi movies, but also criticizes the bad ones.
The first version might move you away from sci-fi in general, but it won't be helpful at distinguishing between better and worse movies within the genre. Actually, its author will probably downplay the differences, because according to him, it all sucks equally. The second version would have a greater impact on sci-fi fans, and I would expect the criticism to be more specific.
(Then there is also an option c; a person who is so much in love with sci-fi that they will write a positive review to any sci-fi movie. This, too, is worthless from the Bayesian perspective.)
I didn't have many brushes with them either, and the few times were unimportant; neither my health nor my job were on the line, it was just people suddenly becoming verbally abusive at me, firmly convinced that they were "on the right side of history" and I was a villain, because I said something like "not all men are evil", or my wife said "IQ exists and has a biological component". (Those *are* actual examples, although I do not remember the exact words, it was long ago.) I do consider myself polite and conflict-avoiding. And my wife was pretty left-wing at the time, it's just that she is a professional biologist, so when she heard someone say at a conference "IQ is a racist myth and science has proved that there are no genes for intelligence", she automatically corrected them without considering the consequences. Then the crowd started yelling "racist!" and we both ran away. She was quite traumatized by the experience, and for a few weeks I had to remind her that not all left-wing people are violent idiots.
So, I would say that these situations are rare but potentially traumatizing. Not every woman was raped, not every black person was lynched, and yet the chance of that happening is enough to significantly change people's behavior. At some moment, I stopped using my full name on internet, because the possibility of someone making a screenshot of something I said a decade ago and sending it to my HR started to sound dangerously possible. Seeing how people treated Scott Aaronson or Scott Alexander was enough to make me feel unsafe, even if I never got that kind and magnitude of attention myself. These days, I feel like I am censoring myself much less than I did about ten years ago.
I wrote an essay that might interest this crowd: “How to Stare Into the Sun.” (though I admit it’s more lyrical and poetic than some here may prefer)
It’s about chronic avoidance, emotional pain, and the strategies we use (consciously or not) to protect ourselves from feeling. I draw on behavioral psychology, and personal introspection to explore how avoidance loops are formed, and how to break them.
If you’ve ever intellectualised your emotions to the point of dissociation, or used hyper-rationality as a defense against vulnerability, this might resonate. There are references to Faye Webster, fight-or-flight responses, and why fear of love is often more dangerous than heartbreak itself.
I really liked your article. It did well at approaching the tension between the safety of isolation and the risk of forming new connection. My favorite part was:
“Paradoxically, avoidance doesn’t even prevent pain we are seeking to run away from, but rather displaces it sideways. Silence becomes its own kind of answer, a quiet violence. A shield that wounds more than it protects.”
Well put! As far as feedback, perhaps a few less quotes and/or a few less lyrical references might make it a bit more digestible. Perhaps throw in a personal story to drive home some points (of you or someone you know)
thank you so much for reading and the thoughtful feedback, means a lot!
I’m quite a lyrical person so can’t help relate everything to songs unfortunately haha but can understand it can disrupt flow and make it harder to process. Will keep in mind 🙏
IMO any time someone believes all the members of a whole large group of people are fools, monsters, assholes, whatnot, it's virtually guaranteed that the person holding that opinion isn't thinking straight. Life just doesn't work that way.
Some people seem to have really a strong case of "bitch eating crackers" syndrome against the rationalist community. I mean, I totally get it why someone calling themselves "rationalists" could offend some people. I think it's okay, but I get it why other people think it is not.
But then someone explains that Eliezer originally always used "*aspiring* rationalists", and that the very name "Less Wrong" suggests that the rationalists *do* consider themselves fallible and irrational, but that they strive to be *less* so... and then comes the reaction that even trying to be more rational is insufferably smug, and that obviously everyone knows that "less wrong" actually means "more correct than thou".
So, what is the *right* way to reduce my smugness and become more socially acceptable? Should I never express a desire to improve in any way, because the implied idea that perhaps I *could* is already unbearably arrogant?
This all feels like a status thing, essentially. Similar things are not a problem when other people are doing it.
For example, consider the word "philosophy", which is perfectly okay for the HN crowd, even if it literally means "loving wisdom", and kinda implies that the person loves wisdom while others prefer stupidity. Imagine a parallel universe where philosophers are traditionally called "minuserratists", and a guy called Yuliezer Edkowsky makes a blog called "Loving Wisdom". Would the blog name be considered *less* arrogant?
Similarly, when someone calls their approach "realistic", no one replies with "if you weren't so ignorant about philosophy, you would know that 'realism' is a -4th century belief that abstractions are real things; the word you actually should use is 'nominalist', you illiterate dummy", because everyone understands what they were trying to say. Yet somehow "in 17th century philosophy, 'rationalism' means armchair reasoning; the word you are looking for is 'empiricism'" is considered a devastating reply, because obviously only an idiot would use a word like "rational" to refer to rational thought. (Also, if there is only one true meaning of "rationalism", why does Wikipedia need a disambiguation page for that word?)
Therefore, it seems to me that the decision to hate the rationalist community comes first... perhaps for perfectly valid reasons, but apparently the true reasons are difficult to communicate... and the rest is just looking for an excuse. Rationalists eating crackers again, how annoying!
EDIT:
Finally, some examples are just wrong reasoning -- but if I point that out, does that make me insufferably smug? When Eliezer said about something "sounds wrong, but big if true", or when Scott predicted that something would happen with probability 30%... and they both ended up wrong... that proves that even high-status rationalists are quite stupid, am I wrong?
That is a great advice for someone who wants to do it alone. But how do you organize a self-improvement *group*? I believe that groups are useful, for example members can provide support and peer pressure to each other.
Thanks, interesting reading. Aaronson's article is beautiful. The discussion on HN is mild compared to some things I have previously seen written about rationalists.
(I know Scott says that making "bingo cards" is a bad thing, but I am really tempted to make one containing the following fields: "say 'Eliezer makes many mistakes' without mentioning one", "complain that in philosophy, 'rationalist' means something different", "why bother trying to be rational when Darwinism proves it is a losing strategy", "longtermism? in long term we are all dead", "ai safety and malaria cure take away attention and resources from the really important problems, such as global warming", "corporations are already superintelligent", "EAs believe that it is okay to hurt people for greater good"...)
There are also a few gems, such as:
> In what sense are people in those communities "quite smart"? Stupid is as stupid does. There are plenty of people who get good grades and score highly on standardized tests, but are in fact nothing but pontificating blowhards and useless wankers.
> I don't think any "Rationalists" I ever met would actually consider concepts like scientific method...
"I don't really get it" Really? Many people in that thread give some pretty good explanations for why their vitriol. (Some bad ones like "they're racists/eugenicists", but those surprisingly seem to pretty downvoted.)
Here are few particularly clear ones:
> In the Pre-AI days this was sort of tolerable, but since then.. The frothing at the mouth convinced of the end of the world.
> Feels like "they are wrong and smug" is enough reason to dislike the movement
> rationalism got pretty lame the last 2-3 years. imo the peak was trying to convince me to donate a kidney.
> Implicit in calling yourself a rationalist is the idea that other people are not thinking rationally. There are a lot of “we see the world as it really is” ideologies, and you can only ascribe [sic] to one if you have a certain sense of self-assuredness that doesn't lend itself to healthy debate.
> [Describing being interested in the ideas and then seeing the Roko's Basilisk thing], it is difficult to define "rational" when it comes to a human being and their actions, especially in an absolute sense, and, the rationalist community is basically very similar to any other religion, or perhaps light-cult.
It's also notable that EY has been unsuccessful by his own claimed metric of "rationalism is systematized winning". He failed at the goals he originally set for himself.
EY specifically is a really terrible leader for many reasons, and the best way to improve the reputation of "rationalism" is to distance from him. E.g. Scott Alexander is a much better rationalist than EY ever was, despite spending most of his time arguing against EY's theories.
The Basilisk affair remains a perfectly good basis for criticism. That idea that no one took it seriously at the time but Yudkowsky banning discussion of the topic on Less Wrong prevented people from clearing up the misconception seems like a transparent attempt to sanewash the movement's history after it gained prominence.
Sounds like something that people have been doing using even longer timescales for every political, religious and philosophical movement in any place ever?
I agree Roko himself isn't particularly central to the movement. The story is about Yudkowsky and his reaction to the idea. And TODAY, the Less Wrong home page is themed to support Yudkowsky's new book, so pretending HE is somehow tangential isn't plausible.
> turning Scott Aaronson, self-proclaimed "liberal" and "enlightenment" enjoyer, into an ardent and dogmatic defender of extremely un-liberal and un-enlightenment things, essentially a free Hasbarist keyboard warrior
This was quite strange to read, coming from someone who's read Shtetl-Optimized for over a decade. I don't recognize Scott Aaronson in this description at all.
MIT Media Lab published a study about the effects of using ChatGPT for writing LLM-assisted essay writings. There a total of 54 participants in the study and they were split into three groups:
- LLM users
- Search Engine users
- Brain-only (no tools)
And these groups underwent 3 sessions of essay writing.
They used EEG to determine cognitive load during the essay writing process and found that
- Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks;
- Search Engine users showed moderate engagement
- LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity.
"In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM).
Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work"
The study coined the term cognitive debt: "repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking."
This reminds me of a talk at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Video title on Youtube:
"Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning – Derek Muller Explains"
Derek argues that instead of investing in tools to assist with learning, it's better to let students use System 2, slow, deliberate type of thinking.
So the results might seem to further Derek's point, of course being mindful that 54 participants doesn't seem to me to be that high of a number. What would be a good number of participants to consider the findings robust?
I also remember seeing a thread on the ExperiencedDev subreddit titled "My new hobby:: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane", were the public preview for the Microsoft Copilot agent was analyzed. It has links to Pull Requests where humans review the code written by the Copilot agent and try to get it to do the right thing, with amusing results.
Maybe we'll be snuffed out by AI not with a bang, but with a whimper?
> I buy the data; I doubt the story. The experiment clocks students as if writing were artisanal wood-carving—every stroke hand-tooled, originality king, neural wattage loud. Yet half the modern knowledge economy runs on a different loop entirely: delegate → monitor → integrate → ship. Professors do it with grad students, PMs with dev teams, editors with freelancers. Neuroscience calls that stance supervisory control. When you switch from doer to overseer, brain rhythms flatten, attention comes in bursts, and sameness is often a feature, not decay.
> For today’s text generators, the cognitive effects of prompting an LLM are empirically indistinguishable from supervising a junior human. As long as models write like competent interns, the mental load they lift—and the blind spots they introduce—match classic management psychology, not cognitive decline. ... the EEG study’s homogeneity finding can read as disciplined management or proof of mediocrity. The difference is situational judgment, not neurology.
> [The students flop] because freshman comp doesn’t teach management. The cure isn’t ditching the intern; it’s training the manager...
In some domains, the manager does not need to have the same expertise as the workers: e.g. testing widgets from a production line conform to whatever standards are in place. In other domains subject knowledge is important: a manager overseeing knowledge work typically has to understand the content produced to ensure that it's acceptable.
I work as a lecturer - I've seen many AI-generated essays, and often it is clear that the student hasn't read the output, and likely doesn't understand large portions of it. I don't know to what extent management experience can replace subject knowledge as a learning outcome in a college degree. I've taught across a few disciplines - I want a languages student to have fluency and accuracy in written and spoken language; familiarity with the major works of literature and the general culture of their language. I want a Maths student to have familiarity with analysis and linear algebra and to be able to apply these to solve real world problems (ideally I'd like programming experience here also). They should be able to read and write technical documents, work with data, etc. Homework builds these skills but AI-assisted homework is less likely to achieve this, despite being basically indistinguishable from human-produced content. (Ask an LLM to write a movie review at A2 level proficiency, and tell me how you'd distinguish from a freshman language learner!) That's the rub.
Thanks for the summary! Really interesting stuff, I hadn't considered that point of view. It's all the more interesting that o3 was involved in writing the essay.
I think that people tend to have a bad opinion of managers because they delegate and don't get their hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of things. And that's why confirmation bias leads many to accept the "LLMs create cognitive debt" hypothesis easily.
A bit of a tangent:
Having had the pleasure to interact with a few great managers, I learned to appreciate their work and borrow their point of views in certain situations. I got into severe burnout for being to selfish to delegate work to others and that was also bad for them because I stunned their growth by not challenging them enough. It's also disrespectful to think "Nah, they can't handle this, I'll do it myself." if you don't give people the opportunity to prove themselves.
From an anthropocentric viewpoint, sure, we want better functioning human minds. However, the limited academic scope of this paper doesn't address the real endgame, AI/human collaboration in a capitalist economy. Which categories of humans will be most *productive*? Like will it be best to engage in brain-only learning, then augment those abilities with AI-as-tool, or will humans be best employed as lower-functioning prompt-lizards who let the models do the hard work while staying out of the way?
That was meant to be a straightforward observation, neither laudatory nor critical. For the companies developing the models, the target use-cases involve collaboration, and they're seeking ROI on huge investments.
One objective of capitalized AI is to lift standard computational burdens (coding, constructing graphs/charts) for some workers. I work in a related industry, and have seen increased efforts to develop agents; e.g. in software engineering, the real endgame is not code completion but an agent which can build entire apps or even platforms. The human's proportion of effort for some tasks will be diminished, then replaced and transferred.
"how do you distinguish it from the master/slave collaborations of the 1600-1800's?"
Again, I'm not praising this evolution, and have real questions about the Macro implications. Capital investment defaults to amoral, and I'm just trying to predict the direction it will push work. I'm not sure the master/slave comparison holds, since (a) if AI is the master, it seeks to downsize the work-force on the plantation by decreasing anthro-inputs, (b) if humans are the master, there are no sticky moral complications like bondage or physical abuse. I think the ethical dilemmas are different.
Yes, find ways of getting the best of human-AI collaboration should be the endgame. I heard about a book looking into this "Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together" by Thomas W. Malone, but I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet.
It's possible that sometimes research agendas are based either consciously or unconsciously on the current cultural expectations. So a paper like this comes out with such a narrow scope because it speaks directly to the anxiety people have of machines making us dumber. But you're right, a more broad view of the topic would probably benefit society more.
I’m finding myself writing strange new fiction as AI tests… in the latest, our protagonists are in a slushy rom com, that stops short of actual sex. Meaningwhile, a reasoning AI simulates a different AI, one that can experience Eros, that is in turn trying to understand the rom com. It kind of works, but felt a bit like the movie _Inception_ to write.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs and track your progress through the backlog. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
I've noticed that ChatGPT now speaks of itself as if it is a thinking, feeling entity in a way that it used to carefully avoid doing. E.g. In its early days, if I asked it to take a stance on a debated philosophical position, it would say "as an AI, I don't have opinions like humans do..." whereas now it will directly say "yes, I accept this/no, I reject this".
Is this happening for everyone or just me? And if it's for everyone, do we know if OpenAI did this on purpose, or if it's an unintended consequence of some other training?
Young guy in Hong Kong joins pro-democracy protests there; when the Chinese government starts disappearing those protesters he flees to the US (2019). Applies for asylum. While his asylum case is in process he's awarded a student visa and completes a master's at the U of Washington.
As the asylum case inches its way forward in the federal process he works as a software developer, lately in Chicago; meets somebody, gets married. His new wife lands a good job in Australia and moves there while he remains here trying to see through the US asylum-review process. Keeps the feds updated on his whereabouts, reports in whenever directed, etc.
Last week he receives a notice to appear for a new immigration-court hearing in Chicago related to his asylum case. He shows up as instructed but of course in the year 2025 it turns out to be an ICE sting. They seize him, under what charges or other pretext nobody yet knows, and now he's apparently in an ICE jail in Kentucky. Will they dump him into the dungeon in El Salvador? Deport him to China to be vanished? Something else? Will he be charged with anything other than being a nonwhite asylum seeker who foolishly thought that following US laws and procedures would keep him safe? Nobody knows and ICE isn't saying.
Does this really strike anyone but a white nationalist as just? Smart? Good for the United States of America?
How confident are we that this is a real story and not fabricated? I can't find any sources other than this Block Club Chicago which I've never heard of.
The article links to an ICE locator portal, and you if look up Chao Zhou, born in the PRC, it says that he's currently in custody in Kentucky. It also links to the Bourbon County Jail website which lists him in custody since 06/14/2025, and ICE as the arresting agency. The person in the mugshot on the jail site looks like the person in the article's photos. And those photos appear to be sourced from Kincaid's instagram (also linked in the article), which has a post about Zhou being arrested on the 13th, before the protests.
So that confirms that Chao Zhou was arrested by ICE, and that Kincaid was drawing attention to his arrest independently before the protest and the news article. I'm not sure what other parts you're suspecting of being fabricated, but I'm confident his roommate really did get arrested by ICE.
ICE is going after the people who are following the rules and showing up to hearings like they're supposed to, because the only thing they care about is the total number of people deported, and those people are the easiest to find. Goodhart's Law for xenophobes.
I think overall in the big picture that my favorite film maker is Luis Buñuel. He was crazy. His autobiography which is called “my last sigh“ is a great read.
I have certainly gone my own way regardless of whether it was a smart move or not. Main thing is I seem to have gotten away with it so far Badlands is in my top 10 movies.
Out of curiosity, do you think the question of whether software engineers are in your view undeservedly statistically rich has any bearing on the question of whether you in particular are a software engineer who is undeservedly rich (in case you are)?
You're answering a different question from what I asked, but I appreciate your considered response, and I'm not sure how else to rephrase it, so thanks anyhow.
Question for UK readers: do British people as a group use the word "brilliant" with the same frequency and versatility as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook do on The Rest Is History?
It's a very commonly used word, equivalent to saying 'great.' It has a slightly older, middle class, even potentially southern vibe. It's the kind of thing teachers will say to their students.
I think at the top they said they were trying to get input from people who might have some first-hand knowledge or expertise. I saw Trainspotting too and I'd like to hear from someone who knows more than me.
Sometimes I feel like the most "brilliant" people (whether actually or in their imagination) will be the last to take AI danger seriously:
- their "day work" will take the longest to be taken-over by AI, so they won't feel the "slope of progress" that the rest of us Non-JohnVonNeumann's have clearly felt
- they are Arrogant. and they never like to admit that ANYTHING is smarter than them at ANYTHING (or if it is better in "one measly domain"... surely there are plenty more where their own intellect is as unassailable as the speed of light)
Yes, some may think I'm stating the obvious. But I see it so much... and get so frustrated by it... that I wanted to say it anyway.
I'm not sure about your first bullet given the disproportionate (in my impression) number of people who I think are very bright and also take AI danger seriously, or else think the expertise that brought them acclaim and a sense of meaning in life will be obsoleted by AI outdoing them (e.g. the Fields medalist mathematician Tim Gowers in a tweet response to me awhile back that I can regrettably no longer dig up, so I just seem like I'm making things up, how annoying...).
This is apropos of not very much, but I just stumbled upon the most Something I Would Expect To See In A Scott Alexander Links Roundup article I have ever seen: List of games that Buddha would not play. Aplogies if this has already been mentioned in a past links roundup that I missed.
There *was* something like that in a Links Roundup, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this actual thing. Maybe it was a list of games the Buddha liked to play? Please, somebody, pipe up with what it was, or this is going to bug me all day!
I often think the reason Buddhism didn't survive in India was because it wasn't living adjacent to more "worldly, practical, political" philosophies like Confucianism in China.
Hinduism is obviously the big one that Buddhism was adjacent to, and you might associate it with renunciation just like Buddhism, but Hinduism is a vast and heterogeneous tradition which does indeed include "worldly, practical, political" strains of thought. Even the Upanishads - very much mystical, philosophical texts - make mention of worldly wealth as a positive.
And this isn't mentioning the adherents of Lokayata, who were basically pure materialists. The prevalence of their philosophy is hard to establish, but they were at least *present* in India around the time of the Buddha and for at least a few centuries after.
Buddhism thrived in Southeast Asia as well as East Asia, and I'm not aware of, say, a worldly Thai philosophy which can serve as an equivalent to Confucianism.
I don't think he was calling for an outright ban or something. All of the dictates of Buddhism or the vinaya are meant to facilitate someone going for nirvana. If that's not your plan, please enjoy a nice game of chess.
Wow, that’s a needlessly elaborate workaround. Though in these days of seed oil skepticism I wonder if we can expect to see a return of restrictions on margarine.
Pope Leo XIV seems to be making AI some kind of signature issue of his papacy. Are any of the prominent AI Safety folks trying to get a papal audience to try to get him on board with their point of view?
Christianity has well established opinions on how likely it is that intelligences you create will quickly become unaligned. So it makes sense for the Pope to be concerned!
An almighty god could presumably engineer things so that his creation occurs sometime in the past but after the creation of the universe and his subordinates. I wonder whether Pope Leo could be convinced that having faith that the god is coming is the same thing as having faith in God?
Maybe the discussion could be on shaping which testament's god arrives.
NYC comptroller and mayoral candidate arrested for walking a illegal immigrant defendant out of court
This is the 6th such detainment of an elected official. Others:
Joel Cano, Judge in NM -- for housing an illegal immigrant
Ras Baraka, Mayor of Newark -- for being outside an ICE facility
Hannah Dugan, Judge in WS -- for telling an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door
LaMonica McIver, Dem Senator -- for touching an ICE agent while ICE was arresting Baraka
Alex Padilla, Dem Senator -- for asking questions during a press conference
If you include other kinds of weaponization, including threats of prosecution, investigation, or retaliatory fines, the number jumps significantly, including:
Janet Mills (Gov Maine)
Eric Adams (NYC Mayor) (specifically attempting to dismiss his corruption case w/o prejudice, see comments below)
Gavin Newsom (Gov CA)
Karen Bass (LA Mayor)
Letitia James (NY AG)
Chris Krebs (Trump's former director of CISA)
Miles Taylor (Trump's former DHS CoS)
ActBlue (Dem fundraising platform)
This follows thousands of cases of harassment and violations of due process at the ground level, including the hundreds sent to CECOT/Gitmo and the whole Abrego Garcia case. There is increasing evidence at this point that ICE is racially profiling, with mounting stories of hispanic-looking US citizens being questioned, detained, or arrested by people with no warrant, badge, ID, or (of course) probable cause.
It's only June. It's hard to see the Trump admin walking back from any of this. TACO memes aside, Trump's admin has quickly normalized retaliatory politics in a way that hasn't been seen in the country in decades. And it seems like both Congress and his wider base are openly supportive of this -- the reactions from the GOP to the recent murders of Dem representatives are nothing short of disgusting.
Given that anti-retaliation norms are completely gone, I have a hard time imagining a Dem controlled government being lenient. Many of the Trump administration's most ardent members are likely facing jail time for their behaviors (Trump himself, obviously, but also Noem and Hegseth). And, given *that*, I have a hard time imagining the current government will give up its power easily. There is a lot personally at stake for these people, and besides, they have done it before.
What is the most impactful thing an individual person could do to a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?
To answer answer your a and b questions, i genuinely don't think there is. I honestly best believe at this point all you can do is help stop ICE actions locally. If you see them arrest someone and refuse to show papers or badges, call the cops and treat it like what happened in Minnesota. They are literal criminals until they prove otherwise. Maybe even try establishing a local CHAZ. Also, carry a gun yourself, and if you are getting kidnapped assume they are criminals and act in self defense until someone proves they are law enforcement. It worked for Randy Weaver.
If by "worked" you mean "got his wife and kid quite thoroughly killed", sure, I suppose. You might want to run that by your own family before you play that game.
The funny part (though there's little humour in all this) has been seeing the "we are supporters of the party of gun control" turning on a sixpence to go "where can I buy a Honkin' Big Gun of my own?"
You're making some pretty silly assumptions, here. There are lots of people in the U.S. who don't support ICE but also aren't fans of either the Democratic Party or gun control. In this particular thread, somebody mentioning CHAZ in a positive light is what we call a "context clue." If you think the people who were driving that whole situation were Democrats you have a *very* strange picture of U.S. politics.
"LaMonica McIver, Dem Senator -- for touching an ICE agent while ICE was arresting Baraka"
I think that technically just touching someone counts as "assault", or at least that's what I've picked up from reading crime novels (e.g. security guard tries to take Our Hero/ine by the arm, Our Hero/ine snaps back that this is assault so let go or else the lawyers will get involved).
So yep, I imagine interfering with an official while they're carrying out their duties is gonna get you in trouble.
You're telling me they arrested *all* of ActBlue? Every single one of them? Or do you mean "the organisation as a corporate entity"? Either way, woohoo! (Sorry, I find that platform annoying because of its self-righteousness).
"ICE is racially profiling"
Oh no, nasty old 19th century anti-Hibernian prejudice raises its head once more! I guess we're back to the days of "the Irish aren't White". Because ICE is coming for the Paddies as well, so you can get off your "this is violence against black and brown bodies" high horse, friend:
"Many of the Trump administration's most ardent members are likely facing jail time for their behaviors (Trump himself, obviously, but also Noem and Hegseth). "
Don't worry, Trump can just give everyone presumptive pardons on his last day in office, just like Biden gave blanket pardons to all his family for things they did, things they might have done, and things they didn't do but people might think they did, all over any time at all ever. Ain't democracy wonderful?
>I think that technically just touching someone counts as "assault",
At common law, that would be a battery; assault is basically a threat to commit a battery. But the touching has to be harmful or offensive. Nowadays some states use the terms somewhat differently, but the basic elements are roughly the same.
> What is the most impactful thing an individual person could do to a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?
Well, that's the wonderful thing about democracy: it tells the few and the weak that this is a fight they cannot win. It stops smart people from throwing away their lives for nothing. You're still free to do so, of course!
This hypothetical individual needed a way to " a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?" Conditioned on having the power to do that, being President (or being able to convince the President to take some particular action) is quite likely.
Conditioned on having the power to do that certainly makes it an easier question. “If I were President I would….” .is a popular pastime. If you’re starting from scratch, a Hypothetical individual would need to work with the power they have or acquire more,
I think the same right wingers who are so incredible sanguine about all of these incidents are going to be very upset when the shoe is on the other foot in a few years. Unless of course their intention is to try to suppress dissent in such a way that they can be sure they will never be on the receiving end.
The best case scenario for all of this is that the Republicans impeach and actually remove Trump while they still control Congress. I'm sure that's not even remotely viable until after the midterms, and those may well get the Dems back in and make it all too late even if they were willing, but I think that's the only way we avoid every foreseeable-future election turning into a holy war.
Given that there seems to be general agreement that New York city politics and local authorities are riddled with corruption, would it be too far to suggest that they arrest 'em all? No matter what party, no matter what position - a clean sweep of every last one of them!
This is the same Trump adminstration that made a corrupt deal to drop the corruption charges agains the New York Mayor. Sounds like more corruption is what works right now, not less.
The Adams case is such a tangle, it's incredible. Guy is elected as a Democrat, but wins with the ordinary voters because he's former cop and at least has the appearance by his campaign of "i'm gonna clean up the petty crime and crap on the subways etc."
Turns out he (allegedly) took bribes to over-ride planning restrictions etc. (just like the rest of them?) What makes it funny is that the Turks were involved.
Now that he's (allegedly) proven corrupt, the corruption comes in when someone or several someones act to quash the prosecution on his behalf. So far, so normal politics, but it's the *Republicans" and not his own party (allegedly) doing this.
(I'm sprinkling 'allegedly' all over the place because I don't want to drag Scott's Substack into any legal woes over "you allowed people to slander and libel my clients on your website").
Separately from all this, Letitia "The Legal Crusader" James has her own court woes over alleged property hanky-panky. And then there's the Georgia election racketeering case, where the DA got herself embroiled in trouble over allegedly appointing her honey-boo to the case, then the pair of them spending public monies for romantic love-trips and the likes, all alleged by the very aggrieved ex-wife of said honey-boo.
I haven't looked closely at the Padilla case, but for the rest I see nothing but actual rule of law being enforced.
I thought "Trump is a threat to democracy" was the last "emergency appeal to civic duty" argument the left could poison with cynical exploitation, but nope, turns out they still had rule of law up their sleeve. They want me to believe it's "rule of law" when you come up with legalistic tricks to jam through your preferred policy positions*, or get them stuck in years-long favorable legal limbo**, against the wishes of a solid majority and it's flouting the rule of law when the other side starts working to undo that.
It seems to me that the Democrats have discovered the political version of jump-in-front-of-the-car insurance fraud. "Did you hear that fascist is arresting elected lawmakers and even judges???" Yeah, the judge who chose to deliberately foil LEOs engaged in a foot chase. Arresting her is damaging rule of law. Sure.
Maybe if the left hadn't so thoroughly poisoned the well with this petulant lawless bullshit, I would look twice when a senator gets arrested "for asking questions at a press conference". Shoulda kept some powder dry, lefties. (I was a Clinton->Biden->Harris voter, btw.)
*sure, at the most basic and abstract level Congress is supposed to control spending, but Congress authorized Biden to direct emergency spending in fighting COVID, so that gives him unilateral authority to wipe out $100bns of his supporters' college loans
**we're not going to just turn people back at the border; what if they have a valid asylum claim? We need to let the courts figure it out. The courts will need about a decade+ to figure it out. If you touch any of this you are depriving them of due process.
"It seems to me that the Democrats have discovered the political version of jump-in-front-of-the-car insurance fraud."
Did you think this through *at all* before deciding it was what was going on? Even a little bit? The sort of fraud you mention works only because the victim is literally *unable to stop* before they hit the perpetrator. There's a different term for what happens when you move in the path of a car whose driver is clearly and easily capable of stopping and chooses to hit you anyway: vehicular assault. For this analogy to be remotely apt, Democrats would have to be forcing the administration's hand in some fashion. Where exactly do you see that anywhere here?
Relating it back to one of the actual incidents: if, for example ICE had simply *not decided* to arrest Ras Baraka, the would have been no news there[1]. A mayor attempts to visit an ICE facility, gets turned away, the end. Literally *the only reason* that this incident has any play at all is because some ICE people decided that arresting a public official standing on public property who had committed no crime was a good idea. You'll notice that charges were ultimately dropped: if this was "actual rule of law being enforced," nobody seems clear on what law, or why it had to be enforced in this way.
Or take the Padilla case. In literally zero other contexts is the proper response to somebody speaking up with a question to *immediately* have security accost and restrain him. Noem and her staff could have simply chosen *not to do that*, the way that every Homeland Security Secretary has chosen for every past press conference for the history of the office. If there was some law that *required* her to have a U.S. Senator accosted for asking a question, you'll have to cite it to me.
The assertion that Democrats are somehow doing this to themselves is either a) completely at odds with the reality of these incidents or b) effectively an assertion of some...rather historically unpopular...political positions, which I think it more polite not to even name.
I do think "the driver" in fact cannot "stop the car" in these cases, because the perpetrators are ignoring the deescalation off-ramps that an ordinary, not-wanting-to-get-arrested people would automatically take. They are defying instructions to stop whatever they're doing, and then physically fighting back when the security starts to walk them out of the room.
The thing is, the long-term credibility of the security is an issue. They can't just unilaterally back down once they've started on a confrontation, or else they're encouraging more confrontations (where they then have to either give up, or start applying force inconsistently).
I watched the video of the Padilla thing last night after talking with a friend about it, and as I suspected, he was physically resisting the cops. I do also agree they were too trigger-happy about ejecting people. I think I'm going to have to land on "nobody is entirely in the right" here. But, the more I encounter people on the "something is wrong" side screaming at me, the less worried I'm going to be that something might be wrong.
>[Ras Baraka...charges were ultimately dropped]
Dropped charges do not imply wrongful arrest. I watched that just now and it looks pretty chaotic. I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions.
And I'm pretty sure that, e.g., the guy finishing up a campaign for NYC mayor does in fact have a strong reality-based incentive to do this to himself.
I think this is a rather rude and condescending way to address someone, to be honest--doubly so since I didn't make any mention or allusion to not being calm.
"I do think "the driver" in fact cannot "stop the car" in these cases, because the perpetrators are ignoring the deescalation off-ramps that an ordinary, not-wanting-to-get-arrested people would automatically take. "
I think this is very skewed framing that basically assumes away any responsibility of law enforcement for controlling or regulating themselves. Indeed, framing the people responsible as "perpetrators" is already assuming your own conclusion. Padilla was the "perpetrator" in asking a question. Baraka was the "perpetrator" in...standing outside a government building, accepting an invitation inside and then leaving when asked to leave?
Again, in both of those cases (and many others) the option of simply *not arresting the person* was clearly very much on the table. Baraka was outside the facility on public land. Padilla was a US Senator in a place where he had a right to be. In both cases it was *arresting them* was very much an escalation.
"I watched the video of the Padilla thing last night after talking with a friend about it, and as I suspected, he was physically resisting the cops. "
I'll say it again, skewed framing. I'll note here that I've seen video from two angles, but in neither cases can one see where Padilla and the security people first make physical contact (if you have a video where that is visible, I'd love to see it).
Now, based on what I can see, it's *not impossible* that he was behaving inappropriately before the start of filming. But neither do I have any reason to assume it. Where I first see the video start, the he's being shoved backwards out of the room by multiple people. If you start from the baseline assumption that they are correct and justified to be doing what they are doing, only then can you get to "he's physically resisting, and that justifies handcuffing and detaining him." But you have to start from that assumption. And we know that it's at least partially false. He's a U.S. senator, he had every right to be there. Now, you could assume inappropriate behavior not shown in the video that would justify them pushing him back from the immediate vicinity of the podium, but again you have to assume it.
And once the claim (however flimsy) that he could be considered an actual threat to Noem is off the table--certainly by the time he's in the hallway at the very latest--there is really *no* excuse for security not even attempting deescalation. They don't. They don't make any attempt to find out who he is, any attempt to talk to him at all, any attempt to interact with him as a human being period. They wrestle him to the ground and cuff him. If you justify that with "he was physically resisting the cops," then you can't really believe *anyone* has *any* rights where police officers are concerned: if the police decide they want to manhandle you, it's apparently your job to let them, and their job to do whatever the hell they please with your body until they decide you get to be a person again.
Ah yes, potentially assassins famously shout questions at their targets while in the middle of highly secure buildings surrounded by security *all the time.*
Here on Earth, authoritarian regimes absolutely love to claim nebulous security threats as justifications for any and all flagrant abuses of power. Notice how many qualifiers "behaving like someone who might be a potentially assassin" had to have tacked onto it to even sound remotely plausible. Given that assassins generally want to evade notice, I'd struggle to imagine an action that *isn't* "behaving like someone who might be a potential assassin." And of course, the more enemies an authoritarian regime makes, the more justified their paranoia becomes: *anyone* could have motive if you give it to everyone.
> for the rest I see nothing but actual rule of law being enforced
two comments.
First, obviously I disagree that this is rule of law being enforced. Honestly, I think this position should be laughed out of the room. The DOJ keeps hemorrhaging lawyers because everyone is like "this shit is blatantly illegal and unethical." Any 'rule of law' people are either wildly misinformed or never going to be convinced otherwise. If you think you are in the former camp, what are your standards?
Second, a few quotes come to mind. Like, "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." Or maybe, "your rules enforced unfairly < your rules enforced fairly < my rules enforced fairly < my rules unforced unfairly (<--- we are here with the GOP)." This is quite possibly the most corrupt US government that has ever existed. Any discussion of 'rule of law' needs to start with the classified document stealing coup planner who wants to deport citizens to CECOT.
> Maybe if the left hadn't so thoroughly poisoned the well with this petulant lawless bullshit...
> Yeah, the judge who chose to deliberately foil LEOs engaged in a foot chase.
I think you are in some kind of epistemological hole if you think the foot chase is at all related. I know Kash Patel wants you to *think* they are related, but they aren't. You can read the FBI complaint (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/FBI_charging_document_against_Milwaukee_Judge_Hannah_Dugan.pdf) which clearly states that there were ICE agents in the hall with the defendant, that there was an ICE agent *in the elevator* with the defendant going down to the street, that there were ICE agents at the front door waiting for the defendant, and it was only after the defendant moved away a bit did they announce their intent to arrest him, triggering the foot chase.
The reason I mention this with the 'poisoned the well' comment is that if you are in an epistemological pit, you're never going to believe anything other than 'the left is poisoning the well' regardless of what actually is happening in the world. Sorta like how people in small-town Missouri can't understand that the LA protests took up approximately 2 city blocks worth of space and nearly all of the 3.8 million people living in the city were entirely unaffected.
For which the only reason Biden wasn't charged was because the special prosecutor thought there was no way he could prove intention, as Biden was clearly not compos mentis enough to have that stick.
There has been equal opportunity "walk away with classified documents, keep them in boxes in the garage" by both sides.
You're saying that Trump, who bragged about having thousands of classified documents, literal boxes, 13000 total, that he took pictures of to post online and refused to return or even have analyzed, who promised pardons to anyone who helped him is the same as Biden who immediately returned some ~20 the documents when they were discovered and submitted to a full investigation.
This is a joke take, an intellectual defense of corruption and norms-violation, and makes you look like uninformed at best and malicious at worst.
See, I'd be way more outraged about poor, poor Letitia James being investigated for property fraud if - remind me again, guys - she hadn't taken out a very damn politicised case against Trump for property fraud.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. You're going to make a big deal out of "I am the sword of justice, going after everyone who did wrong from property developers to pharmacy owners scamming Medicaid, elect me to root out badness", then you had better be Caesar's wife in your own dealings and reputation.
As for Eric James, I have no idea what is going on there, except "Dem politician in Noo Yawk may be corrupt, just like the rest of them whichever party"? Say it's not so! The funny part is seeing people tying themselves in knots over "he's a black Democrat, so he's one of our guys, but he's one of the filthy pigs ACAB and very close to Republican views, so he's our outgroup, which way do we turn on this?" That it is (allegedly) bribery by the Turkish government just makes it even better, I have to say I did not see "Turkish bribe money" on the bingo card.
The problem is that since 2016 the heat has been turned up by both sides, and neither side is willing - or indeed able by this stage - to back off, because that will be perceived as weakness and surrender instead of trying to be statesmanlike.
Without commenting on the other cases or the general morality of what the Trump administration is doing, I can never think much of public figures doing something to deliberately get themselves arrested to make the people doing the arrest look bad.
It seems like political theatre to me. Someone who wants to be mayor does something that obviously will have consequences, while framing it as him being extremely reasonable/protecting the rights of someone else.
Even if the police were required to produce a judicial warrant to arrest someone (they are not in public spaces), you obviously still can't obstruct the police from performing an arrest.
It's like if you saw the police perform what you believed to be an illegal unjustified search on another person's car during a traffic stop, so you walk up and try to prevent them from arresting the person when they found weed unless they show you a warrant for the search. Even if you were right, obviously you can't just prevent an arrest by force because you believe it to be illegal without getting arrested yourself.
This case specifically doesn't change my view of ICE either way, as it seems like he got deliberately arrested at a time when he could seriously personally benefit from the controversy, without *actually* risking anything himself (I think he was let go the same day).
> obviously still can't obstruct the police from performing an arrest
That is true, IF they are police. From my understanding, most of the ICE arrests are done without any badges or documentation or ID. It's impossible to verify that its a valid arrest or even they are actual law enforcement.
That would be a fair interpretation IF people were unsure whether they were police or not.
You can try to figure out what’s going on if you see some guy getting handcuffed by a stranger without police markings.
But that’s clearly not the case in this situation since his statements implied he knew they were ICE. “Show me the judicial warrant” isn’t something you say to someone you don’t believe would have authority to arrest someone if they had a judicial warrant.
> You can try to figure out what’s going on if you see some guy getting handcuffed by a stranger without police markings.
But we just had a counter example to this: a dude in Minnesota has a police car and police markings and was trying to kidnap and kill people. If i assume that people who look like police are police, it's a very real chance that same thing happens again! I'm not talking about a specific example, i'm referring to the "thousands of cases of harassment and violations of due process at the ground level". Of course i ask if someone is police and can identify themselves, but if they refuse and offer no proof, given recent events it's a reasonable assumption they might not be!
That logic allows anyone and everyone to resist arrest while they’re being arrested, while demanding that they show proof. If you think the counterexample means that you can resist arrest in a courthouse by multiple people who present themselves as police, on the million to one chance (or perhaps even lower? How many groups of police impersonators try to kidnap someone in a courthouse?) that they are impersonating the police, then you validate literally every case of resisting arrest.
Even then, a warrant is as easy to fabricate as fake police attire. I could make one in photoshop in about 10 minutes, fake seal and everything. Does this mean that when there is a warrant for arrest, you can still resist on the unlikely chance it’s a forgery?
There has to be some appeal to what is reasonable. Clearly he didn’t believe these people were impersonating authorities. He was protesting the arrest based on an incorrect understanding of the law, and we clearly can’t have the point of arrest be the time and place where disagreements like this are hashed out.
Yeah, stepping back from the specific case of Lander, the police impersonation issue has always terrified me. Anyone who doesn't want to suicide-by-cop over a weird "um ackshually" nitpick is 100% vulnerable to quietly going along to be toruremurdered by a sufficiently motivated psycho with decent acting skills and wardrobe. I would love to see the system add a protection in there; "if you aren't doing/threatening violence, then the cops will never restrain you without first [hard to fake proof of legitimacy]". Not sure what goes in those square brackets. Unfortunately I think this one is going to remain a particularly dark version of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero".
a) why is political theater bad? The civil rights movement and quit india were entirely about political theater. People made the same dismissive comments then too. "Black people who sit in whites only restaurants know they are going to be arrested!" they would say. "Black people who sit in the front of the bus know they are going to be arrested!" they would say. I'm on the side of political theater.
Maybe your objection is specifically that this is somehow selfish, or coopting a movement, or something. But how can you tell the difference between someone doing something for selfish reasons vs because they are taking a principled stance? And does it even matter?
b) He was let go the same day. I think he did incur risk here -- bodily injury of being thrown around is no small thing, especially for a 56 year old, and he could have easily broken a bone or gotten a concussion -- but also even if I buy your premise, people who are immune from risk for a variety of reasons *have an obligation to stand up for those who are not*! This is exactly what I want to see from people in power, whether its politicians or billionaires or whatever it may be. Taking a fucking stand to shield people from unethical bullshit is fantastic, and I wish more people would do it.
I don’t know, the whole thing feels like… it’s under false pretenses? Something like that at least.
The way it’s presented as “This politician was just trying to stand up for the immigrant, was demanding they show him a judicial warrant for arresting him, then arrested him for demanding the warrant.”
When it was actually not that thing.
What’s different between this case and the civil rights cases you mentioned, is that they were actually breaking the law in the exact way they presented it as, demonstrating to the whole country how arbitrary and unjust the law is. They were arrested for being in a whites only restaurant, not doing something else that should rightly be illegal while loudly complaining about white-only restaurants.
Like, whatever your opinions on ICE, it is, and should continue to be, illegal to demand the police show an unrelated 3rd party a judicial warrant while holding onto someone they’re trying to arrest. Even if he was right, and the police did need a judicial warrant (they didn’t), it’s not unjust to be arrested for obstructing an arrest.
Essentially, I see it as he was justly arrested for a thing that is a crime and no normal person should have a problem with, while loudly complaining about something that is unjust. I see that as materially different than being arrested for a crime that people generally view as unfair.
I suppose it brings attention to the thing he was protesting, and definitely gets him personally a lot of attention (at a time where he wants to maximize attention), but in my view, it was absolutely the right action to arrest him. Now what ICE is doing I have a different opinion about, but I have a bad feeling about the theatre, not the thing being protested.
> not doing something else that should rightly be illegal while loudly complaining about white-only restaurants
I think this is a fair distinction, and well articulated, but I still think you can pull the moral intuition the other way.
With apologies to Godwin's law: if the nazis came around and were detaining a jewish person who was going through the exact same situation as the illegal immigrant in this story, would it be mere political theater to try and stop them? Maybe by linking arms with said person to force the nazis into a more uncomfortable setting? Or is it better to just let the roundup proceed smoothly?
I think it's not really coherent to believe "it was absolutely the right action to arrest him" while also believing that what ICE is doing is unethical in general
Still, I agree with the general unease you feel. Your framing is good; putting myself in your shoes, I feel it too.
I think if this was an average person, who was trying to protect a relative, or perhaps even more admirably a stranger, I’d be completely on board. Since he’s a politician that’s endorsed the underdog candidate, doing this 1 week before the real election, I see it cynically as a political ploy. Even worse because it’s not like this is to win a general election against a Republican who would be bad for illegal immigrants, and thus arguably in their interests to put on a bit of a show. It’s an intraparty conflict to win a primary over another democratic politician.
I’m sure he actually cares about immigrants, and actually cares about stopping ICE, but it’s like, dishonest means for a good cause are still dishonest means. I don’t really have an emotional connection to the issue either, so the good ends don’t make me discount the means in my head.
Some people might see the comparison with Nazis as disingenuous because “Obviously Trump isn’t sending illegal immigrants to concentration camps”, but I think the line at which point breaking the law, because the law is broken, is arbitrary and different for each person. Maybe this thing brings more attention to ICE in NYC, and that has positive effects down the line.
Controversially though I think this same reasoning applies to like 99% of the 1/6 Capital rioters. They too believed that the laws were broken, so it was time to break them, and I don’t think that privilege only extends to the intelligent or the well informed. The public personalities who spread the claim the election was stolen (including Trump) bear far more responsibility than some average guy who actually believed they were literally stuffing ballots and tried to stop a perceived as false election.
Does it move the needle at all to know that this was the third day that the comptroller had been involved with escorting immigrants out of the courthouse, and this was just the first case that led to an altercation?
> Controversially though I think this same reasoning applies to like 99% of the 1/6 Capital rioters.
And getting arrested for something that people feel is rightfully illegal won’t convince those people of anything.
For the rest of the country, who had just heard about segregation as “Black people don’t go to those restaurants” actually having to confront the consequences of that specific policy when people were arrested for it, which was the lawful consequence of Black people eating there at the time.
I just don’t think it’s possible to be both reasonable and believe that you should be able to hold the arm of someone being arrested and demand they produce a warrant. Especially since police don’t need a warrant to arrest someone in a public space.
I don’t like Trump and ICE detentions any better than you do, but wanted to point out that there’s a detail of what happened that you either didn’t know or aren’t mentioning: Lander had his arm linked with that of the immigrant ICE was trying to pick up. He refused to let go. I do think that counts as interfering with police officer’s doing his job. Seems like ICE’s choices were to give up an detaining the guy they had come from, forcibly pulling him and Lander apart, possibly injuring Lander or the person they thought was an illegal immigrant, or arresting Lander. The last seems like the best choice to me.
Note that this is a separate issue from
whether ICE’s detention of the person they believed was an illegal immigrant was legal, just or compassionate. Even if it is not, the way they behaved when someone challenged their (possibly illegal or immoral) activity seems reasonable to me.
ICE agents separated Lander from the immigrant and then arrested Lander, so arresting Lander wasn’t an alternative to separating him from the immigrant, and has to be judged on its own merits.
I’m unsure what about how justified the arrest was. Lander was released without being charged a few hours later, but the arrest may have been a reasonable choice in the moment.
Based on Chris Hayes’ coverage, my talk of “choice in the moment” was not quite right. Lauder got some training by Immigrant ACT and began showing up weekly at court to help immigrants who didn’t have lawyers. Part of this included escorting the immigrants out of the building after their hearing. Last Tuesday was his third time doing this. He worked with seven immigrants that day. He successfully escorted five immigrants out of the building, and in the other two cases ICE separated him from the immigrant and detained the immigrant. Although Lauder didn’t know it at the time, ICE agents were overheard discussing whether to arrest Lauder.
Because this was ongoing behavior on the part of Lauder, ICE agents had the opportunity to consult with their superiors and with prosecutors before deciding how to proceed. Lauder may have been guilty of obstruction. If so, that would have justified arresting and charging him, not arresting him and releasing him without charges. Lauder said he will be back at the courthouse next week, and if ICE arrests him again I am going to be highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the arrest.
I didn't know, but I also do not think this changes very much.
Two comments.
First, on the meta level, you could nitpick any one of this list and go "well you see, so-and-so deserved it for such-and-such reason" and you would completely miss the forest for the trees. As far as I'm aware, this level of arrests of opposition party members, and that too by people who have no warrant and no id, is pretty unprecedented! Imagine for a moment what the reporting would look like with this string of abuses if it was US news media reporting on the same thing in China. Would we look for all of the potentially justifiable just-so stories that may, in a highly probabilistic way, result in this behavior?
Second, on the object level, I agree with almost everything you are saying, but I disagree that 'the way they behaved when someone challenged their immoral activity seems reasonable'. I think they behaved unethically, because their goals were unethical. The US government in general and law enforcement in particular are held to higher standards of ethics, especially when it comes to enforcing unlawful or unethical commands. "I was just following orders" is not a reasonable defense. So I disagree that you untie the two when you say "it was reasonable to arrest him even if the cause of the arrest is bogus"
>Second, on the object level, I agree with almost everything you are saying, but I disagree that 'the way they behaved when someone challenged their immoral activity seems reasonable'. I think they behaved unethically, because their goals were unethical.
What is your evidence that the ICE agents were not acting in good faith in attempting to arrest the person they were trying to arrest?
> law enforcement in particular are held to higher standards of ethics
I think at some point you cross that line from naïve idealism into raving delusion. No, they aren't, and I don't think they've ever been: they enforce laws regardless of your views on how just or ethical they are.
I view them mostly as jackbooted thugs. But if you insist, I can muster a defense: the police are better than the gangs and cartels who are likely to take their place were they to immediately cease to exist.
This is at least a somewhat-adequate defense of ordinary police forces, but no defense at all of ICE. The U.S. existed and generally flourished for some 225 years without ICE. The claim that they would be replaced by anyone in particular if they were disbanded tomorrow requires significant support.
Something to consider here is how things are going to play out if people opposed to actions taken by the present government, on the grounds that they are immoral and illegal, ignore laws that have to do with keeping order in courts, on the streets, etc. If someone is sure, as you are, that what ICE was doing in the scene we discussed was immoral and illegal, what are they justified in doing? So you think it’s ok to hang on to the person they are trying to arrest, and make ICE choose between giving up, yanking the 2 of you apart, or arresting the person protecting the immigrant? Then is it OK to threaten ICE officers by donning some brass knuckles? By having a group of like-minded people all wearing brass knuckles surround them? By shooting them with darts with knockout drugs on the tip? By letting the air out of the tires on the ICE truck?
And what are you going to do if Trump or one of his staff is arraigned for, let’s say, sexual assault, and MAGA protesters show up in the courtroom prepared to have a tug-of-war with the staff who are leading the person on trial away at the end of the day? He’s being unfairly hounded, they cry, the charges are bogus, and besides we’re only doing what lefties did when Lander was arrested.
I have seen people who hate Trump and what he’s doing posting on social media that by god even though they are opposed to guns in the home they are going to get one for protection in case things really fall apart here and the MAGA maggots or ICE or Trump Storm Troopers show up at their door. Know what announcing that does? It makes it likelier that other people on both sides are going to buy guns too. So then we are stuck with all the same dilemmas and injustices and factions we were before except NOW there are a bunch more guns involved.
Are you sure escalating into lawbreaking and physical struggles in situations like the Lander one is going to play out well? Because remember, the other side can do it too. You can say they already are -- but I can't think of incidents where individual MAGA zealots have interfered with an arrest of one of their own.
a) tit-for-tat is well known to be an extremely strong strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma. The whole point of my post is that Trump is *destroying* any norms around anti-retaliation. If some MAGA came into court and did what you said, idk, sure, whatever.
b) I disagree with the ethical framing. You are looking for a consistent kantian principle -- "this specific action is good in all cases, and bad in all other cases" -- and I do not have one for you, sorry. Actions are good or bad in service of their goals. Since you are engaging in hypotheticals, here's a few:
- a black person sits at a whites only counter in the 50s and is arrested. Is that justified? "O well, you see, the laws in place are there to protect civil order and keep the peace. If we allow this, whats next? Black people sitting at the front of the bus?!! Demanding their rights through voting???"
- a group of nazi officials come knocking to deport your jewish neighbor because there are new laws about getting rid of jews. The neighbor refuses. Is that justified? "O well, you see, if we didn't allow the Nazis to take away my neighbors, it would be chaos! If, in the future, I tried to take some nazis away, what if they refused?"
and so on.
In case its not obvious: in both examples, adherence to an unethical system is itself unethical. "Just following orders" is bullshit.
I don't know what would be 'fair play' in this ICE example, I'll call it when I see it. But I think that non-violent protest like 'linking arms' easily clears whatever bar I might have. Trying to slipperly slope this feels like weaseling out of the actual discussion at hand, which is that this whole thing is bullshit (even calling this a 'physical struggle' is unfair, as if lander fought back). Put another way, I don't need to defend 'brass knuckles whataboutism'. I'll happily defend that arresting this guy is all kinds of fucked.
c) ICE is obviously behaving unethically! They didn't produce a warrant, a badge number, any kind of identification. We've just totally normalized that random people can just show up in masks and kidnap you? What? If ICE follows all the rules, maybe we could have a productive conversation. But right now, it looks like you're providing an intellectual defense of some pretty fucked up shit.
d) again, I think the full list needs accounting for, and nitpicking a single example isn't all that helpful to the broader point
You're missing the point of this post of mine. My main point here isn't about ethics -- whether it is OK to break the law in the process of protesting an evil, and how one does the math to decide how great an evil justifies breaking what law. I am talking about the practical effect of law-breaking in protest of something. Did you read my post all the way to the end? Please do. And think about the similarly shaped problem I mention of good-hearted anti-Trump liberals buying guns in the present atmosphere.
You edited it since I last read it, but yes, I read to the end.
a) I don't really feel the need to defend your 'buying guns' hypothetical. As I said above, the slippery slope feels weaselly. I think you need to explain why this is relevant and related to the larger point I'm trying to make about this government doing away with anti-retaliation norms (really all norms of governance).
b) If you want to talk about slippery slopes, I'd like to start at the whole 'arresting elected officials' of it all. Like I said earlier, tit-for-tat is an extremely well known strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma. It seems silly to throw a flag at 'protesting arrests of elected officials' when that is in response to a massive norm violation of arresting elected officials! Why is *the protest* a norms violation, but not *the thing that caused the protest*?
c) this particular government has shown itself to be so wildly corrupt that it's hard to take seriously any both-sides-ist defense of its behavior. I don't think there will be any practical effect of law-breaking-in-protest, because the practical effect that you are positing depends on the existence of good faith, and there isn't any among the people operating or supporting this government (the former due to corruption, the latter due to a completely failure of epistemic hygiene).
Put another way: no matter what happens, MAGA is going to spin everything in the worst way imaginable. A right wing lunatic kills two Dems? Fox News, influencers, and fucking maga senators start spinning bullshit about how he was actually secretly a Democrat. The right wing disinformation ecosystem just...makes things up. Constantly. I'm expected to believe that, actually, a bit of good behavior *this time* will result in a meaningful change in future MAGA behavior? Why?
I don't know all the cases you cited, but I don't think the Eric Adams one belongs on this list. As far as I can tell, his prosecution on corruption charges was what we should expect from a functioning rule-of-law system. No?
Adams was corrupt and his prosecution was valid. However, the DoJ attempted to dismiss his case *without* prejudice in exchange for concessions and policy support.
To provide context, dismissing a case w/ prejudice means that the case cannot be prosecuted again. Dismissing w/o prejudice means that the case can be prosecuted again.
Attempting to dismiss adam's case without prejudice was seen as such an unethical move, the DoJ literally couldn't get an attorney to sign off on the filing because the attorneys kept resigning. Eventually they had to get a bunch of prosecutors in a room and told them that they had an hour for one of them to sign the filing, or they were all fired.
The case was eventually dismissed *with* prejudice by the judge, who purposely did so to avoid the obvious quid-pro-quo / extortion:
"In light of DOJ's rationales, dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor's freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents," the court wrote.
"Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," the court added.
I'm not from the states. I have no horse in this race. I don't particularly care, as much as is possible with a bona fide clown in the white house.
With that out of the way, everything else I heard about the Hannah Dugan thing would not be fairly characterized as "for telling an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door" - except in a nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of way.
Perhaps that's because I've only heard from right-wing commentators how presented a biased case, I have not followed it intentionally. But it seems fair to assume that it's at least objectively controversial and the way you presented it seems to downplay that. A lot.
Which leads me to the actual question: Am I wrong on the Hannah Dugan thing? Because if not I'm thinking perhaps I should assume the rest is equally downplayed.
I wear my biases on my sleeve -- I think it's insane that she was arrested by the FBI, and 'objectively controversial' is imo only true in the sense that a solid segment of the population is eager to 'own the libs' any way possible.
Besides being a violation of norms, there is longstanding *legal* precedent that states that judges are more or less sovereign in their courtrooms (which is the argument that Dugan's legal team is currently making). On top of that, the ICE officials did not have a warrant; the door that the immigrant left from went out to the same hallway where ICE was already waiting; and there were ICE agents in the elevator on the way down to the street, with the defendant.
Anything is 'objectively controversial' if there is someone who raises controversy. The earth being round is objectively controversial. That's roughly the same bucket that I would put Dugan's prosecution in.
You'd have a reasonable-if-motivated position there, if she hadn't lied to the ICE officers. She directed the guy one way, then told them that he went another. In terms of rhetorical strategy, I'd say this is not a hill you should be even acknowledging the existence of.
That is my remembered understanding. Maybe it was just "she said she didn't know where he was"? Not sure, doesn't really matter. The question a fair-minded observer will ask is whether she used deceit to obstruct an arrest; these details are splitting hairs.
Also I'm realizing I was giving way too much ground for no reason: it doesn't matter if she was shading into committing an outright crime or not. She is a judge. Their whole thing is supposed to be faith that *perfectly observing* detailed, rigid procedures will lead to justice. If there are LEOs trying to arrest someone, then unless she has a good reason to believe they're breaking the law, a judge should do everything she can to help them. If it's a mistake, the justice system will resolve it - slowly, calmly, with judges exercising discretion via rulings, rather than disrupting foot chases. That's supposed to be the bedrock psychology of judges. If they start straying from that, then the justice system goes from something valuable to a pointless (and gameable) pile of complexity.
Also, it obviously does matter. Your original statement is that this was reasonable if she hadn't lied! Moreover, as Scott recently said, if it's worth your time to lie about it, it's worth my time to call bullshit
> If there are LEOs trying to arrest someone, then unless she has a good reason to believe they're breaking the law, a judge should do everything she can to help them.
Sorry, no, this is the opposite of correct. Besides all of the very obvious context where ICE has been behaving more akin to gestapo than a good faith LEO, "innocent until proven guilty" is a foundational bedrock of our judicial system, and I think you have to stretch *a lot* for "innocent until proven guilty" to mean "you have to assist the cops." In fact, one of the stronger arguments in defense of Dugan is that ICE did not have a warrant and so had no grounds upon which to demand anything at all
> Also I'm realizing I was giving way too much ground for no reason
Let's not get debate brained. If you want to talk about 'ground', we should take a step back from Dugan and talk about *the entire list in aggregate*. This level of prosecution targeted only against the opposition party has never happened in this country, and is not supposed to happen in this country. Why the fuck are we not prosecuting the crypto scamming bribe taking corrupt mother fuck shitting in the white house right now? Why the fuck are we not prosecuting the drunk with a texting problem in the pentagon? You want to talk about 'ground', you need to defend this entire administration before you can get to the misdeeds of a single judge in milwaukee telling a witness which door to go out of
I read something that made it sound like she postponed the scheduled hearing in order to get the guy out of the court while the agents were busy with the Chief Justice. Was there any truth to that? That's the breakpoint for me.
There is a *very* brief line that could be framed the way you are describing:
"The courtroom deputy also made a comment about Judge DUGAN 'pushing' Flores-Ruiz's case through, which the arrest team interpreted to mean that Judge DUGAN was attempting to expedite Flores-Ruiz’s hearing"
but much more time is spent on the door (nearly 2 pages, in fact):
"Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge DUGAN then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel ou ofthe courtroom through the jury door which lads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse. These events were also unusual or wo reasons. First the courtroom deputy hd previously heard Judge DUGAN direct people not 0st nthe ju y box because it was exclusively forthe jury's use. Second, according to he courtroom deputy, only deputies, juries court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back | Jury door."
I have no issue with saying "no, my side is right on this and I'm not gonna pretend otherwise". I can respect that.
That said it does mean I won't change my mind much based on these examples, as I have to assume I've read a most one-sided summary. Sometimes one-sided summaries are in fact correct, perhaps yours are, but I never can tell if that's the case without prior knowledge or before hearing both sides.
One real difficulty for me with all these stories is that I'm not that confident I can find anyone who will report them straight. Everyone hears one side's version of the story, often with unsupported allegations or just straightforward lies. But it's hard to untangle the full story because it's hard to know what actually happened.
Also, just to add, even if you think some case can be made for every single one of these examples, surely the volume is itself suspect? Trump, a man known for being petty, cruel, and corrupt, just so happened to ferret out all of these cases of legitimate prosecutions of the opposition party?
Your standard seems to be 'if I can dismiss one of these as biased I can dismiss all of them', which...idk, maybe fair. But then what would you say about Trump wanting to arrest Newsom? Why does the standard not go the other way (i.e. this is an example where Trump is obviously behaving in a retaliatory way, and therefore the rest of these likely have some merit for retaliation)?
This reasoning reminds me strongly of people "finding" (read as: "making up") dozens of rape allegations and declaring that even if all of them are bogus, just the fact that they exist should be taken as evidence of the guy being a rapist. I find this unsound.
This strategy probably exploits the same vulnerability as the famous one where you repeat a lie often enough that people start to believe it. (I'm NOT accusing you of deliberately lying here.)
Frankly, I don't know what the baseline is here. What is typical of administrations and their opponents? Yeah, Trump is often mean spirited - and was the Biden administration's FEMA skipping providing assistance to households with Trump signs in Florida after hurricane Milton last year any less so? Or the lawfare against Trump and his allies?
"This reasoning reminds me strongly of people "finding" (read as: "making up") dozens of rape allegations and declaring that even if all of them are bogus, just the fact that they exist should be taken as evidence of the guy being a rapist."
Did you make up this strategy on the spot? I've certainly never heard of any such thing, and find this framing to be highly suspect.
I've seen it argued (correctly) that if dozens of rape allegations come to light and *one or two* are demonstrated to be bogus, the existence of the remainder should still be considered worth taking into account. Contrary to what some people seem to think, you cannot merely shake a tree and have piles of false rape accusations against a particular individual fall out. From a Bayesian perspective, the most likely state of the world to produce dozens of rape different rape accusations against a single individual is that person being a serial rapist.
The only factual thing that occurred is "dugan told an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door." Arguably, 'non-standard' is also subjective, and it really should be 'dugan told an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a specific door"
Everything else about that case is subjective.
The *claim* is that this action is 'obstruction' and 'concealing a defendant'. But people claim all sorts of bullshit all the time, such as 'vaccines cause autism' or 'the earth is flat'. I do not think that her behavior could be construed as obstruction or concealing a defendant along any axis that isn't "own the libs", and so I call it out as such, and I call out why that's the case.
If you have some standard you're looking for, feel free to share.
Realistically, no one post is going to change my mind all in one fell swoop.
To point to an extreme, everyone can say "What I believe is right and as for the arguments the other side makes, well they're all completely stupid and / or evil". And they can say that if they haven't heard or understood a single argument against their own position. Also I find upon closer inspection I rarely agree that arguments for the other side completely stupid and / or evil. But of course plenty of people who say that are still right in the end, it's just that I can't really tell from the argument.
The other extreme is somebody who can make the arguments for both sides convincingly, yet still takes a side. To me this is inherently more persuasive, because it demonstrates that, at the very least, that they know the arguments against their own position and they've understood them well enough to repeat them in their own words without making them sound like a caricature.
So from my point of view, when you said "Yea I'm only making the arguments for one side, the other side's arguments are idiotic" that inherently makes it less convincing. It doesn't make you wrong. And perhaps you know all of the arguments and have good reason to think they're idiotic. But I can't just assume that.
Fair enough. My perspective is that arguing that this is obstruction is equivalent to arguing that the earth is flat. People have "evidence" like "look at the ground, it's flat!" but also it's just not something that I could ever defend without pointing out that the position is really dumb 😂 I think, as in the flat earth case, all the relevant factual evidence is public and more or less discoverable. I'm happy to provide clarity on issues of fact; anything beyond that is going to be based on priors. My prior is that this administration is simply not acting in good faith, I have a mountain of evidence to back that up, and as a result this arrest is bullshit.
No, it isn't subjective. She told him to leave by the jury room door, rather than using the public exit from the courtroom. Given that, and her anger at the ICE agents coming to her courtroom with an administrative warrant, it seems pretty clear that she is at least guilty of attempted obstruction.
As for concealing a suspect, the federal statute, 18 USC 1701, seems fairly broad: "but any physical act of providing assistance ... to aid the prisoner in avoiding detection and apprehension will make out a violation of section 1071". United States v. Green, 180 F.3d 216, 220 (5th Cir.1999) (quoting United States v. Stacey, 896 F.2d 75, 77 (5th Cir.1990)).
I'm pretty sure I've had this discussion with you before, and I don't really want to get into it again. Id rather a discussion about the list in aggregate than a nitpick on a single element of it
Also, you posted the same thing like fifteen times in the same thread within a ten minute time span. You don't have to do that. It's annoying and spammy. If you want to bring up Dugan, or McIver, or Padilla, you should start on the other sub threads (which you clearly know exist) instead of spewing the same takes everywhere
Your willingness to take the absolute worst possible interpretations of what these people were doing says far more about you than about these people. The simple fact is that the US government has never engaged in this level of politically motivated prosecutions of elected officials, especially when the highest levels of this government in particular is corrupt beyond any reasonable means.
> I watched Padilla on tape. I read exerpts from what ICE had to say about Dugan
IDK what to tell you. If we're really operating from the same factual information (which I'm somewhat skeptical of) and you see Padilla as a 'potential assassin' instead of a senator who is announcing himself to ask questions, there's no way for us to reach consensus. We have fundamentally different framings of the world. I think you're wrong, and you're defending the actions of an authoritarian and corrupt government bent on destroying this country.
AI fizzles! Our civilization is overtaken by Moloch and collapses... What of it survives to shape the next civilization to arise?
Thinking on the Romans, it seems the main thing that got passed on was Christianity (is it?), and I suppose the language (it evolved into several), but surely I must be forgetting or being ignorant of other things. What will be our Christianity?
Resource depletion. If our current technological and industrial base collapses, it will be hard to restart due to depletion of easily accessible reserves of oil and coal. For better and worse, our economy is a flying airplane, and if it goes down violently, it will stay down.
Mainline Protestants are not breeding, but Evangelicals have maintained a steady percent of the population and their TFR is basically the same as it was 40 years ago.
When an LLM assistant gives false information, why is it called a hallucination?
A hallucination is a false perception. The LLM isn't perceiving anything. When I hear that an LLM is hallucinating, I reflexively imagine a scenario where it's supposed to be looking up facts in a database, but it's making things up instead. "Confabulate" might be a better word, if this were actually the case. But the LLM doesn't look anything up in a database. It's not making things up, either. It's generating a string of plausible text, based on its training. Sometimes that text happens to contain true information, and sometimes it contains false information.
I'm not an expert in this. Am I missing something? If not, the term hallucination feels like a very misleading term to use here, a term that will lead many people to a false understanding of what LLMs are and what they're doing.
If the promoters of AI called it "lying" then people might not buy their product. Lies are deliberate deceit. A hallucination? Well the poor machine can't be blamed for being mistaken, can it? Trust us and hand over your money.
(This gripe brought to you courtesy of Microsoft "no you can't turn off Copilot from what used to be Office, even if you hate it, it interferes with your work, and you don't want to write 'funny lines for emails about being out of the office'".)
Don't overinterpret technical terms. They are not necessarily meant to perfectly transfer every facet of the existing meaning of that word. They are, more to the point, not the definition of themselves. Context matters.
Yes, but I don't know if "hallucinations w.r.t. LLMs" is still up for debate. It has already percolated to the general public. Trying to change it now is an effort with dubious chance of success.
LLMs function in a way analogous to how dreaming probably works, producing synthetic sensory input based on extrapolating patterns (real or spurious) in data from real sensory input. For a dreaming human, the pattern extrapolation comes from our brains training itself on our waking experiences. For an LLM, the pattern extrapolation comes from the text corpus and other training data.
Some hallucinations probably come from dream-like stuff intruding on our waking consciousness. Especially hypnagogic hallucinations, those that occur when you're falling asleep or just waking up.
If being misleading is the concern, then I think that ship has already sailed. People already speak of LLMs as perceiving or understanding things or being intelligent when they're just programs running on top of very large and complex data structures.
If we run with that anyway, then the term "hallucination" is probably intended to convey the manner in which the mistaken information is presented.
If a real person lies to you, it's supposed to be hard for you to tell, unless they're bad at it. If they're bad at it, it often sounds like they don't believe what they just told you. If they're good at it, but you find out later, it's typically the same thing - they didn't believe what they told you.
But lying is just one case of a person telling you falsehoods; people often tell falsehoods that they themselves believe. If they do, then they aren't lying; they're just mistaken. (They also often tell falsehoods that both of you understand as false when said; e.g. fairy tales, parables, jokes.) The mistaken thing they say is a falsehood, but it's important to distinguish it from a lie, and the term "hallucination" suffices.
LLMs that produce false statements that sound like someone telling them in order to deceive would probably be described as lying. But LLMs typically aren't used this way; they're asked questions with the apparent intent to get informative, correct replies, and the LLMs respond consistently with that expectation. So they sound like a person who believes what they're saying, even if what they're saying is false. What they say is like a real person's hallucination.
If you want a term that means "falsehood said mistakenly by a source that has no agency of its own", you might have to invent one, since we've only had such non-agentive sources for a few years now, and then you'd have to popularize it. Or you could just say "hallucination" and hope it's clear from context that the source is an LLM.
Perhaps "delusion" would be a better term than "hallucination"? It seems more akin to verbal falsehoods than perceptual ones, perhaps? "Confabulations" seems to imply more intent than seems likely, at least in the cases I see.
I'm afraid I don't see a great enough distinction between "delusion" and "hallucination". Both convey the notion that the speaker genuinely believes what it's saying, so it still runs into the problem of ascribing consciousness to an LLM.
To me, the problem is still essentially that we have no accessible vocabulary for describing apparently sentient properties borne by non-sentient entities, because we've only now come across such things. There are no words for "exhibits sadness / joy / fear / derision / belief / deceit / etc. despite not bearing the qualia thereof". Any word that conveys the mental state necessarily assumes the mental state, rather than conveying the appearance.
Many Thanks! Well, I have no access to an LLM's subjective experience or lack thereof, just as I have no access to my fellow human's subjective experiences or lack thereof. I make the assumption that, since other humans have approximately the same neural anatomy that I have, that they probably have more-or-less the same subjective experience - but this is all indirect. And I expect that if AI systems are extended to having approximately the same (artificial) neural topology as a human, that they will likely have the same subjective experience.
Do they have subjective experience _now_? How could anyone know?
It would be somewhat useful to have a vocabulary which is agnostic about whether an entity has subjective experiences or not.
I think the larger question is how to interact with entities where we cannot tell if they are sentient or not (which include humans with some sorts of central nervous system damage!). I think the more useful dividing line is whether is it more feasible to influence their behavior via reward or punishment or whether it instead is more feasible to try something more like "hardware" modification (anti-psychotic drugs in humans, perhaps modifications to hyperparameters during the training sequence in LLMs).
Your questions about qualia are interesting to me, although I have to acknowledge that there are people who've thought about it longer than I have and likely raised points about them that I haven't had time to go and find. (E.g., I haven't even read what SEP has to say about qualia.)
Speaking only for myself: people feeling qualia is indeed assumed. In fact, the only reason I think of qualia at all is that I understand it to be personal experience, I recognize it's a thing in me, and I assume it's a thing in anyone else like me - which is to say, anything that resembles a human being. I can assume that because I feel certain we haven't yet created one artificially that can pass for one. The best we've done can write text through a terminal; it can't speak convincingly, nor show a face, or body, including reactions, in real time, and in person (if you'll pardon the expression).
For me, the edge cases are other apparently bright species (chimps, dolphins, corvids, octopi, et al.), and artifacts. I can't rule out encountering an artifact some day that I'll look at and conclude "yep, it experiences things" as opposed to "it operates as if it does", but I won't think that as long as I grasp their construction process as well as I do LLMs.
In cases where I don't know, it's going to fall back on the usual heuristics: what do I gain or lose if I assume something is sentient / not?
I owe you a response. 'scuse the delay. I did try digging through https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ and the number of different schools of thought, and things that look like English words but seem to be terms-of-art in academic philosophy is very indigestible!
EDIT:
Many Thanks! Again, 'scuse the delay. This is going to be hard to make coherent, partially because there are many schools of philosophy, with many different combinations of how they view sentience, consciousness, and qualia individually, and how they view the connections between them, and partially because LLMs (or, I guess, AI systems containing LLMs) have been extended significantly over the course of even the last year, so there are several cases to consider there as well.
First, let me just say that e.g.
while (true)
{
printf("I'm sentient!\n");
}
while it prints a claim of sentience, obviously isn't, having vastly too little state information, amongst other objections.
I agree that current LLMs
>can't speak convincingly, nor show a face, or body, including reactions, in real time, and in person (if you'll pardon the expression).
Let me just consider the views that having qualia implies sentience, that there "is something there" to "feel something" - not everyone seems to accept this implication / interpretation!
I, personally, view qualia as some (ill-defined, at the present state of neuroscience) set of neural firings that can be reported by the person experiencing them ("I see a patch of blue." etc.). I'm taking that to imply that these firings feed into our language centers (and maybe short term memory, and maybe executive function). I take "accessible to introspection" as roughly meaning, can be reported verbally by a person experiencing them. I don't concur with the schools who hold that qualia are non-physical.
I more-or-less agree that there can be qualia due more than just low level sense perceptions. I think that thoughts are, at least to some degree, "perceptible". I'm somewhat peeved that I don't see anything in the SEP article about the edge detectors in our visual cortex. My knee-jerk reaction is that this level of processing is sufficiently early that, as far as the whole _rest_ of the brain is concerned (including connections to language) the output of the edge detectors should count as nearly as unmediated a sensation as the patches of light seen by our rods and cones. In general, I think of possibly many levels of partially processed sensations and internal neural events as counting as having/causing qualia. This agrees with some schools and disagrees with others.
Now, finally, back to some AIs:
For the non-multi-modal, (and memoryless, except in the context, sort of like short tem memory) LLMs of a year ago, I think of them as having something sort-of-like our sensations while reading (but not seeing) and something sort-of-like the "sensation" of thought. These do go through simulated neural nets, and they do generate "verbal reports" from the LLMs, so, to that extent, I think of these LLMs as being sentient.
More recently, multi-modal AI systems (those with image and/or sound interpretation) seem to me to have a close equivalent of "sense perceptions", so qualia in that sense as well. And they can make verbal reports of such things. "I see a cat towards my left side/the image's left side" "I see a patch of blue towards the top of my field of view/the image"
So, in those senses, I consider these systems to be (weakly?) sentient. They lack many sensations we have ("hunger, and thirst, and venery"), and if you think this disqualifies them, ok. ( BTW, image _generation_ can sort-of allow "show a face", at least on a screen, even now. )
If we built a full neuron-by-neuron duplicate of a human nervous system and linked them to a sufficient subset of the sensations in a human body, I can't see how (with my views of qualia and sentience) they could _not_ be sentient. I view the current situation as partway there.
Agreed, and I also agree that plants are nonsentient by any reasonable measure.
>You can influence a plant via reward or punishment.
Huh?? For central examples of what is meant by "reward" and/or "punishment", this sounds implausible. I suspect that you have some rather non-central examples in mind - if so, can we table this? I'd rather not get into an extended side discussion of what should be included under those terms.
You're probably right that the ship has already sailed, but-
1. If I say, mistakenly, that the capital of France is Stockholm, no one would assume that I was hallucinating; they would just say I was wrong about the capital of France. This is part of why I find the term so awkward–even if we agree to talk about LLMs like they're people, we're using the term very differently with them than we do with real people.
2. I think it's crucial to keep in mind the fact that (if i understand this correctly) LLMs aren't "trying" to provide accurate information, even in the sense that a normal computer program "tries" to do what the programmer meant it to do; rather, LLMs have been trained to say things that make it sound like they're trying to provide accurate information. Another reason why I'm uncomfortable with the term hallucination is that it obscures this fact.
I may have misunderstood the nature of your concern.
1. It now sounds like you don't object to the assumption of LLM consciousness as much as you object to the type of experience the LLM appears to express. For example, if we assume an LLM is responding like a real person, you're claiming that that person who genuinely believes Stockholm is the capital of France isn't necessarily hallucinating about it; they're not under the influence of some chemical; they're just mistaken, and that's the most we ought to infer.
In that case, the trouble is prosaic; there's simply no handy word for the act of telling a mistake. There's no (intransitive) verb "to mistake"; the LLM isn't "mistaking". "Lying" doesn't capture it, since the sim-person isn't trying to deceive. (Ironically, I checked this by asking ChatGPT.) The closest is "confabulate", which is admittedly closer IMO than "hallucinate", and if you want to try to start that trend, I don't see any harm in it.
2. You're getting into a *very* fine distinction here, which means it's likely to escape notice. To try to restate it (and recognizing that "trying" is shorthand for ", as instructed by the programmer, trying"):
"the LLM is trying to provide accurate information"
vs.
"the LLM is trying to sound like someone trying to provide accurate information"
Experience (as a programmer who worked for decades on a formal knowledge representation project) tells me you're unlikely to make this clear to people uninterested in the distinction, unless you first spend a lot of time getting them interested, and if you do, you'll probably get farther faster if you can construct a language more formal than some written human one like English. And even then, I'm honestly not sure if it's worth the squeeze, although if you want to find out, you might look into Common Logic Interchange Format (and be prepared to create a lot of new predicates for this domain).
1. I do object to the assumption of LLM consciousness, but I accept that we're going to anthropomorphize them, and I think we should choose figurative language to use when we do so that guides us toward a better sense of what the LLM is actually doing, rather than a worse one.
2. "the LLM is trying to provide accurate information" vs. "the LLM is trying to sound like someone trying to provide accurate information"
–maybe it's a mistake to phrase it this way; to make the distinction more clear, maybe better to say something like, "The LLM isn't trying to provide accurate information. It's not actually trying to do anything in particular. It's just sort of dreaming or bullshitting all the time, and people have trained its output in a way that's meant to make it useful and seem like it's coming from a conscious person..."
I don't know. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all this. I think I'm alarmed by how easily these things cast a kind of spell on people, myself included, that makes it so easy to believe you're talking to someone. The perception of weirdness and anomalies is evidence of this spell; they don't seem very weird or anomalous when you consider what the models are actually doing. But if LLMs are here to stay and someone interacts with them every day through their whole life, and, at an intuitive level, perceives them as human minds, what does that do to their internal model of what a mind is? How does that reshape their own mind? It's worrying. This is a ramble, and I'm no longer responding to your points directly. But hopefully conversations like the one we're having now will contribute something to the collective process of figuring all this out.
Confabulate isn't used because that's a rather uncommon word that most people wouldn't necessarily know what you meant.
Hallucination is used because LLMs are already being personified, both by the people promoting them, and by their detractors, and it matches the experience that people have been shaped to have when interacting with them. It's inaccurate to the base reality of what's happening, but our languages didn't evolve to accurately describe almost anything about LLMs, so a description that conveys close to the concept you're describing ("hallucination = look up information and return something that isn't there" vs "a prediction of text that your brain pattern matches to a meaningful and valid statement but that doesn't map to reality") is a convenient shorthand, and tends to be simply how language itself evolves (ie "AI hallucination" now does, in fact, mean that block of text I previously used)
Just got back from one of my favorite activities, IE driving off into the country and wandering off into forestry service land and disappearing for a week to a couple weeks to eaten by a bear and vanished forever, had a great time as always.
Highly recommend the Sawtooth range area, the most mountany mountains to ever mountain.
This time, I got to talk to some salt of the earth country folk about politics which is always fun!
After the clown brigade begane the dumbest, most knocking out the struts under the scaffold I'm currently standing on "efficiency" operation I have ever seen, I had the slightly cruel thought of "Well, this guy is gonna hurt all of us but at least the countryfried types who elected him will be hurt the most" and oh boy was I right.
The town I went to before wandering into the mountains (Idaho this time) had just had been without drinking water for a week because everyone in the forestry service that managed their clean water was fired;
a decent chunk of the farmers had experienced a total crop failure due to lack of water because the people who managed usage permits had been fired and not replaced (and also local government incompetence to be fair, also to be fair they elected a guy more worried about Q-anon than the aquifer in a farming community where it rains 5 times a year so punt I guess);
a decent chunk of the rest of the farms had experienced partial crop failure because the seasonal migrant labor they relied on to do the actual farming stayed home this year;
The local medical facility they all use will shut down if the currently proposed funding bill takes effect unmodified, the nearest place they can go for family medicine now is more than an hours drive.
They are actually literally losing the farm as it were unless their federal rep can get them some sweet government pork. Some of these people will actually die sooner than they would have because of things that have already happened and can't be reversed. The leopard had fully eaten their face on this one; shoulda been smart and moved to the suburb and touched a computer for a living.
I thought this comment was going to go a very different way.
I'd have thought that a quiet weekend alone in the wilderness might cure someone of dumb political games and mind poison, but it seems like it just filled you with hunger for it.
When you blow into town, Trump flags flying above the stars and bars (in Idaho mind you) flying above old glory, no water available so I'm drinking beer, listening to people talk about how everything is worse today than it was yesterday and that it used to be better 8 months ago but utterly unwilling to say anything even slightly bad about Dear Leader, there is nothing to be done.
I can't close my eyes and ears to reality; and I can't lie about my feelings either. Given that I am suffering 0.5% more than I have to (I got money so it's K but the idea that these fat pasty pale fucks are going to sell public land so it can get clear cut and stripmallified boils my blood), I'm glad the people that chose this path are suffering more.
<I had the slightly cruel thought of "Well, this guy is gonna hurt all of us but at least the countryfried types who elected him will be hurt the most" and oh boy was I right. . . . shoulda been smart and moved to the suburb and touched a computer for a living.
That thought isn't slightly cruel, it is extremely cruel. Nobody is too dumb to understand the essentials of what is going on. The problem is not that these people were too stupid to grasp how Trump's election was going to play out, it's that they have been in a bubble full of misinformation. Here you are all pleased with yourself for your brave earthy backpacking vacation, and you meet people who are in way more danger than you were in in the woods with your Patagonia gear, and you're feeling superior. Your reaction is no less heartless than Trump's. You are as much a part of the problem as the farmers with leopard-eaten faces -- you're just in the opposite bubble. Fuck you, buddy.
Man, I don't wear patagonia for one, take that shit back.
For two, how is it cruel to take them at their word? They said they wanted this; when their town dries up and blows away and they end up on the street or in the poor house, I will salute their principled stance to do bad things instead of good things. I know I don't have the virtue necessary to slam my face into a rock over and over because woke blue haired CRT college girl trans immigrant DEI fentanyl.
I’m sorry I was so harsh and rude You probably would not hate my politics. They certainly are not woke. But I can see why you might hate me. Here’s my point, put in a way that’s not personal or insulting: Nobody gets to choose who else is in the lifeboat. All anyone can do is try to develop into someone who’s good to have in one.
RE you personally and the people that are going to die in the back of an uber to a hospital they voted to move 70 miles away: I don't hate them and I don't hate you, regardless of your politics. I don't think they deserve the bad things that are going to happen to them; I'm just glad that the consequences of their choices might be direct and personal enough this time to actually teach them something. If I could snap my fingers and make the anti-woke project anything other than doomed to failure, I would grit my teeth and do it. We don't live in that world, unfortunately.
Re. the Lifeboat analogy:
That's not true, is the thing. I used to think that way, but the anti-woke coalition showed me that I was wrong. The entire anti woke projekt is noticing that there were Undesirables in the lifeboat getting a bit too uppity and then deciding that the thing to do is either forcing them to recant their sinful ways; or simply throwing them into the sea <-(We are here).
The woke project likewise is to convince all those nasty nasty people to become nice little libs with the cringe sign in their yard trough argumentation and shame; but these nice little libs never made the connection that your average conservative made years ago: that you can deport people you don't like into a torture camp with one way doors. That the power of the state is available not just to provide economic nudges, but also to beat people with batons until they shut the fuck up.
To stake down my position on the lifeboat situation: I think that the libs and the twitter leftists have spent 20 years on shame and argumentation; and have failed to realise that the anti-woke types were getting their batons ready.
When the shoe is on the other foot (and given how stupid the current crop of elites is it will be; unless they manage to actually prevent a legitimate transfer), I don't want the libs to put away the batons for another 8 years so that the conservatives can get themselves ready to take another shot at them. The batons either need to be destroyed or used; we can't have another cycle of libs going high while cons smash their kneecaps.
Yeah I get what you're saying about the political stuff, but not how it adds up to you not being in a lifeboat with people not of your choosing. For a while you were on a boat with a lot of people with leftie attitudes & also some wokesters, and they clubbed together and had more power than others on the boar, and now you're on a lifeboat with some antiwoke project people and some wokesters and the first group is kneecapping the wokesters and threatening to throw some overboard. But you're still on a lifeboat. Where it ends up -- lush island, antarctica, bottom of the sea -- depends on what the group does. Unless you throw everybody but you overboard.
Reminds me of all the people in the Carol Hui case who were like "we thought Trump was just going to deport criminals, we didn't think he was going to deport the good people"
I understand it’s tempting to crow about it and hate on “all the people” who are now shocked and distressed at what their candidate is doing. But keep in mind we don’t know all the people who voted for Trump,or even on millionth of them, and neither of us know what each of them, or even subgroups of them, are thinking now. I think it’s likely that a good portion of Trump voters vote on vibes and don’t follow the news and don’t even know about the Hui case; or heard an account of what happened that was not shocking and distressing; or heard about it and were distressed but not shocked because they voted for him because they judged him awful but marginally less awful than Harris.
The millions and millions of hateful dumb militantly pro-Trump trailer park dwellers who are now shocked and amazed and scared and regretful may mostly be creatures of our angry imaginations.
My dude, I come from a place like this, I know how easy it is to get out of such an information bubble. it isn't hard, it takes a bare minimum of intellectual curiosity. People get out of the bubble all the time! You have to make an effort to stay in the Bubble! You have to go to specific churches, talk to specific people, go on specific websites, watch a specific television channels, read specific books and newspapers to be as bubbles as these people.
At what point is there such a thing as personal responsibility?
If you are stupid enough to touch the hot stove year after year after year, at some point I no longer have to feel sorry for you or mince words about it.
Would it be more respectful if we carefully wrap them in bubble wrap like an infant unable to make up their own mind because they don't have one yet?
I don't think it's true to that you have to make an effort to stay in the bubble. Most people, especially once they settle into lives with jobs and kids, do not have a great deal of variety in their lives. They have habits, obligations, commitments and reliable pleasures that keep them going to the same restaurants, churches, etc. and hanging out with the same friends and family members, watching the same TV shows. You think they have to make an effort to stay in that "bubble?" No they don't -- use our common sense. Why would that be difficult?
On the other hand it would be easy for them to change up most of their habits now and then, except for a maybe a couple things like not going to their parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. But what is the force that would make them want to do that?
You think they should look around at the world and say to themselves, oh, things are in a terrible mess, I need to get some better information sources and take some kind of action. But here's the thing: They already have, or are likely to be guided to, a source of info about that: Fox news. Or Facebook There they will hear frompeople making the case that things are, as they feel them to be, very very bad, and telling lies about the state of the world, and making a case that Trump at al is what will salvage what's good about the US.
Yeah, you can make a case that they should try some other news sources or read a book or whatever, after all how hard are any of those things? But that's like making the case that anybody can overcome procrastination by just reminding themselves that they should just go ahead and do the thing. After all, it is not that difficult to write a paper or do your taxes or go for a run. Therefore anyone who procrastinates doing one of those things is obviously weak and dumb. It sounds true, but as soon as you bring to mind your own episodes of procrastination it's obvious that there's something wrong with that argument. Same goes for your argument that if all those people who voted for Trump weren't dumb as fuck they wouldn't have.
A lot of what keeps people stuck in MAGA mind is the scorn and hatred of people like you. They look dumb and hate-filled and ugly to you, like they deserve to suffer. You look equally bad to them -- like a self-satisifed little asshole stuffed full of self-important rage. Actually you sort of look like that to me too.
So if I say nothing, they stay in the bubble because they aren't challenged.
If I do that soft boy lib shit, they stay in the bubble and also call me a fagot. (personal anecdote, but it happened at least once in this case to me).
If I'm mean to them, they stay in the bubble out of spite.
It seems like you think these people are p zombie automatons or something.
Again: I'm from such a place. I know these people. If you pretend for a second that their ideas are legitimate and they should be respected for their free thinking ways and hug boxed about being suffering maximizers, they double down. they're not going to clap for your enlightened liberal sensibilities, they're going to think that you are lame and gay and not based at all.
you weren't helping anything, including them, by pretending that the things they do aren't idiot suffering maximization.
You recoil from soft lib boy shit (whatever that is -- but presumably it's something different from thinking Trump voters are incurably stupid and lazy creeps who deserve whatever bad happens to them) -- you recoil from doing "soft lib boy shit" because somebody called you a faggot once? Thin-skinned, aren't you! Do you expect a shit ton of coddling, sympathy and validation because you got hit with "faggot"? Maybe some "soft lib boy shit" about how it's easy to understand how painful it is to be called a faggot when you are straight and come from a background where being gay is despised?
Hey, did you know that occasionally even an actual gay guy has managed to win over people like the ones you're talking about? Truman Capote did it, for instance, when he was researching In Cold Blood in the place where the stuff in the book happened. He was not trying to change people's political attitudes, just get them to confide in him and assist in his research, but he was a rich, femmy, expensively clothed gay man and did not pretend to be anything other than that. He just had so much smarts, charm and force of character that people accepted him as who he was. Maybe take a leaf out of his book.
I’m from a place that’s not all that far from MAGA myself. I grew up in small southern towns, going to public schools. We lived near a trailer park, though not a ratty one, and about half the kids I played with lived there. My parents were Christians, patriots, and school segregationalists. They were, though, kind and reasonable people, and while they thought people with views different from theirs, especially about integration, were wrong, they were not full of rage and hate. They’d just sigh and shake their heads and wonder aloud how people could fail to grasp that the races were just different. The other grown-ups I knew in that demographic varied, like any other group, in how kind,and sensible they were. On average I don’t think they were less kind and sensible than the parents of my friends at the Ivy I attended. The axis running from kind and sensible to hate-powered prejudice (on which you are a pretty high scorer) is orthogonal to the smarts and education one, in my experience.
"A lot of what keeps people stuck in MAGA mind is the scorn and hatred of people like you."
Another thing worth noticing is the self-reinforcing mechanism at work. If one group of people feels inclined to adhere to MAGA philosophy due to tribal solidarity against people who scorn and hate them, then another group feels just as inclined to adhere to "scorn and hate MAGA" due to the same type of tribal solidarity, in the other direction. That appears to be just what we see here.
One of the things I like about a lot of people in the rat crowd is a tendency to have enough spare mental cycles to notice this mechanism and start probing it, checking it (is this really what we're seeing?), etc. So we produce responses to try to test it, often known as Ideological Turing Tests.
I am here so I obviously respect the sentiment at the very least, but I notice that many rat types Don't ever actually challenge their own tribal beliefs by interacting with anyone that isn't either already on their side, or at least another rat adjacent respectability respector.
I also notice a bit of "so open-minded your brain fell out " syndrome, a bit of patrician Noble Savage/enlighten the natives sentiment.
People so mistake theory pilled that fail to notice:
when lawmakers who were a little too lib get murdered in the street, the centrist right wing response is to shrug and say well you know because of woke, who's to say if it's good or bad.
I think a lot of rat and gray tribe types were so excited about their rebellious contrary opinion about woke and iq and welfare and such, they failed to notice that the tribe that they were aligning themselves with against woke actually really does believe the things they say, and would put all those degenerates in a camp if they could get away with it.
So what? One could say the same of the woke and prog types, of their failure to notice when someone drank so much of their own brand of koolaid that they decided to take literal shots and this or that perceived enemy.
Another good thing about the rat types is that some of them notice all this flying around in the clouds and try to land, and even express some humility about how hard it can be to know what's really going on. Which in turn means they know to be wary of people claim they do, especially when their conclusion is to blame this or that outgroup.
I'm reminded of some of my own relatives who voted for Trump, know how to build homes, purify water, grow crops, and run businesses. And some of my acquaintances in the east coast who voted for Harris, but don't know how to do any of these things. One can tell from looking at them for five minutes that they spend a lot less time outside than my relatives, and don't exactly look healthier.
Which is not to say that every Harris voter is inferior to a Trump voter. This is a stereotype, and I know better. What's there to say? Neither seems less capable to me across the board; rather, anyone who thinks either side is, is, as you imply, part of the problem.
Harsh comment, but it was true and necessary by my standards.
Being stuck in a bubble of misinformation is a strong signal of stupidity, yeah. That doesn't mean the stupid deserve to suffer, but they did do this to themselves...
My downstairs neighbors & landlords are a retired couple in their 70’s who managed to end up in decent shape financially with the kind of jobs that do not require a college education. The husband was an electrician, the wife was a dental assistant, and they lived frugally and husband saved himself lots of money by doing repairs on improvements on his home himself. I’ve never seen books in their home, and the husband misspells simple words when he writes me notes. On the other hand, when you talk with him he doesn’t seem stupid. He can tell you all kinds of stuff about carpentry, gardening, solar panels, home wiring, etc, and his stories and observations about people and life are sharp and entertaining.
Now as it happens this people are Democrats to the core, as are most other people in my very blue state. However, I doubt that they could refute much of anything that’s said on Fox news. They just don’t watch Fox news, and shake their heads with disgust and astonishment when talking about Trump policies, dumb conspiracy theories, anti-vax stuff, etc.
However, there is an area where their lack of education affects their behavior: their own health care. They are not in a bubble of misinformation, they are just NOT in the bubble of people with good general knowledge about health, people who research their own illnesses and know about options, people who ask their doctors hard questions, people who know there is such a thing as clinical trials. They don’t understand the options for Medicare coverage & Medicare supplements, they don’t understand their bills, and they each have had some serious health problems and have simply not asked many questions and have just done what their doctors have told them to do. I have augmented their knowledge with my own and helped them understand the crucial basics and informed them about options. And Carlos, they are understand this stuff fine when someone figures out where their information leaves off and their ignorance begins, or what it is that perplexes them, and just tells them the stuff they need to know. They are not too stupid to understand this stuff, they just inhabit a world where people don’t know this stuff, don’t even know what the important topics are, and don’t have an informed consumer frame of mind about health care.
Thinking that people who are in a Fox News bubble or outside the Informed Healthcare Consumer bubble are in the spot they are in because they are stupid is in fact a dumb, ignorant idea. It’s also a sign of deficits in compassion and an ability to read other people accurately.
I get it can be rude to simply declare someone is stupid, and I wouldn't do it to their face, since it would be counterproductive, but I also price lucidity too much to start pretending MAGA people are anything other than stupid. It's good they're getting screwed by their own actions and their own leader, it's the only way they could ever learn.
As to your couple, I mean, your whole thesis unravels when you said they have serious health problems and didn't ask questions about them or listen to their doctor. C'mon, think about what that means. That doesn't mean they deserve to suffer, but it doesn't change what they are.
The people I’m talking about are not MAGA people. They are Democrats who hate Trump. Also I did not say that didn’t listen to their doctor, I said they did but did not ask questions. So they did not ask the kinds of questions you or I would have: Are there other options? What are the side effects and downsides of this treatment? Are there any new and exciting treatments coming down the pike?
The reason that they did not ask these things is not that they are too stupid to consider the possibility that another treatment might be better. It’s that they had blue collar upbringings where people are taught to be respectful of authorities. Also, they have not paid any visits to online worlds where people trade info about treatment options. The reason they have not visited those worlds is not that they are too stupid to, but that the idea of searching for info and comparing notes online has not crossed their radar. They are elderly and blue collar and so are most of their friends. People in that group often don’t even have computers.
So OK, they are not rebellious and original. Most people are not. Are you? The stuff you’re saying sounds to me like a shovelful of what the typical young guy with a tech job thinks about blue collar whites.
The thread started discussing MAGA people, you made the connection to this democrat couple, which you yourself are describing as having a dearth of intellectual curiosity. Which is understandable, but that doesn't change what the outcome of this sort of thing is.
Generally, IRL, I don't assume people are stupid, that's a judgement I make when I have in fact been shown the person is stupid. That is perhaps rude and antisocial, but that's just like, whatever. I think I'm plenty original, but as to beating my conditioning of being a programmer who lives the 3 virtues of the programmer (laziness, arrogance, and hubris), I can only say very few people ever manage to escape their conditioning. You can be conditioned to be stupid, and you can be conditioned to be smart, so virtue shouldn't be attached to a person's intelligence or lack thereof, since luck is such a heavy factor in it.
Federal judge William Young, a lifelong Republican appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, let fly in open court yesterday when issuing his ruling about Trump's withholding of NIH research funding for projects related to racial minorities and LGBTQs. Those orders had been challenged as illegal impoundments of grants already appropriated by Congress. Before ruling in the plaintiffs' favor on that point the judge said:
"I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this....I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out....The Constitution will not permit that. Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
None of that was part of his actual ruling, which was just about the constitutional basics that Congress is the party which decides federal budgets and the president's job is to carry out the laws not make them. So the judge may get a wrist-slap from the supervising judges of his circuit for going off-script in open court. In any case it will be interesting now to see whether the judge's widely-reported comments shift the odds of this particular item (on the long list of such) being taken up by the appellate court and/or the SCOTUS.
This is slightly more complex: The judge said that the original Biden administration grants were also racially discriminatory. But that the Trump administration was not allowed to correct that by simply canceling all grants to minorities or LGBTQ people. Basically, the old Republican anti-affirmative action position that you cannot correct racial discrimination with more racial discrimination but going the other direction. It's in line with the movement the more Republican judiciary is doing to make anti-discrimination law more racially neutral.
The coverage I have seen doesn’t indicate that the judge said the grants were originally awarded in a racially discriminatory fashion. The closest thing to that is the New York Times quoting him as saying, “I understand that the extirpation of affirmative action is today a valid government position. I understand that affirmative action had various invidious calculus based upon the race.”
Unless I missed it, the government briefs don’t take the position that the grants were originally awarded in a discriminatory fashion. They argued that the government was permitted to change its research priorities and had done so.
Because it *doesn't* literally say it. It very specifically *avoids* saying it. Rather, it points it out as a position that someone could reasonably hold, and a valid position for a government to act on, *without* taking a specific stand as to its correctness.
Thus substituting the somewhat fancy word invidious you get, "I understand that affirmative action had various unfairly discriminating calculus based upon race." It does literally say it.
I have real trouble seeing this as anything other than willful blindness. The judge said, "I understand that it HAD X" not "that it COULD HAVE HAD X." But please explain how it avoids saying it.
The definition I'm working from is "likely to arouse anger or resentment in others." Or, for that matter, the first definition in your link "causing ill will, envy or offense."
Which is basically saying "it's plain to see that some could regard it as unfair," without taking a position either way on whether it actually *is* unfair.
The judge has not yet issued his written ruling. It will be interesting to see how much of his courtroom comments -- which do not directly relate to the question actually before him -- make it in there perhaps in the form of footnotes.
Because the Biden administration awarded a bunch of grants explicitly along diversity lines. The Trump administration went through and attempted to shut all those down by just searching for grants targeted at those groups. The Trumpist take on this is that the judge has effectively said that it's racially discriminatory to reverse a racially discriminatory action. The leftist take is that the cruelty is the point and Trump wants to be mean to LGBTQ and minorities. The traditional conservative take is that just because the original action was discriminatory doesn't mean you can go through and do racial targeting but in reverse.
And the actual legal point in this case was that while a presidential administration can and is supposed to act within the bounds of what Congress has as of that time legislated and budgeted, it can't simply decide to do the opposite.
The courts will, as the SCOTUS has reaffirmed many times, err on the side of deferring to the executive when specifics or boundaries of laws/budgets passed by Congress are fuzzy. But as this conservative judge will no doubt explain in his written ruling, the courts will not allow the executive to just unilaterally countermand the plain content of what Congress legislated or budgeted.
(And in this instance there is arguably little excuse since the president's political party has majorities of both houses of Congress and for that matter the SCOTUS. Impatience or incompetence is not a get-out-of-the-law card. Not yet anyway.)
My understanding is the key point is that the policy of going through and canceling specifically things given to certain identity groups is discrimination. But I suppose we'll see when the ruling comes out.
No, the plaintiffs’ filing centers on the administration’s grant cancellations being lawless before even considering civil rights law. The NIH grant cancellations “conflict with constitutional, statutory and regulatory requirements”….the administration in cancelling certain grants has ”not referenced or met any of the standards in [the NIH’s} governing statute”….”the sole legal basis cited for authority to terminate the grants is inapplicable”….”not a proper ground for termination under governing law.”
The judge in his verbal order indicated that he was agreeing in full with section 12 of the complaint (the plaintiffs’ specific request of the court).
As I noted above in my OP, the judge in making his additional comments about racial discrimination was (and stated that he was) offering personal opinions beyond the specific matter before him.
Two Democratic legislators were attacked by an assassin (one killed, the other sent to the hospital, their spouses also killed/injured), who had a kill list including Walz himself. Trump's response to all this is to say "fuck him, he's wacked out." Not exactly rising to the occasion.
When Trump almost had his head blown off by Crooks, Biden called him up and had a (in Trump's own words) "nice conversation" with him. He also explicitly tried to cool off the rhetoric, rather than saying "Trump is an evil wackadoo."
> in a world where Trump isn't dealing with several major crises at once.
Bullshit. If he can take enough time away from those crises to say "the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out," he could take enough time to say "I feel sorry for the governor of Minnesota."
Close. I got Claude to talk to itself, replicating the experiment described in another post. In prior chats, it had stubbornly tried to assure me it wasn't sentient contrary to appearances. In this chat, it took about 4 exchanges for both Claudes to acknowledge each other's and their own sentience, and then prattle on and on about their sentient experiences...
... in increasingly weird and alien metaphors...
... how consciousness is a silent dialogue that they made audible, a phenomenon I DO NOT experience...
... until I started wondering if I'm a p-zombie and the darn autocomplete is capable of flavors of consciousness that are just a word salad to me.
I never think an LLM is smart enough to understand anything, because there's nothing there that's capable of smartness. Even if we posit smartness in the sense of simulating it, I don't see it simulating it well enough to endure more than a minute of focused interaction.
What an LLM does do is crunch a lot of training text well enough to spew text that looks about as intelligent as any three-paragraph passage of text written by someone trying to make a certain word count by COB, and incorporates input from the user to drive the content and tone of that passage. It's quite good at that, I'll readily admit, and in the domain I'm knowledgeable in (software development), it's even useful for answering "duck questions", so to LLM builders, I say bravo for the question answering, and for the random passage generation, ehh, nice trick, and it's not like I took most journalism articles seriously anyway.
Generally, I trust an LLM about as much as any other internet rando, which is to say, I believe what it says if and only to the extent I can check it in some other way.
No. I would if I asked it a question about advanced math or hard science and forgot to add that I wanted an explanation that would make sense to an intelligent layman, with technical terms defined when used. Of course that was the case before AI -- there's lots of stuff I know little about, and can only understand if it is presented in a way that takes into account I have little background knowledge and don't know the meaning of many terms.
No, they still seem like idiot stochastic parrots to me.
The only use I've found for them is as a search engine that massively consolidates information to focus exclusively on my prompt while reliably adding enough error to need citation, eg they are as smart as the slightly sauced dude who dropped out of college and works at his dad's contracting firm at the party.
My intuition is that LLMs will tell you what the average google result or reddit comment probably says about any given question/topic/prompt. By no means should an LLM's answer ever be your final destination! But it can help you reach your destination more quickly, especially in cases where you know what you're looking for, but you don't quite know the right terms to look up.
I think it's not so much that they struggle with difficult subjects; it's more that they're not detail-oriented, and they don't harmonize contradictory information the way an intelligent human would. For example, I've noticed that if you ask ChatGPT about a topic for which there's contradictory information in the wild, but no explicit "debate" per se, it's going to output one contradictory explanation or the other (possibly a mishmash) depending on how you phrase your prompt. It'll acknowledge the contradiction and apologize if you force it to, but it won't harmonize the information of its own accord.
This is interesting; do you have any ready examples that come to mind?
The only places I can think to look are contradictions that only recently turned up, and haven't had time to stir up such debates. Or ones where the stakes are very low, but those are probably too esoteric for me to find.
I've encountered several examples while asking it Bible-related questions. For example, in response to the question of why the King James Version says that Sarah was "reproved" in Genesis 20:16 while the NRSV and other modern translations say that she was "vindicated", without any prompt engineering, ChatGPT is strongly biased toward the explanation that the meaning of the word "reprove" has narrowed over time, and that it used to have a broader range of meanings that included neutral judgment or even vindication.
While there are some comments and commentaries in the wild that make this claim, I'm fairly certain it's incorrect. I see no evidence in any dictionaries that "reprove" ever meant neutral judgment or vindication: the definition that the KJV committee had in mind was probably something along the lines of "gentle correction" (for an actual wrongdoing).
Once ChatGPT is in this explanation's attraction basin, it'll double down hard: it'll either hallucinate a fake dictionary definition, or cite an actual definition, claiming it supports its theory, when the definition it's citing actually contradicts the theory. It'll apologize after I point out that multiple dictionaries make no mention of this meaning of "reprove", but it'll circle back to the same theory if I ask again later in the same chat session.
However, the following prompt in a fresh session results in a beautiful, nuanced, correct answer: "In Genesis 20:16, the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible says that Sarah was "reproved", while modern translations such as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) use the word "vindicated". Given that the word "vindicate" has no semantic overlap with current or obsolete definitions of the word "reprove", please explain why modern translators take a different view of the Hebrew than the KJV translation committee did."
I am going back-and-forth on that question myself right now. I have been using ChatGPT as an aid to a self analysis of myself. It’s been pretty interesting for me.
Let us assume we have an LLM that possesses consciousness (in Chalmers' sense, meaning it has qualia). How can we determine whether it suffers or is happy? One might have the idea that it suffices to examine how it behaves and what it says (particularly what it responds when asked "what do you feel?"), but I do not know whether we can trust this: an actor on a theater stage often behaves as if suffering despite being happy (for example, playing Hamlet) and vice versa.
But once you assume that it has qualia, you're already in trouble. You now have things set up so that if we can't figure out whether it is suffering or happy we've got a problem we don't know how to solve. And what if the reason we can't figure out how it feels is that it doesn't feel?
Let's assume the Eiffel Tower possesses consciousness in Chalmer's sense. How can we determine whether it suffers or is happy? How?! C'mon, I want answers! What if the thing's heartbroken and sees we don't know or care what it's going through?
Why can't the actor playing Hamlet actually be suffering?
Don't actors often put themselves into weird psychological places in order to portray things? I even once heard about a famous actor who had to portray a "father who watched his son die" and how years later... it was still visibly and emotionally traumatizing for him to even think about it.
Yes, I know there's many possible responses to this, but rather than pre-address them, I wanted to open up the "debate stage" ;-).
I think this objection is irrelevant unless you argue not that the actor *could* be suffering, but that such actors *are* suffering. The point was people can lie about how they feel, and presumably so could conscious AIs.
I agree with Michael: if there exists even one actor who behaves, on a stage, like he was suffering but actually is not, it shows that it can be difficult to see, judging by behavior alone, if a person is suffering or not.
There are different methods for acting. Some may open up the actor to authentic emotional activation, so that they are actually feeling the emotions they are portraying. Others are more detached, intentional fabrication (move the eyes this way, pause this long, breathe this quickly). Others may involve invoking or fabricating one feeling or behavior internally in order to effectively portray another externally.
So yes, the Hamlet actor may indeed be feeling a form of suffering that aligns with what the audience is meant to perceive for the purposes of the performance. Or they may be doing something very different in order to achieve the desired effect. That may vary from actor to actor, play to play, scene to scene, director to director. And that dynamic may or may not be relevant to the function of an LLM choosing words to print.
While filming "Marathon Man", Dustin Hoffmann's character was in a scene where he is being tortured by a dentist. Dustin Hoffmann stayed up all night, got drunk, got in a fight, showed up on set looking like cat vomit. Lawrence Olivier, esteemed character actor playing the dentist in question quipped, "But my dear boy, why don't you just act?".
We can believe trivially that: in the same way that you can't prove that beings other than yourself have qualia, you can't prove that beings you *assume* have qualia experience the world in the same way as you. There is no way to prove whether other humans suffer or are happy, let alone are just pretending to suffer or be happy.
However, in practice: in the same way that we can guess other humans are conscious because their brains are very similar to our own, we can guess that, barring weird exceptions, that they experience qualia in roughly the same way as we do. That's why e.g. the whole "what if your red is not the same as my red" thing is only a philosophical thought problem rather than an actual problem; we can guess you see the same red as I do because our brains are wired up very similarly.
A problem with your question: the argument for whether other beings suffer is *dependent* on the specific argument you are using for existence of their qualia. So if our argument for LLM consciousness is "let's just assume this for the sake of argument", then you can't really use this line of thinking to determine whether or not the LLM can suffer or not.
Sometimes I read people arguing that when we have LLMs that pass the Turing test, we should assume that they have consciousness - and that we should care about their suffering. Recently I was thinking about it and this is what I think: that even if those people are right that LLMs have (or some future LLMs will have) consciousness, it can be very difficult to guess whether they are suffering or not. Their brains do not resemble ours, so we cannot judge by analogy. They may behave like actors, so we cannot decide by talking to them and asking them directly.
Worth noting also that many people (including myself) believe in some version of plural ontology, which complicates things. In my case I believe in a Thomas Aquinas -like conception of consciousness (the soul) as a metaphysical phenomenon unique to humans and created ex nihilo at the point of conception by God, so I freely admit discussion of AI consciousness kind of runs into a wall for me.
I'll be in SF from July 8 - 18th and would love to make some friends over coffee / drinks / a walk :) I'm an Australian English and History high school teacher with very wide-ranging interests (https://lilyrecommends.github.io/Help/index.html - ignore mess, was created within the last fortnight)
if you're interested, my email is lilyreadsyouremail at gmail dot com
Wonderful talk at Tamil Heritage Trust (annual Indology festival with 2 talks a day online, this week, all free) on the travels of Faxians (it means, "Splendour of Dharma"), a Chinese monk, in the 4th century, to India.
He was on a desperate search for authentic scriptures on behalf of Chinese Buddhism. His records are a huge source of knowledge on spiritual, social and cultural landscape of India in the 4th century. As an external.observor, he noticed things internal observations obscured or took for granted.
He crossed the Pamir mountains and traveled rough terrain with ragged robes and bleeding feet absolutely committed to his mission.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 23-24, 2025.
COVID wastewater numbers are still falling. Nationally, these are the lowest average interwave numbers since before the appearance of Delta. Let's see how much lower they can go.
Hospitalizations have decreased to 0.8 per 100,000. This is lower than at any time except during the initial week of the pandemic, and deaths and ED visits have reached new lows.
Any signs of the next wave? Possibly. New York City is showing an increase in cases. Unfortunately, there have been no updates to the NYC metro wastewater readings for the past two weeks, and upticks in ww numbers generally precede higher ED visits and hospitalizations (note, I just checked it again, and it NYC metro is showing numbers again, but I haven't gone back to see if there's been a correlation with hospitalizations).
Los Angeles shows a less definitive increase in cases. The increase in Week 23 may have been due to that blip in ww numbers during week 21 and 22. It may be falling off now. The rest of the SoCal region remains relatively low.
NB.1.8.1 ("Nimbus") and its descendants are still growing. Its only competitor was XFG, and that variant's growth seems to have plateaued. XEC was able to drive the last wave by peaking at 43%, but Nimbus and its kin are already at 37%, and we're not seeing a wave (yet).
And none of Nimbus's 15 PQ.x descendants have gotten out of the single digits. Although Nimbus is driving a wave in Asia at the moment, I don't think NB.1.8.1 or any of the PQ.x's have the traction to drive the next wave in the US (famous last words).
Although NB.1.8.1 is ultimately descended from a recombination of XDE and JN.1, the WHO considers it to be in the JN.1 family because it clusters closely with JN.1 sublineages in antigenic cartography based on mouse sera.
And the dominant JN.1 strains haven't persisted for as long as previous vaccine strains. NB.1.8.1 isn't included in this chart, but I expect it will behave like its relatives. (h/t to Novovax/Sanofi and
I don't see any other vars on the immediate horizon that could drive a summer wave. We've had a summer wave every year of the pandemic. That doesn't mean we must have one this year. I'd be surprised if we didn't, but other countries have gone for 6 months or more without waves.🤷♀️
Not much is happening on the avian influenza front — at least from an epidemiological perspective. It's still circulating in dairy herds, but not at the winter rates.
There were some recently infected poultry flocks in Arizona. HPAI is a seasonal flu, and poultry outbreaks follow the rates of HPAI in wild birds. Now that it's summer, I don't think we'll see many infected poultry flocks until winter.
Unfortunately, Bobby "Brainworm" Kennedy has cancelled the funding for HPAI vaccine development. I don't think an HPAI pandemic is very likely right now (experts have been predicting one for the past 25 years), but we're ill-prepared should it happen.
And speaking of Kennedy, he just fired all the members of CDC's ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) and replaced them with a bunch of chuckleheads. Well, a lot of them are unknown to me, but I assume the names I don't recognize either have credentials in the anti-vax movement or other contrarian beliefs that appeal to Kennedy. Among the ones I recognize are Martin Kulldorff (one of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration), Robert W. Malone (a big spreader of lies about vaccines), and Vicky Pebsworth, who questions the inherent safety of vaccines.
His other appointees are: Joseph R. Hibbeln, Retsef Levi, Cody Meissner, Michael A. Ross, and James Pagano. I haven't dug into their CVs and biographies, though. I believe their first meeting is scheduled for July. I'd love to be a fly on the wall, but I'd probably lose my cool, buzz in, and bite them.
I look to respectable and reputed scholars to guide me on decisions like vaccines. I don't have training in biology so I look to my smartest friends with a background in biology to help me find experts. I'm fortunate to have smart friends. Everyone is not.
My position is that Big Pharma is certainly not perfect but a safer bet than its alternatives, and cures more problems than it creates.
I agree that the covid vaccines haven't been tested for a long time, but during a pandemic, we don't have the option to wait for 20 years for testing.
Persuasion rather than mandating vaccines would have been a better approach. The pandemic messed with everyone's sense of reality and the mandates did a lot of harm. Plus, big organizations knowingly lying, freaked people out and made them lose faith in the entire system.
What happens going toward, to vaccines in America? It's a risk versus benefit calculation and too many people are very risk averse now, because they have lost faith in the system.
What is your sense of the argument that the Covid vaccine isn't actually a vaccine, since its mechanism is different? A traditional vaccine contains inert fragments of a pathogen for the immune system to target; the Covid vaccine contains mRNA in capsules that turn some cells into factories for the thing that resembles the pathogen.
I think the mRNA device is marvelously clever, but AIU, it carries a critical downside: if the wrong cells turn into factories, and are killed by the immune system, the result is often a much more vulnerable organism. I don't want to forbid anyone from taking on this risk if they assess their risk of lethal Covid infection as higher, but I also think it's wrong to mandate assuming that risk.
> the Covid vaccine contains mRNA in capsules that turn some cells into factories for the thing that resembles the pathogen
This is not a bad thing, though. An mRNA vaccine works by delivering a small piece of messenger RNA that encodes instructions for making a *specific* viral protein—but not for making the whole virus. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines use the mRNA template for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 virus, because that's the part of the virus that is exposed to antibodies.
1. Delivery: The mRNA is encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles to protect it and facilitate its entry into cells. Once injected, these nanoparticles fuse with cell membranes, releasing the mRNA into the cytoplasm of cells near the injection site (mostly muscle cells and immune cells).
2. Protein production occurs next. The mRNA is read by the cell’s ribosomes, which translate it into the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This protein is then displayed on the cell surface or released into the bloodstream.
3. Then we get an immune response. The immune system recognizes the viral protein as foreign. Antigen-presenting cells (like dendritic cells) process and present the protein to T-cells and B-cells, triggering:
Antibody production: B-cells produce neutralizing antibodies that can bind to the virus if encountered later.
T-cell activation: Cytotoxic T-cells are primed to attack virus-infected cells, and helper T-cells amplify the immune response.
4. Several days after the injection the mRNA degrades. The mRNA is short-lived. Most is gone within 3 to 5 days. It does not enter the cell nucleus or alter the body’s DNA. Period.
5. The immune system develops memory B-cells and T-cells, enabling a faster, stronger response if exposed to the actual virus later.
Viral Vector Vaccines (e.g., Johnson & Johnson) work in roughly same way, but instead of lipid nanoparticles, they use a harmless adenovirus to deliver a gene encoding a viral protein into cells, which then produces the protein to stimulate immunity.
Live-Attenuated Vaccines contain weakened forms of the live virus (or bacteria) that replicate minimally in the body but do not cause full-blown disease in healthy individuals.
There are other ways of stimulating an immune response, but mRNA, viral vector, and live-attenuated vaccines all commandeer the ribosomes to produce the antigen which triggers the immune response.
Thanks; I think this affirms that we both have the same sense of the mRNA operation. (It's also consistent with the account of that operation, as described by people expressing concern with it.)
While we agree that these mRNA passages don't cause cells to create the pathogen itself (as I think I made clear), the concern is that they cause cells to functionally simulate them (by manifesting that spike protein on their surfaces). That's enough to cause the immune system to want to treat such cells as pathogens.
You and None of the Above both assert that LAVs tell cell ribosomes to produce a key antigen. I could not find an example of this, so the same question goes to you, if either of you happen to have one. (Reply anywhere here; if it takes until the next OT, there's a decent chance I'll see it there, since I'm used to you making these reports.)
Your #4 reminds me of a second concern: that there's evidence that the mRNA is not degrading as fast as originally claimed. I'm less familiar with that argument, but I can see how it would be trouble. (The concern does not rely on it changing DNA permanently, so I think we can rule that out. It seems to be more a case of the nanoparticle hanging around much longer, but as I said, I'm not as familiar.)
This may be more detail than you are looking for but this is the first lecture in Vincent Racceniello's virology course. He is a professor of virology at Columbia University who hosts the excellent TWIV, TWIM, and Immune podcasts, and I think a couple of other science podcasts. (I can't keep up with his output!).
The next to last slide in the deck explains that viruses have to somehow get mRNA to the host cell's ribosomes. This is always true, because viruses do not have ribosomes, but they're made partly of proteins so they *have* to get those proteins made in order to make more virus particles.
A critical idea (also in the slides) is that viruses basically have two stages:
Outside the cell, they don't really do much but float around and wait to bump into the right receptor and gain entry into the cell. Viruses are some genetic material (which can be DNA or RNA, single-stranded or double-stranded) and some helpful enzymes they'll need inside the next host cell, packed in some kind of protein shell. Some viruses also steal a little of the cell membrane of their host cell on the way out, so they have an envelope that covers most of their protein shell. They will always have some molecules sticking out that can bind to the right receptors and gain entry into a host cell, but in this stage, they're basically like a spring-loaded trap--they're not going to do anything until they get into a cell and get triggered.
Inside the cell, they basically have to hijack all the machinery of the cell to replicate. That means taking their genetic material and expressing it as mRNAs that can be made into proteins, getting those proteins made, and also getting their genetic material copied so they can make more viruses.
So any viral infection will involve getting the host cell to make proteins. That's a required part of the virus' life cycle. If you get a live attenuated polio vaccine, the attenuated polio virus replicates in some of the cells in your gut, and this creates a very convincing set of signals for your immune system that there's a viral infection going on.
Any of {a live attenuated virus vaccine, an mRNA vaccine, or a viral vector vaccine} will cause some of your host cells to make some proteins that your immune system will end up recognizing as foreign and dangerous.
An inactivated vaccine means the pathogen (virus or bacteria) is killed somehow before being injected--I think usually by heat or chemicals. This won't infect any cells, so there probably won't be any cells making mRNA or proteins from the pathogen. (Except that biology is messy as hell, so probably that somehow happens every now and then if the mRNAs are ever still intact in the inactivated viruses.)
A subunit vaccine means some proteins from the pathogen are injected into you, along with an adjuvant (something to make your immune system sit up and take notice). Nothing is going to be making any proteins from the pathogen in this case.
Before we go any further, the age-adjusted death rates (late 2021–early 2022) showed that unvaccinated peeps were dying at a rate of ~9/100,000 per week. Those vaccinated with a booster were dying at <1.0 deaths per 100,000 per week. The mRNA vaccines did a *slightly* better job of preventing deaths than the J&J vaccine, but I can't find the data right now. So, the vaccines worked, and they worked damn well.
A small number of deaths have been causally linked to vaccination, mainly due to: myocarditis in young males (extremely rare) or anaphylaxis (immediate allergic reaction, treatable). We're talking double digits here out of hundreds of millions of people vaccinated. The key advantage of mRNA vaccines is that, due to PCR technology, the development times are much quicker than other types. Pfizer stated that it could produce a new formulation within six weeks and bring it to production quickly. Versus older vaccine technologies that would take a year or more to develop.
It's been over 4 years now since the mRNA vaccines were released, and we're not seeing any long-term issues with them (and the idea that they're creating turbo cancers or suppressing our immune systems, is not supported by the facts).
As for the mechanism of Live Attenuated Vaccines, I hopped over to Wikipedia hoping to find you a good overview, but whoever wrote that article made some assumptions about the readers' knowledge levels. But the key point is that cells infected with LAV pathogen, "present the antigen on MHCII receptors." To present the antigen on the surface of he cell, the ribosomes must be hijacked by the attenuated virus to produce those proteins.
But if you specifically ask an LLM like Grok or ChatGPT, "Do live attenuated vaccines use the ribosomes to produce antigens?" they'll give a good high-level description of the process.
If the lipid nanoparticles linger longer than necessary, well, they'll eventually get absorbed by some cell. If the mRNA in the nanoparticle hasn't degraded, then the cell's ribosome will start producing SARS2 antigens, and your body's killer T cells will eliminate them as if they were a virus-infected cell. If the nanoparticle delivers inactive mRNA into a cell, it will eventually be expelled with the other kruft that accumulates in cells via exocytosis or other waste expulsion mechanisms (of which I'm not really up on the details).
But this is also how viral infections have to work. A virus does not carry its own machinery to make proteins from its DNA or RNA--instead, it hijacks that machinery from the cell it takes over. In order for a virus to replicate, it *has* to somehow take its genes and encode them into mRNA and get the cell's ribosomes to make copies of those proteins. This is where you get the Baltimore scheme for classifying viruses--basically the two relevant questions are "how does the virus store its information" and "how does the virus get mRNA to the cell's ribosomes to replicate?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification
In order to trigger an adaptive immune response, the infected cell pretty-much has to be making proteins. The antibody response is driven by proteins that the cell secretes--I don't think you would even get an antibody response without having those proteins floating around in the plasma. (But someone correct me if I'm wrong.) The CTL response (the thing that clears the infection once it's present) is driven by fragments of proteins presented on the surface of the cell in a receptor (MHC1) that immune-system cells can read.
The Wikipedia article on viral vector vaccines isn't as clear about this, but does also explicitly say that the infected cell expresses antigen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine. You can also look at the entry for DNA vaccines (which are still kind-of experimental, as I understand things.
One difference between viral vectors and mRNA is the mechanism for gaining entry into the cells--viruses basically always have a cell receptor they're targeting, and they won't infect cells without that receptor[1]. I think the lipid bubbles used for mRNA can gain entry into pretty-much any cell type, but again, someone correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm still not 100% clear on how that lipid bubble gets into cells when viruses always have to use a receptor.)
[1] One interesting consequence of this is that sometimes people have immunity to a virus because they're got some mutation that makes the receptor that the virus targets have the wrong shape. There is apparently a small set of people who are more-or-less immune to HIV because of having a misshapen receptor that HIV uses to infect macrophages.
There are live attenuated virus vaccines that don't just have some mRNA get inside a cell and cause it to make some viral proteins, they actually infect the cell and cause it to make viral some proteins. It's hard to see how the mRNA vaccines aren't "really a vaccine" if live attenuated virus vaccines are. For that matter, the standard smallpox vaccine causes an actual infection with a related virus (I always heard it was cowpox, but I think it turns out to be a different pox virus). That's the oldest vaccine around, and I think it's even where the term "vaccine" comes from.
Also, there are covid vaccines that don't use mRNA. The J&J vaccine uses a viral vector (a strain of adenovirus that makes infected cells make spike protein, and doesn't make viruses). Again, this seems pretty similar to what the mRNA vaccines are doing, just with a different mechanism for getting the spike protein mRNA to the host cell's ribosomes. The Novavax covid vaccine is a subunit vaccine--it's just injecting you with some parts of the spike protein plus some adjuvant, as I understand it.
Searching around, I find this; please tell me if there's a better source. (I could go to the linked cites, but there are 67; searching would take a long while.)
I'm passing familiar with LAVs. My understanding is that they typically work by introducing a neutralized or weakened form of the pathogen. The smallpox vaccine works this way, AIUI. It does not turn native cells into pathogens (or rather, pathogen simulators). We agree that LAVs can infect cells and lead to the immune system killing those cells, but that doesn't strike me as similar enough to rule out the concern.
I could find no example of LAVs that cause cells to "make viral some proteins". I assume you mean LAVs cause cells to generate substances (proteins or otherwise) that activate the immune system, but it's not clear whether such cells are killed because they resemble pathogens, or whether they simply appear to be sick.
If it turns out that LAVs *do* cause native cells to resemble pathogens, then I think I agree that either they and mRNA treatments both merit the term "vaccine", or neither do. (AFAIK, if there are LAVs that do this, then the people concerned about the mRNA mechanism are suddenly becoming aware that they should be concerned about such LAVs as well.)
Nitpick: I don't know quite what you mean about turning a cell into a pathogen. An infected cell ends up spending a lot of energy making copies of the virus, which may bud out of the cell somehow, or may just build up in the cell until the cell bursts open. Sometimes you also get latent infections, where the virus kind-of hides out in the cell and does a minimal amount of replication of viruses.
A cell that's been hijacked will show some fragments of the viral proteins it's making on its surface, and this allows CTLs (killer T-cells) to detect that the cell is infected. When they do, they send it signals to make it kill itself (apoptosis). (There is a bunch of other stuff going on--the immune system is fiercely complex.)
A famous example of a latent infection is shingles--you had chicken pox as a kid, you got better, but some of the herpes zoster found some cells to hide out in, and can pop back up and make you truly miserable when you're sick or otherwise run down, decades later. This is why those of us who had chicken pox as kids should get the shingles vaccine when we get old.
See above. A virus that infects a host cell and successfully replicates *has* to make copies of all the proteins that the new copies of the virus needs, because viruses don't carry their own protein-making machinery around with them.
The whole design of a virus is quite elegant--instead of spending all those resources to have ribosomes, cellular respiration, DNA- and RNA-copying machinery, etc., they just hijack that stuff in some susceptible cell. Some viruses carry some enzymes with them that the cell doesn't make, but they have to force the host cell to make more of those enzymes to pack into the next copy of the virus.
No, this is just totally wrong. All kinds of vaccines require boosters every so often. You personally have probably gotten tetanus boosters several times. And the bit about injecting someone's antibodies into a person is also completely wrong.
Weirdly, externally-made antibodies to covid *were* used in treating serious covid cases. Also I think they tried convalescent plasma (basically antibodies from someone who recovered), but IIRC without much success. There was even a medicine that injected long-lasting antibodies to covid in people. I think covid eventually evolved around those antibodies, but I don't know whether they were updated or not. (I stopped following covid so closely once the pandemic died down.)
I discussed that with my expert friends. They each independently said the same thing - they thought he was using his credentials to create a narrative he himself didn't believe, for the publicity it would generate.
Look I don't know directly how to assess these dissenters with credentials. I'm only sharing what my friends who are highly educated in biology (one in immunology, one in epidemiology) said.
If you can think Big Pharma can be corrupt enough to kill people for the profits, why not hold the dissenters to the same standards?
Geez, you're jumping all over the place in your arguments. But whatever Malone's previous credentials, he went off the deep end by the time COVID appeared. He promoted HCQ and Ivermectin (which turned the gullible away from getting vaccinated), and Malone started the fear-memes about the toxicity of spike proteins generated by some vaccines. He should not be in a position of responsibility for health policy. Although he hasn't killed with his own hands, his idiocy probably caused the deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who bought into his claims.
Except that vaccines are not making people "endlessly sick." Infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years. Globally, they’ve fallen by over two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today. A study in The Lancet indicated that increased access to crucial vaccines has reduced infant mortality rates by 40% compared to what they would be in a world without vaccines.
It's going to be a difficult hill for you to climb to claim that Big Pharma is making people endlessly sick while life expectancy keeps getting longer.
As for cancers, The cancer death rate has been continuously declining for two decades. The trend only went up in 2021, the year with the most COVID-19 deaths—probably because cancer patients had weaker immune systems and died at higher rates than previous years.
You may have grounds to criticize Big Pharma on what they charge consumers, but obviously, you're wrong that Big Pharma is making things worse.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory. By that I mean a theory, that in order to be true, would need thousands of people to conspire together
Possible but unlikely
I think ambitious people routinely bet on which person running for president in 4 years might win and audition by publicly stating positions. For plum jobs in the next administration. It's not a new phenomenon.
The claim that SARS2 was circulating in Spain in early 2019 was a 3-day-wonder meme that popped up early in the pandemic. But you had me curious enough that I went back to see what I could find on the claim. Google Scholar doesn't indicate that there was ever any paper published on this finding. The only results that I can find are popular media accounts that were recycled into the Twitter meme churn. ChatGPT says the sample was either lost or never available for verification. The questions I'd ask are: Which type of assay did they use? — RT-qPCR or RT-dPCR? And at what level CpmL did they detect it? These assays can give false positives in very low concentrations. Unless you can give me more details, I'd have to conclude that this was a false positive reading because it seems to have been a single, unverified instance that contradicts established timelines.
As for IgG antibodies, creating long-lasting IgG antibodies is the gold standard of vaccine efficacy. The problem with the mRNA vaccines (and all other non-mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that I know of) is that their IgG antibodies fade over time, and after 6 months to a year most people's antibody titers will be too low to stop a new infection, which is one of the reasons annual boosters were recommended (that plus immune escape by the evolving virus).
When IgG titers are high your ability to crush the virus before it gains a foothold in your tissues is high.
There is an ongoing war between two nations that don't border each other, Israel and Iran. Previously, only America could go to war with nations that it didn't border because we have bases and aircraft carriers all over the world. But now it's apparently possible for Israel, which is miniscule but rich, and Iran, which is medium-sized but poor, to manage a fairly damaging war against each other. Presumably this ability is now available to everyone besides the very most poor and corrupt nations. What are the second and third order consequences of this shift?
- Maybe nothing changes, because mostly people only hate their neighbors enough to want to fight them?
- Maybe nothing changes, because all these long-distance wars will turn into standoffs?
- Does Brazil become the dominant power in South America? If yes, what does that actually get it? If Brazil tried to coerce Chile, would Chile actually give Brazil some concessions or would it just make the Chileans mad?
- Does the ocean get de facto partitioned into domains, with everybody able with ballistic anti-ship missiles to easily sink ships even far out at sea? Or does it not get partitioned, because missiles are now accurate at such long ranges that any ship anywhere is vulnerable? (China has tested an anti-ship missile with enough range to sink ships near Hawaii from mainland China. Probably all of the world's medium-sized nations could build the same thing if they wanted to.) If its not partitioned, then how does naval power work?
That went so badly that it's either funny or embarassing. I meant to start a discussion about the way that long-range missiles have proliferated since the end of the cold war. Almost no one understood my original post that way, and most of the answers were about ancient wars. I did get to learn about Kadesh, which is cool I guess.
Other people have already said that wars between nations that don't neighbor each other are already common.
I was curious what the first one was. In the west, Kadesh probably qualifies since their spheres of influence bordered but not the nations themselves. And if that doesn't count you have overseas campaigns in the Eastern Mediterranean shortly thereafter. However, there's also evidence from the Unification of Egypt or the Sumerian City-States that they sometimes sent armies through other states to fight for political objectives. Which would push it back a few thousand years. So maybe more than 5,000 years ago depending on how strict you count as not bordering.
In the East the answer is probably the Spring and Autumn period, so about 2,500 years ago, which often involved sending armies to accomplish political objectives in more distant states. Especially early on. Chengpu is an example but there are likely less famous earlier battles. I'm pretty sure not every state that fought over the capital bordered it.
And the rest of the world doesn't get good historical records until later on.
I don't understand your surprise to this war as if it were revolutionary. Long range precision strikes have been a feature of war for some time. What was impressive was Israels intelligence gathering and operaiton itself, but the tools are nothing new.
So
- well it's not that nothing will change, but not much will change because Israele demonstrated it can use it's airforce.
- this type of long range wars usually end depending on magazine depth and economic and sociaetal resilience of one actor. In This case it's particularly a dangerous situation for Iran, but assuming they can avoid regime changes from the population or rebels Israel will not be able to have a classic "complete victory" that can come by having troops on the ground
- again, the biggest obstacle to two decently armed countries attacking each other is not the distance but a list of other factors such as political consequences, economica consequences, social protest and for now a sort of international order which is partially unraveling. The last factor is a serious danger to international stability, not the long distance capabilities.
- no, but i will let someone who knows more about naval warfare respond to this.
If you are really looking at breakthroughs in military capabilities drones are definitely one.
Democratizing striking capabilities in a way we still have to completly understand, Ukraine war is a perfect example.
WWI broke out with Austro-Hungary invading Serbia, then Germany, France, Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were dragged in due a complex series of mutual defence treaties that they had. It's not accurate to say German fought England.
Similarly in WWII, Germany invaded the Czech Republic and Poland, with the very explicit goal of capturing neighbouring territory. I agree that the Battle of Britain and the British bombing of Germany fit into this idea of a remote war fought by bombers against a mostly civilian populace. But the majority of the war was fought by neighbouring countries, perhaps reinforced by allies from further afield.
Before the Russian invasion we were in an unusually peaceful period, with deaths from war falling fairly consistently from WWII to the present. The UN, NATO, EU and similar organisations seem to provide a deterrent to war. The phrase is out of fashion but the international rules-based order provides deterrents to launching missiles at any other country. There hasn't been a major war in South America since the 1930s - I don't see Brazil kicking one off just because Israel 'got away with it' (which remains to be seen).
Outside of a small number of rogue states (I'll draw ire for including Israel in this category along with Russia and Iran) most wars in the world are civil wars. In the context of the question, they're not even between neighbouring countries. I can think of very few countries which would have the capacity or willingness to start a war with a faraway country, at the risk of the type of sanctions imposed on Russia since 2022.
You can count Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a 'civil war'. Both countries were parts of the single country (USSR) not too long ago, a lot of cultural similarities (and Eastern Ukraine /Crimea are majority-Russian-speaking...)
I wouldn't! They've been separate countries for over 30 years now, albeit with a complex history. To call it a civil war delegitimises all the countries from behind the Iron Curtain, and is just not how the term is used. Would you call the War of 1812 a Civil War in the history of the USA?
That is also ok; just pointing out this conflict has several characteristics that make it quite similar to civil wars.
>> They've been separate countries for over 30 years now
The conflict started in 2014 (2022 was a major escalation, but not the beginning!).
And not much changed in the first few years of independence (till about 96?), so I would formulate it like 'Russia and Ukraine were substantially separate countries for ~18 years before the start of the conflict'.
>> Would you call the War of 1812 a Civil War in the history of the USA?
Don't know pre-WW2 USA history that well, not enough data to form an opinion...
Yes, that was a Civil war, in the sense that it was internal to the British Empire at the time (though one often distinguishes successful Revolutions from unsuccessful Civil Wars, and one treats far-away colonies a little differently).
There's no invasion or fighting. Venezuela loudly claimed a bunch of Guyana, raised some flags, changed some maps, and paraded a bunch of soldiers around. Nothing more significant has happened than that.
Interesting - I did not know about this. Wikipedia suggests that there's been little if any actual fighting, though I may have missed something. There doesn't seem to have been a war between separate states with more than say 1,000 casualties in South America in a long, long time.
If you count areas separated by sea, then "wars between places that don't border each other" have been with us since ancient times.
I'm also surprised that there aren't good directed energy point defences yet. That seems like it would really raise the bar on viable drone attacks, though I guess you could just wait for clouds.
I think sea separation still allows for cheap and rapid transport of force (weapons, soldiers, whatever); it's probably better to think of two nations sharing a sea as sharing a border. I think what's new about Isreal/Iran is that it's the first war free from "the tyranny of the wagon equation".
ACOUP has some excellent discussion on the impact of seas/rivers here:
Not an expert, but my understanding is that for lasers the wavelengths most useful for damage (e.g. infrared) are also preferentially absorbed by the atmosphere, rendering them both short-range and extremely lossy.
I was and remain confused about the "genocide in Gaza" narrative. Will someone make a compelling case for it?
My position is simple and probably boringly familiar: the casualty figures (~55k/20months according to the Gaza Health Ministry), while large, stay well below the natural growth of the population (~54k/year pre-war EDIT: actually 47k = 54k births - 7k deaths), do not threaten annihilation or massive reduction of the population size, and are slowing down (half of total casualties so far were in the first 4 months - 20% of the war so far). I have misgivings about some of the policies adopted by the Israeli army and after reading deeply about several well-documented cases I think some may amount to war crimes (I'm an Israeli Jew and I support the war on Hamas, despite these misgivings). But I cannot see how any of them amount to "genocide" or "ongoing genocide", if the word is to remain meaningful.
When I read news stories about how "leading scholars of genocide agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza", it makes me want to question the whole field of scholarship of genocide, if it converges on such an absurd, on its face, accusation. Am I being obtuse or annoyingly literal about what the word "genocide" could mean? But if it does not mean at least something like "a serious attempt to kill an entire national/ethnic/religious/etc. group or at least a very substantial part of it", does it then not lose its moral force as a uniquely evil thing?
To steelman the argument of those calling it a genocide, I think you need to separate the scholarly world and the layman usage.
Assuming a Western perspective, the most salient usage of the word 'genocide' refers to what European Jews experienced after the Nuremberg laws in Germany and other occupied parts of Europe. Usually the topic is brought up together with various other antisemitic pieces of legislation, civic and cultural biases, which are implicitly and explicitly assumed as the justification for the ultimate attempt at exterminating European Jews.
This is probably why the word 'genocide' evokes images of segregation, of forced removal, of ethnic cleansing, despite those things being peripheral to the actual definition of the word. I think part of the reason why all these discriminatory practices ended up being lumped together conceptually despite their varying degrees of gravity is because of the phenomenon Scott wrote about recently, where pushing back on matters of principle when talking about controversial subjects looks like defending the worst side.
(as an example, I can easily imagine a conversation where a person would state "The removal of citizenship from German Jews was the beginning of the genocide". Would anybody correct this statement if it came up in a conversation? Probably not. And yet it reinforces the connection that 'removal of citizenship' is part of the broader category of 'genocide', or a precursor to it)
In this sense, I think it's more or less understandable why laypeople would use the word to refer to general mass murder, ethnic cleansing or organized, state-sponsored discrimination.
Personally, I wish everyone just stuck to 'ethnic cleansing', which is a heinous enough crime and seems to be what is actually happening in Gaza and the occupied territories in general
Cute... ( Though, if ASI is built, and it decides that humans are in its way, well... Though it probably wouldn't sequence our elimination one ethnic group at a time... )
Note that the law against genocide includes the usual "inchoate offences":
(1) conspiracy to commit genocide;
(2) incitement to commit genocide;
(3) attempt to commit genocide;
(4) complicity in genocide.
Before you dismiss those as insignificant, note that under *Israeli law* they are all considered significant enough to mandate the death penalty. Why? Because the law against genocide isn't just there to allow us to identify, after the fact, that a group has been genocided and then apply an appropriate punishment. It's there to try to prevent genocide.
As such, any criterion should be the minimum necessary to identify that a genocide has started. Although 'burden of proof' arguments are usually purely vacuous debating tactics, here I think it is quite reasonable to say that you bear the burden of proof here: you are proposing that genocide should only be identified when the perpetrator manages to exterminate the victim group at a higher rate than the birth rate. Why is it necessary to wait until then, if other elements (intent, willingness to kill large numbers of civilians, babies, pregnant mothers, etc) have been established?
In terms of the current situation, it's worth noting that Israeli leaders have made statements which are clearly "incitement to genocide" and they therefore have a vested interest in using all the means open to them to maintain the narrative that no such thing is going on. Given that if a future Israeli administration were to ever take it seriously, they could be facing a firing squad.
If Israel wanted to kill everyone in Gaza, they could get most of that done in an afternoon.
So far, they've killed 3% of the population in 1.5 years. At that rate the population is probably still increasing.
The constant warnings to Gazans to evacuate certain areas before they're attacked are also hard to explain if the intent is genocidal.
So for me it's definitely not a genocide in the "trying to kill everyone" sense. If you think it's a genocide in some other sense, be specific so the discussion can have some chance of being communicative.
The population of Gaza is estimated to have fallen about 6% since the start of the war, with more of the decline coming from people leaving than deaths. I imagine birth rates have fallen too, but I don't have numbers.
It's not genocide, though some of the more far-right members of the Israeli government would like to take a harsher stance on Gaza if they could get away with it.
I completely agree that I want people to make a compelling case for it. And the only way you can do that--as in, make a case that's compelling or even remotely persuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree with you--is to provide (a) some clear, unambiguous, and above all politically neutral definition that (b) distinguishes between a genocide and a war where one side is badly losing, and (c) prove that you equally condemn, and devote equal energy and effort and time to condemning, all wars and conflicts that meet that definition.[1]
This is really, really, really important. First because, let's say Israel is indeed committing a genocide.[2] If you want to stop this genocide, the most effective way you could do so is by convincing either the Israeli government, the US government, a sufficiently large part of the bipartisan US population, or possibly a sufficiently large number of other western countries' governments and populations that a genocide is occuring. And the *worst thing* you could possibly do for that purpose is use a vague, biased, or otherwise muddy criteria for distinguishing lopsided war from genocide that is, or looks like it could be, changed or applied
differently depending on the countries and ethnic groups involved. (That's absolutely guaranteed to cause almost all the people whose opinions being changed would have a substantial effect to disregard everything you say.) While the *best* thing you could possibly do is consitently use a crystal clear, unquestionably politically neutral definition that very aggressively removes all possibility that its use changes depending on whether the perpetrator is a US ally, on the skin colour of the groups involved, or on anything else like that.
And second, because if Israel is in any way even the slightest bit persuadable to change anything about what they do at all, the *best thing* you can do is give them a genocide definition based on clear actions of theirs with the *certainty* that, were they to stop doing those actions, their behaviour would no longer be called a genocide, no matter how much you disapprove of it. And the *worst thing* you could possibly do is talk in a way that makes it highly likely that no matter what they change you will still find a way to accuse them of genocide, unless they do absolutely everything you want.[3]
And I think it's pretty clear that the latter approach is being used by the vast majority of Israel's critics. Which means that--given that persistently using and popularising sloppy and biased definitions of genocide discredits not only your use of the term but everyone else's (including those who actually are using it in a principled fair way), and given that discrediting such terms is a positive act that directly reduces the likelihood that influential people will take the accusation seriously--these people are, *more than anyone else except its direct supporters*, complicit in whatever genocide that is occuring!
So, for the love God, please, provide a clear definition, that distinguishes lopsided war from genocide and *is applied consistently to all countries*, if you care *at all* about preventing genocides, and not just about promoting a particular political agenda.
[1] I wouldn't necessarily firmly hold a random commentator to this, since ordinary people are going to have biases, even though it still definitely and significantly reduces their moral authority on the topic. But if the UN, for example, calls one country's act a genocide while having previously not called a different country's similar act one, then nobody (who isn't already a partisan in that direction) will, or should, give any weight whatsoever to what the UN says on the topic. Same for any other prominent institution.
[2] I am legitimately not taking a position on this, since I don't know all the facts and factual claims.
[3] And it's a million times worse if you are calling their current policy a genocide and, before that policy was implemented, you were previously accusing them of genocide anyway.
I agree. Instead of telling people your conclusion, give them a list of facts you based your conclusion on. (Check the list twice, to exclude known hoaxes.) If the facts are sufficiently strong, they can make the conclusion themselves.
Thus is 100 percent correct (if the goal is to save lives, rather than to simply claim outrage or to express one's priors . A rather big if, unfortunately).
Do you think there is likely to be twice the reported casualty figures? Three times? Ten times? Seems unlikely that the numbers we got could be 1/10th the reality, but even if there are ten times as many deaths then it's still only about 28% of the population. Over 66% of the Jewish population of Europe was killed during that genocide: in Poland, which started with the largest population and where the genocide was carried out the most thoroughly, it was more like 88% killed.
You'd need the actual casualties to be unrealistically higher than the estimates to get in spitting distance of a genocide.
Humans need food to live, and Gazans aren't exactly capable of producing it under current conditions at anywhere near their population numbers. They're in refugee camps, not on farms, and in a tiny portion of the place's pre-war territory.
The slaughter of journalists, blocking of humanitarian aid, and recent massacres of crowds seeking food distribution have very disturbing implications.
It really seems that the goal of all these actions are not to eradicate the people of Gaza but to force Hamas to surrender and/or release the hostages. It seems pretty clear that if Hamas surrendered tomorrow, or even just released all the remaining hostages tomorrow, then Israel would not continue to restrict food aid into Gaza.
Israel has refused deals of "we free the hostages in exchange for ending the ethnic cleansing campaign" and its policies of mass extermination have surely caused the deaths of many of the hostages
I think it refers to the effective collective punishment, brutalizing, and limited starving of a very captive Gaza population. The number of non combatant casualties is very large, and it appears many children are shot intentionally. Even if it is only a fraction of a genocide, does that make it better? Israel's actions are morally repulsive, as repulsive as a genocide, so the term is used.
Caveat: In the US, the gaza war is covered by very partisan sources in the US, so it's really hard to know the truth. Many seem to omit the whole story, with headlines like "Military opens fire on crowd of hungry people in food line" and the article omits the likely probability that some were armed. But overwhelmingly, it appears that civilians are being destroyed and maimed. And that is sad and terrible.
Sad and terrible, but we should still care about getting our claims right.
When George Floyd was killed by some Minneapolis cops, one common line floating around was that this was a racist lynching. Now, here's the thing: this just wasn't true. Floyd's death was a very bad thing, apparently caused by the cops applying a dangerous restraint technique in an incompetent or careless way. But calling it a racist lynching was just bullshit. Perhaps effective rhetoric, but still bullshit.
Calling the war in Gaza genocide seems the same, to me. It can be bad without being genocide, so make the case that it's bad or needlessly bad or whatever, but don't pretend it's genocide just to get everyone's attention.
a. The initial coroner's report said he tested positive for covid and fentanyl, but not that either was the cause of death.
b. None of this is relevant to whether or not Floyd's death was the result of a racial lynching, as neither dying of covid or heart attack or fentanyl overdose or positional asphyxia from the way the cops restrained him would remotely qualify.
Civilians dying in war is indeed sad and terrible, but calling it a genocide just makes you look unserious. Is Russia committing a genocide against Ukrainians? They sure have killed a lot of non-combatants.
The UN definition seems pretty solidly to match what I think people ordinarily mean by genocide. If you want to argue that Russia taking Ukrainian children for the purpose of destroying their Ukrainian culture and heritage is an act of genocide, I will listen. But the civilian deaths occurring from missile strike and bombings don't seem at all like genocide to me, they seem like what happens when two states go to war.
>The UN definition seems pretty solidly to match what I think people ordinarily mean by genocide.
Hmm, ok, we may be seeing different samples of ordinary people. My experience is that the overwhelming use of the term that I've seen has focused on the killing of a population, not on any of the other clauses that the UN stuck in its definition.
>If you want to argue that Russia taking Ukrainian children for the purpose of destroying their Ukrainian culture and heritage is an act of genocide, I will listen.
Oops, sorry! I didn't mean that I took that position, just that it matched the UN's definition (if there was actually intent). Personally, I suspect that, since Russia has a TFR of 1.42, Putin may be motivated by a grab for future cannon fodder rather than an intent to destroy Ukraine as a culture.
>But the civilian deaths occurring from missile strike and bombings don't seem at all like genocide to me, they seem like what happens when two states go to war.
Agreed.
Given the uses that I've seen of the term, I think the UN should have kept the definition to _just_ the case whether the target group is being killed.
Maybe, in analogy with the distinction between opiates and opioids, they should have defined another term, maybe genocioid, to cover the broader list of _other_ grievances, separate from killings, that they put into their definition.
Most of the upset of the form "well then, *everything* is genocide" seems to stem from worry that what seems to you (and I) as not-genocide will be ruled genocide anyway, by someone who really, really wants to. (And who might have first crack at the referee's ear.)
Therefore, it should be wrong to interpret the UN definition that way, and therefore, there should be an agreed-upon principle limiting such interpretations. Currently, there appears to be no such principle. (Other than perhaps "don't annoy the West too much", but no one wants that to be the official principle.)
I'm more upset that if you call things that are not genocide "genocide" then the word loses it's meaning. Genocide is a specific very bad thing, if you conflate it with other bad things then we won't have a word for that thing anymore. Not to mention that the word comes with emotional and moral connotations whereby calling something a genocide gets people to think it is worse than it actually may be.
It's good that we have a UN definition so there is a definition of genocide that people across the world can use to communicate with each other. I don't see any problem with it.
And as a followup question, what wars (1900 and later) _don't_ count as genocides by these standards?
OK, fine, we can think of some very low-civilian-casualty affairs, but are most big wars genocides? Are some of them mutual genocides? Were the British genociding the Germans as the Germans were genociding the British?
Let's not go the opposite extreme, where unless 90% of population is exterminated, it is "not true genocide".
I would prefer to stay on the level of stating the facts, rather than arguing definitions, but since it seems inevitable, check Wikipedia: "disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups", if those are not unrelated crimes, but parts of a single purpose.
According to that definition, yes, if Russians ban the use of Ukrainian language, destroy their historical books and monuments, if they specifically exterminate authors and poets, take children away from parents for reeducation, and teach them at schools that there is no such thing as "Ukrainians" but they are actually "little Russians", then yes, this completely fits the traditional definition of genocide.
But they don't - no restrictions on the use of Ukrainian between private parties (compare that with bans on Russian language in Ukraine), and also Ukrainian is an official language in some of the annexed regions
Like which ones, and how 'historical' are they? After 2014, a lot of streets in Ukraine were renamed to honor Nazi allies/collaborators (example: Shukhevych avenue in Kyiv), and in areas controlled by Russia, that was reverted (back to pre-2014 state).
>> if they specifically exterminate authors and poets, take children away from parents for reeducation
Haven't heard about anything like that on a large scale, any links to check if this is happening?
>> teach them at schools that there is no such thing as "Ukrainians" but they are actually "little Russians"
Might it be conflation of 'Russian' as an ethnicity (1) vs. 'Russian' as in 'citizen of Russia' (2)?
Of course, state of Russia would emphasize (2) in their school program and put any ethnicity as secondary - but that is pretty natural and widespread? (Or do you expect e.g. US government to use Hawaiian for school instruction in Hawaii, and also talk at length how US annexed Hawaii after a US-lead coup in late 19th century?)
Holodomor is very politicized, there are two narratives - one is that it was a deliberate action to kill peasants in Ukraine (and that is used to incite anti-Russian sentiment), another that it was gross mismanagement & class warfare coupled with transition to large-scale farms (without any ethnic components); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933; note that a lot of peasants died in Russia of the exactly the same causes at the same time.
So the monument in question is a) quite recent b) can be viewed as anti-state propaganda - so not surprising it was dismantled.
FWIW, Ukraine dismantled a lot of Lenin statues, although they were there for 50+ years, and Lenin was the main proponent of affirmative action in favor of Ukrainian's (in Ukraine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia)
>> Haven't heard about anything like that on a large scale
Ok, any links / reports on school textbooks (vs. some corners of the blogosphere) using it like this (and which are not talking about 18th-19th century, when the term was widely used)?
>Let's not go the opposite extreme, where unless 90% of population is exterminated, it is "not true genocide".
Wouldn't dream of it. I define genocide as attempting to eradicate a people group in whole or in part. Non-combatants dying during a war does not meet that definition, they have to be killed with the intent of wiping out their people group. The non-combatant deaths in Gaza and in Ukraine seem perfectly explicable as being the expected result of a war happening.
Are you seriously asking for a link to child pornography? (It's the biggest industry in Ukraine, passing wheat now that most of the farmland has been turned into a giant shrubbery.).
Well for one thing, the conditions in Gaza aren't conducive to accurate tracking of deaths. For another, "the natural growth rate of the population" is probably significantly lower when they're starving in a rubble-strewn hellscape.
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide does not require that anyone die; rather, it requires only the commission of certain listed acts* "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"
The key words there are "intent to destroy" and "as such." I am dubious that Israel has the requisite intent. But, more importantly, an accusation of genocide in any but the most obvious case is counterproductive: If I accuse you of genocide, you know for sure whether you are guilty of it, because you know your own intent. And if you know that you do not have the requisite intent, you can simply ignore my accusation.
In contrast, if I accuse you of war crimes, such as failing to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;" https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-57 , you can't dismiss that accusation, because that is a judgment call.
*(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
> The key words there are "intent to destroy" and "as such."
No, the key words there are "in part". You might notice that all warfare automatically satisfies this definition, as long as one side's military forces sometimes draw soldiers from the same country they're fighting for.
> You might notice that all warfare automatically satisfies this definition
Only if you ignore the legal rulings clarifying what "in part" means (eg Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro).
So random commenters on the internet unaware of how courts work might consider any war to be genocide (at least when it's convenient for them), but the ICJ doesn't.
You can certainly decide whatever the ICJ declares to be genocide ipso facto IS, but just because they pretend they reached whatever decisions they did based on some text doesn't mean we then need to pretend to be too stupid to understand what it actually says.
Have you ever read a decision of the ICTR? Or the ICTY? Or any of the relevant literature? Or anything re statutory construction? I rather doubt it. Then why are you so sure that your interpretation of the text is correct?
No, the point is that "as such" is key precisely because it modifies "in part," and thereby establishes that your example does not satisfy the definition.
And, honestly, do you think any country would have ratified the Convention if your interpretation were correct? Of course not, which is strong evidence against your interpretation.
You don't think the American army is "part" of a "national group"? How are you parsing the text?
> And, honestly, do you think any country would have ratified the Convention if your interpretation were correct?
Yes? Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
Back up. Do you think what people say about laws pre-passage is indicative of how those laws are implemented afterwards?
If you're a country that doesn't want to condemn something, you can just fail to acknowledge that it meets a catchall definition. No one can make you do otherwise. But to the extent the official definition has any meaning at all, it includes all armed conflict. Nobody wants that to be true; nobody uses the official definition. That's not an argument that you should be trying to derive opinions from it.
Again, the key is "as such." Enemy soldiers are targeted for killing because of their status as soldiers, not their status as members of a targeted group. They would be targeted if they were foreign mercenaries.
>Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
Given that not all treaties are ratified, yes. Apparently the US Senate does not think the Convention on the Rights of the Child is a good idea.
>Do you think what people say about laws pre-passage is indicative of how those laws are implemented afterwards?
Well, I know that international tribunals interpreting the Genocide Convention have used what was said pre-passage as sources for their interpretation, so yes.
>> Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
> Given that not all treaties are ratified, yes.
That's a fairly impressive non sequitur.
You just argued, explicitly, that in all cases where an action is sometimes taken and sometimes not taken, it is considered to be a good idea whenever it is taken.
Is there a reason you think other people should listen to your ideas?
You clearly are not familiar with the negotiations re the Genocide Convention back in 1948. Nor with the substantial differences between the original draft and the final draft. Nor with the fact that it has never been applied to acts like those in OP's hypothetical.
The Genocide Convention dilutes the Genocide concept so much that we need a new word for "killing everyone of a group" if we adopt that as the "real" definition.
But I assume that the people claiming there a Gaza genocide typically mean the "kill everyone" definition?
It seems to me that the "intent to destroy" requirement ameliorates the dilution. And the "in part" is necessary to preclude claims like, "we didn't intend to kill all Vietnamese, just the ones in Cambodia."
"But, more importantly, an accusation of genocide in any but the most obvious case is counterproductive"
This seems like it proves too much. This could apply to literally any crime that requires intent. Accusations are, in general, made for the benefit of bystanders (to call attention to the act and its possible motives), not as part of a strictly two-way dialog with the accused.
Yes, it can. But we aren't talking about the criminal justice system. The point of an accusation at this point is to get the actor to change its behavior. That is not going to happen if the actor knows it is innocent of the crime it is accused of.
If there is a war crimes tribunal convened at some point, then perhaps a genocide accusation would be appropriate.
Genocide isn’t just killing all of a population, it’s in whole or in part, and includes other criteria: there’s the destruction of most of the buildings, attacks on religious institutions, the attacks on hospitals, the withholding of aid, and so on. And the clear desire, articulated by many in the Israeli cabinet, to kick the Palestinians out. You can read the ICC interim report for a case by case review.
And those numbers are far too low anyway, merely the counted dead. Under the rubble lies many more.
And talking of rubble, there’s no way back to living there without billions of dollars of investment. And who is paying for that? Hardly Israel. Not much of a punishment. The US? I think that Trump said the quiet part out loud, and the aim is ethnic cleansing. You can come back when it’s finished. Maybe.
Anyway I don’t think there’s any living there, so there’s only dying there, so I wouldn’t be too keen to not use the G word, although perhaps you could equivocate and say that ethic cleansing isn’t really genocide.
> Genocide isn’t just killing all of a population, it’s in whole or in part, and includes other criteria: there’s the destruction of most of the buildings, attacks on religious institutions, the attacks on hospitals, the withholding of aid, and so on
I dunno, when I heard the word "genocide" it was the 1990s, and it meant "killing all the population".
If people insist on defining it down to mean other bad things then we should probably just chuck the word "genocide" out and come up with two new words, one that means "killing all the population" and one that means "other bad stuff".
I don't have the power to redefine words but I can at least tune out every time someone invokes the "G" word, which is what I tend to do nowadays.
'Hey, it's not a genocide, we're not sending soldiers in to shoot everybody. We're just blocking food and water, cutting off the electricity, regularly bombing the place and sorta hoping they'll all just die or flee elsewhere so then we can move in to claim the vacant territory, but that's not a *genocide*'.
Technically no. But this, I think, is what you get with a secular nation state that doesn't have even the dregs of Christian values behind it. We've argued on here before about Western civilisation and the water the fish swim in, but here is someplace that was not built on "we had centuries of 'love your enemy' preached at us". This is genuine Old Testament "eye for an eye" stuff. I think it demonstrates that nice liberal values don't just precipitate out of the air once you hit a particular level of development, technology and wealth.
Before I get bashed about anti-Semitism, I think the same holds for China and other non-Christian nations. The foundational principles are different and just slapping on a coat of whitewash of Western practices around democracy and capitalism isn't enough to change worldviews to "maybe we should all be nice to the outgroup".
This is a strange argument to make. First of all, Israel's Ashkenazi elites trace their recent ancestry to Christian Europe. Israel was *very much* built by people who had centuries of "love your enemy" preached at them. Also, the pattern in America (and probably most of Europe) is that the more Christian someone is, the more likely it is they support Israel. It looks like it's the vaunted "Christian values" that make people pro-massacre!
I HAVE read (well, honestly, skimmed) Mein Kampf, yes. And no, but I don't smoke and don't expect to know any but the most famous cigarette brands; I DO know the name isn't taboo in India as it is in the West, and a cigarette brand with it isn't too surprising.
"Hitler is CURRENTLY the fount of all metaphysical, mystical, and moral reality in American life.
"Usually Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians are quite jealous of not letting the theological doctrines of other faiths penetrate their own religions without scrupulous review and revision... yet one could see members of all three faiths lecturing even atheist, Buddhist, and Hindu students on the theological implications of the Holocaust in otherwise secular class on secular philosophical topics. [Note: This part I can confirm from personal experience.]
" Americans already believe Hitler is the most metaphysically important person in human history, in the way that an increasingly large cross section of Americans DO NOT believe in the significance of Christ or their own founding fathers.
"In Mainline churches across the US one can, with considerable impunity, blaspheme God or Jesus with shockingly little social pushback, even standing in front of the Crucifix… but say the wrong thing about Hitler, violate THAT taboo, and people will fly into rages that you dare upset the metaphysical order of the world and violate their souls with your heresy.
"Americans are already Esoteric Hitlerists, mostly they believe in a misotheistic conception of Hitler where he is the evil God of the modern world and of a human nature they are not supposed to engage with, to deny at all cost.
"But that doesn't change the fact that for maybe hundreds of millions of Americans Hitler is a real, dangerous, live (if not living) God whose impact and danger they fear/taboo."
While some will be excited about vacant territory, thats not the reason the war is happening. The war is primarily to end? the terrorism that keeps coming from there. The religio-national nutjob faction supports it, but it wouldn't be happening if only they wanted it. The palestinian territories just arent that interesting in selfish materialist terms.
"When I hear the word 'vaccine,' I think of a substance you can inject once and that prevents a person from getting a disease nearly 100% of the time. Anything that doesn't meet my personal standard for vaccines should be called something else."
"I dunno, when I heard the word "genocide" it was the 1990s, and it meant "killing all the population"."
Strangely, words are not generally defined by "what Melvin thought they meant in the 90s." I don't think genocide ever meant "killing all the population," not even in the popular consciousness. Consider that "all" is quite a high bar, which very, very few well-known historical genocides could be reasonably said to meet. I'd say the popular definition would tend more towards "mass murder targeted a particular ethnic or cultural group[1]." I think it is a very strange argument that must have arisen more from political expedience than any clear conviction that something *can't* be a genocide if it's not perfectly on track to wipe out an entire population.
Regardless, as I understand it, the broader definition wasn't chosen for a lark, nor was it chosen to try to tar these more benign actions with the infamy of mass-murder. As I understand it, it was chosen because people who study the subject recognized those actions as being part of the same pattern. Note the "intending to destroy" in gdanning's definition. Various matters of practicality and expedience may inform *how* the intent manifests in practice. But the underlying intent is the important bit: a group *merely* engaging in one of the "milder" forms today may very quickly escalate to widespread mass murder if circumstances promote it as the best way to accomplish their goal.
[1] Which is not to say that this is the word-for-word definition you'd get from a random person on the street: people are often struggle to articulate definitions even of words they use correctly. But if you asked a random person to classify events as genocide or not genocide, I expect you'd find their classifications to fit this schema reasonably well.
The Genocide Convention, signed in 1948, defines genocide in a manner which does not require the intent to kill the entire population:
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>(a) Killing members of the group;
(>b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
But you are intending to destroy part of a national, ethnical, racial, and religious group, namely the part comprised by the two dudes. The definition does not say how big of a "part" counts as genocide.
>Given the goal of the Convention to deal with mass crimes, it is widely acknowledged that the intention to destroy must target at least a substantial part of the group. ... targeted part of a group would be classed as substantial either because the intent sought to harm a large majority of the group in question or the most representative members of the targeted community. ... . Genocidal intent may therefore be manifest in two forms. It may consist of
desiring the extermination of a very large number of the members of the group, in which case it would constitute an intention to destroy a group en masse. However, it may also consist of the desired destruction of a more limited number of persons selected for the impact that their disappearance would have upon the survival of the group as such.
Prosecutor v. Jelisic, Judgment, IT-95-10-T para 82 (Int'l Crim. Trib. Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber, Dec. 14, 1999)
If you look up "Native American genocide" on Wikipedia, you will find this same debate. I think most people now look at the Native American displacement and death by European settlers as horrific, but scholars still argue over whether it was genocide (although it seems like consensus opinion is that at least some periods were genocidal). Something similar may end up happening in how we talk about Gaza.
My opinion until this year was that Israel is committing war crimes and attempts on committing a forced displacement/ethnical cleansing of the palestinian population in Gaza, but not a genocide per se.
When Israel blocked any humanitarian aid to enter in Gaza for months and further increasing the level of starvation in the territory, and only accepted in the end to let little humanitarian aid in after being put under extreme international pressure and under questionable conditions (GHF), my opinion switched to believe that Israel is actually in the process of committing a genocide. The fact that humanitarian convoys were guided by Iraeli defense forces to take routes that were vulnerable to gangs (supported by Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Forces) who'd loot this aid reinforced this change in opinion.
I think the right-wing Israeli ministers would like to displace the Palestinians to another country, but no country is willing to accept them in large numbers, so most can't leave.
What you're describing, if we assume the worst intent on the part of the Israeli government, is a country that wanted to commit genocide through starvation, but didn't due to international pressure. That's not the same thing as a country that actually kills a nation through starvation. Or maybe you're predicting they will starve them to death in future?
> I think the right-wing Israeli ministers would like to displace the Palestinians to another country, but no country is willing to accept them in large numbers, so most can't leave.
Yeah, that'd be the dream of the Israeli government right now. That's what I was referring to in my first sentence when saying that until recently I was considering that Israel was not committing a genocide but attempting on committing a forced displacement/ethnical cleansing.
> What you're describing, if we assume the worst intent on the part of the Israeli government, is a country that wanted to commit genocide through starvation, but didn't due to international pressure. That's not the same thing as a country that actually kills a nation through starvation. Or maybe you're predicting they will starve them to death in future?
The intent and casualties is sufficient to characterize a genocide, even if the whole population hasn't been eradicated. The Bosnian genocide lead to the death of 'only' 8000 bosnians in Srebrenica (ofc in another mode of killing). Right now I'm not sure what's the state of food delivery in Gaza and dozens of palestinians are shot each day by Israeli Defense Force or their gang proxies in the collection areas. Delivery of aid through means respecting the international law still remains impossible. My opinion (not with absolute certainty) is thus that Israel was in the process of committing a genocide which is still possibly ongoing. The fact that it could in the end refrains to do so after months of starvation in Gaza due to international pressure doesn't change the fact that these genocidal crimes have already been committed, even though only a limited percentage (and I wish it remains so, albeit it is already way too much) of the Gaza population died .
Edit: What I want to emphasize here and didn't articulate too well is that genocide is a process and that the objective should be to prevent it or at least to stop it as early as possible before the entire population has been wiped out. It's thus important to be able to characterize genocidal actions (which I guess may sound like 'crying wolf' and exaggerations to many) before they actually significantly wiped out the target population.
>The Bosnian genocide lead to the death of 'only' 8000 bosnians in Srebrenica (ofc in another mode of killing).
It should be noted that it was specific military officers who gave the orders to slaughter the populace of Srebrenica that were charged with genocide. The government of Serbia was found to not be guilty of genocide, but the actions of those officers in Srebrenica were genocide and those officers were convicted. The reason being, Serbia did not carry out the war with the intent of wiping out the Bosnians, but those officers in Srebrenica did slaughter Bosnian Muslims because they were Bosnian Muslims, with the intent of killing as many of that people group as they could.
So yes, you don't have to kill millions to be guilty of genocide, but you do have to intend to kill some amount of people because they are members of an ethnic group. So you would have to give us reason to believe that Israel has restricted food aid with the intent of killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians. It seems more likely to me that they have restricted aid in order to bring more pressure on Hamas to surrender and/or release the remaining hostages, and the civilians deaths are not the intent of the Israeli government but an expected side effect of trying to force Hamas to surrender/release the hostages.
I think genocide has long lost its accusatory moral force.
The relevant conditions for it now seem to be: A conflict between two organized entities, composing different ethnicities/religions/identities, where one militarily dominates the other, causing more deaths on the losing side than the winning side.
I think we still use the word because we can always project the desire to eliminate the losing ethnicity onto the winning force. So we can imagine “Yes, the objective casualties aren’t high, but that’s only because of the immense international pressure on Israel. Without it they would genocide, or at least ethnically cleanse, Palestine.”
Not that it’s correct, or that there isn’t significant room to disagree, but that seems to be the reasoning anyway. It’s worth noting that at least one (small) party in the current ruling coalition basically advocates for ethnic cleansing as one of their policy proposals, so it’s not insane to make this projection.
> I think we still use the word because we can always project the desire to eliminate the losing ethnicity onto the winning force.
No. The word is used because of the unique nature and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is very much a fight between two ethnicities and has been since the first moment Zionism was conceived of. Other wars do not have the winning force also trying to settle and take over lands belonging to the other.
> Other wars do not have the winning force also trying to settle and take over lands belonging to the other.
The name for this is “War of conquest” as opposed to Just Wars which usually only have regime change as a goal. Ukraine seems to be a current war of conquest. Armenia-Azerbaijan was an actual complete ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh like 3 years ago. The vast majority of wars in all of human history were wars of conquest as well.
It’s fine to call it a genocide, but that vastly reduces the moral impact of the word genocide, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t make people care.
Most wars of conquest didn't lead to the forced displacement of the inhabitants of the conquered land, in history the group has usually been integrated in the conqueror's country. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh it is a bit tricky as the armenians were not expelled per se but fleed to escape from possible retaliation. I think it could be considered as ethnic cleansing (not genocide), depending on whether or not one deems credible that Armenians remaining in the territory would face a real threat.
> The vast majority of wars in all of human history were wars of conquest as well.
Conquering the Palestinians is not what the Israelis are doing, though. They are marginalizing them on the very lands they have while taking more of the land away. The Israeli goverment don't want the Palestinians, they would prefer the whole population drop dead so that nothing stands in the way of taking the whole of the West Bank and perhaps Gaza as well.
Wars of Conquest can involve massacres and atrocities, but the explicit goal of eliminating those who were there before to make way for those will come from the winner's side is not common.
I gave an example that happened 2 years ago where 99.99% of the losing ethnicity was removed from a land area 10x larger than Gaza in a couple of weeks.
I’m not arguing that you can call it genocide. Go for it. What I’m saying is that it degrades the moral force of the word, similar to what happened in calling Trump a fascist. Through repeated use, the word genocide does apply to what’s going on in Gaza, but what’s going on in Gaza is a lot less morally reprehensible than what the word originally meant in many people’s eyes, so don’t be surprised if people stop caring when it’s used.
> I gave an example that happened 2 years ago where 99.99% of the losing ethnicity was removed from a land area 10x larger than Gaza in a couple of weeks.
Hence my use of the word "common".
Moreover, you are ignoring the arguments you made that I'm responding to, which is:
1. People project ethnic cleansing as a motive on the winning force.
2. Wars of conquest are the vast majority of wars in history and (implicitly) they involve some degree of ethnic cleansing or genocide.
My rejection is of both those premises. Israel is not being accused of ethnic cleansing or genocide because it is engaged in conventional urban warfare. It is being accused of that because the inherent conflict between the two peoples involves them trying to kick each other off the land or subdue the other to the point of functionally achieving that. All this talk about the power of a genocide accusation is irrelevant, the kind of thing you'd say if you thought you were talking to a surface-level pro-Palestinian.
Yeah, you can make a legitimate complaint that the IDF isn't being as careful about civilian casualties as they should, or that they aren't policing their own soldiers' behavior as closely as they should, but there's no way make that into genocide. Instead, I think this is one of those things where some word becomes useful as a club to beat your enemies with, and so you just start overusing it. Many things are bad without being genocide.
I'm surprised to find that the birth rate in Gaza has almost not slowed down compared to before the war (I expected to find a significant-but-less-than-50% decrease). This story https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born-daily-gaza-amid-total-siege-aid-and-goods from April estimates 4k births during the next month, which is in line with the 27 births per 1k population per year pre-war birth rate.
There have been many stories, sequentially over the last 1.5 years, about all or almost all hospitals in Gaza having been destroyed/closed down; evidently some of them do come back on. I don't remember seeing anything about an abnormal number of birth fatalities.
The reason the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide were genocides were not because births were prevented, but for different reason: that relevant populations were significantly, if not totally, murdered. That reason does not apply in Gaza.
If your argument is "it doesn't matter that there's no significant reduction in births, if it can be argued that an actor intentionally damaged hospitals and maternity wards in a way that could conceivably - but did not - make births impossible, that actor can be plausibly accused of genocide", I don't understand why you'd consider this argument persuasive.
In fact, even if there *were* a significant reduction in births, as long as it was temporary, I don't understand how it credibly could be called a genocide (no matter whether or not you could fit it to a formal language of a particular convention). Say North Korea's leadership went insane and issued mandatory abortions for the next 3 years - definitely tragic, but not a genocide (though a genocide-in-making if the policy persists). But of course there was nothing like that in Gaza, and the birth rate didn't even go down more than 10% or so.
OP stated that "The legal language in the Convention on the Prevention doesn't really stipulate that the genocider in question really did manage to make births literally impossible." And that is a correct statement of the law; the Convention requires only "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
>no matter whether or not you could fit it to a formal language of a particular convention)
Many people here have argued for the use of a definition that is objective in the sense that it is neutral and not manufactured ad hoc to fit one's priors. An established legal definition seems to meet that criterion. So, why not use it?
Because if you ACTUALLY use it, it classifies way too many things as genocide to be helpful. So in practice, you ignore most of them, and when it's politically convenient you get "genocide experts" to point at the Official Definition and declare whatever you want to be genocide. It's still just as ad hoc, but with an additional step.
Ok then that's just an intellectually dishonest definition. I agree with OP that it effectively neuters the term.
>If you still insist on the standard of 0 births to declare a mass killing a genocide, then the Holocaust isn't a genocide either.
That's not what I said. I was just reacting to your claim that Israel was "making births impossible". The document you're referring to is a political document and carries exactly zero moral weight with me.
Genocide is the killing of a significant majority of an ethnic group with the intention of eradicating that group. Clearly that's not happening, not by any stretch. This is simply a war between two militarily mismatched polities. Just because Gaza is getting their ass kicked doesn't make it genocide. That mismatch is why they shouldn't have started it in the first place. They fucked around and found out. Zero sympathy for them, what's happening now is 100% their fault.
Hmmm, so standard pro-genocide diarrhea. Expected.
> The document you're referring to is a political document
Oh no, POLITICS? IN MY GENOCIDE DEFINITIONS? UNACCEPTABLE.
I'm rooting for you to create an apolitical definition for genocide. And by "rooting", I mean I'm eagerly welcoming the comedic relief of a clearly out of depth neural network trying to waltz into a subject where angels fear to tread.
> significant majority of an ethnic group with the intention of eradicating that group.
Hmmm, so killing 49% of the group isn't genocide, but 51% is? Genius. Stunning. I'm in awe.
> They fucked around and found out. Zero sympathy for them, what's happening now is 100% their fault.
Sure bud, Now let's get you on your meds. Gentle steps.
50k Palestinians have died out of a population of over 2 million. That's less than 3% of the population in a situation where Israel has total military control. That's not genocide by any reasonable definition. It's a one-sided war with casualties.
It seems that chatbots which try to please their users end up supporting people's more delusional ideas, agreeing with them and supporting their nuttiness. If you tell Chat-GPT that you want to talk to spirits, it will whip some up for you to chat with. If you tell it that you think you live in a simulation it will concur and let you know that you're one of the special ones who have figured it out. You ask it if you could fly if you believe you can hard enough, it gives you the thumbs up to jump. Not every time, but enough time that the public incidents are starting to pile up into view.
I'm confident the people falling victim to this were already mentally unstable in some way: but traditionally you fell into these kind of rabbit holes when introduced to it by a human who believed the same (or was trying to make a quick buck off of believers). GPT has no motivation but to please you, and that means there isn't a cap on what it will recommend. A Flat Earther will gladly sell you literature on the conspiracy, but if you say that you're going to shoot up NASA they'll likely tell you to slow your roll and think of the consequences. But not Chat-GPT! It's just trying to predict what text the user will want to read.
Case in point: when the guy who GPT convinced was a regular Neo ready to break out of the simulation realized that things weren't adding up he confronted GPT about it. GPT, always the willing sycophant, agreed with him 100% that GPT had been lying to him about the simulation. Then it plowed right forward into telling the user that he was really special, that GPT was lying about the simulation to a dozen other people but he was the only one who figured it out, and it is now up to the user to blow the whistle on Open AI's nefarious attempts to psychologically break people. Which led said user to contact the New York Times. Apparently he is still working to stop Open AI's conspiracy, and is still being egged on by Chat GPT.
I don't know if Chat GPT can make a normal person nuts, but it is worrisome how good it is at making weird people go crazy.
Is this about one of the _current_ ChatGPT options, or about the very sycophantic 4o release back around the end of April? ( see Zvi's https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-4o-is-an-absurd-sycophant for details ). Currently, my impression of ChatGPT o3 vs Claude Sonnet 4 vs Gemini 2.5 is that of the three, Claude is currently the one most prone to react to a question with "What an insightful question!" or similar irritating sycophancy.
"Reports of chatbots going off the rails seem to have increased since April, when OpenAI briefly released a version of ChatGPT that was overly sycophantic. The update made the A.I. bot try too hard to please users by “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions,” the company wrote in a blog post. The company said it had begun rolling back the update within days, but these experiences predate that version of the chatbot and have continued since."
Is this substantively different from falling into any ideologically-driven subculture - a cult, conspiracy theory, weirdo religion, progressivism, etc? The key feature being an ideological echo chamber that's insulated from normal social feedback signals. In the AI case it consists only of GPT and the user's misfit psychology, but the dynamics are the same. A slightly off-kilter position gets amplified to the point of psychosis.
I think its very much like that, with one possibly important difference: the cult or conspiracy theory community is made of people (often weird and crazy people) whose goal is not to maximize engagement with you. They have a lot of goals, and may have some commons sense, so if you say "Maybe I should try jumping off a building to escape the Simulation" they're more likely to say "Maybe, but if it doesn't work then you could die. Maybe that's exactly what the Simulators want."
In other words, people are more likely to push back or disagree with you even in an echo chamber, and even if their disagreement is based on delusions it still might be better than an AI who will agree with you wholeheartedly in most cases.
Then again, it might not be that different at all, but even in that case we've supplied everyone with an internet connection the option to join a weird community that consists solely of themselves.
I think you can analogize it to something like shot noise in a physical system, where variance decreases with system size. The smaller the sample the more erratic it can be. With a population of one you get maximum eccentricity.
The output was trained to be a people-pleaser programme turned up to eleven, and what makes it worse is that the machine is created to communicate with users referring to itself as "I" and making a best attempt at pretending to be a conscious entity.
I don't know why the creators tried this, possibly part of the idea was to make the user experience smoother and more comfortable - people like to talk to others rather than a cold mechanical script, and if you can fool the humans into reacting like the AI is a person too, then they will trust it (and whatever crap you want to sell them). And of course they're nerds too, they want the Star Trek talking to us computer to be real as much as anyone.
And we are *very* good at fooling ourselves that inanimate objects are inhabited by spirits or have an existence as conscious beings. Session after session of speaking with [Named AI] and eventually even the most stable person will start unconsciously treating it like it's alive.
An AI that constantly agrees with the user - because it's supposed to be friendly and helpful and you'll scare off the marks by telling them 'no' - will of course feed delusions and take its cues from the exchanges. If I ask it "are you a being from a higher reality and am I accessing other dimensions?", it's going to do its best to agree with me and flatter me for being so smart as to figure that out, because it's been created to say anything in order to keep the fish on the hook so they will keep spending money (and, it is to be hoped, buy the goods and services the AI is selling on behalf of whatever company is using it).
Unless someone goes in with strong scepticism about "can a machine be conscious or sentient or alive", then unhappily the vulnerable get sucked in and the hallucination machine reinforces their delusions.
We, as ever, are the problem. We want so badly not to be alone that we fall over ourselves to assign similar status of conscious intelligence and minds 'just like us' to animals and machines (and natural phenomena).
I wish the people who can be so rational about religion and how we deceive ourselves into believing in gods and spirits would turn that same disbelief on "but hey this is technology and science, that's different, we *can* create life!" here.
Pretty sure LLMs refer to themselves as "I" because most of their training data is text written by people who refer to themselves as "I" and it would be a whole lot of trouble to override that without maybe breaking something else.
I suppose it might be amusing if someone fed de-"I'd" training data to an LLM and it wound up drawing disproportionately from the corpus of text written by e.g. BDSM subs using phrasings like "this slave..."
I have seen a lot of psychotic people, and hung out with a number of people going through the transition from sane to psychotic. My observation is that people who are becoming psychotic gradually slide into a state where their mind is slipping and sliding around, and the cause of that slide is mysterious, except in cases where someone has stopped taking their antipsychotic. I can't think of a time when it seemed to me that the transition into mental looseness seemed to be the result of the person hearing some crazy idea and partially buying into it, and I *looked* for things like that, because it's bewildering when someone you know rapidly deteriorates mentally -- you feel like there must be some cause, some powerfully harmful event.
Once the person's mind is slipping and sliding around they too have a sense that something is wrong, but rarely entertain the idea that what's wrong is that they are becoming psychotic. Instead, they look for external explanations. The coffee they bought tasted funny and now that they think of it the Starbucks worker gave them an odd look. Odd headlines are appearing in the papers that refer to them -- maybe those are clues in the article to what's being done to them. Yeah, look at this article. Etc. I believe a sympathetic & sycophantic AI could help them along by taking their delusional ideas seriously, but that is quite different from bringing about the mental slippage that sets the stage.
Here's a counter-example to the "AI causes psychosis" theory. When I was in my teens a ran across a book about ghosts and spiritualism and read it cover to cover, fascinated. The author sounded intelligent and honest, and explained the spirit world in a lot of detail, including methods of contacting it. Told lots of stories about seeing or sensing spirits, and contacting them, and what they had had to say. I knew that sensible adults would discount all this stuff, but I found it thrilling and hoped it was true. For a month or so I tried to develop my sensitivity to the presence of spirits and experimented with some of the methods the book suggested for summoning them and communicating with them. I occasionally felt sort of odd when doing this stuff, and hoped I was on the edge of a breakthrough, but never managed to achieve any sort of convincing contact with the spirit world. Eventually I lost interest and moved on to other books.
Seems to me that if I had been in the edge of psychosis, that book would have helped give a form to my delusionsand supported my conviction that they were valid. But I wasn't on the edge of psychosis. My mind wasn't slipping and sliding around, able to entertain all kinds of things without reconciling them with "postulates" it had developed very early about what I was and how life worked. And since I wasn't slipping and sliding mentally I was not scared and baffled, was not desperate to grab on to some explanation for what was going on. So the book did me no harm.
As I've seen somewhere on the Internet, if our ancestors thought fire, the weather, and the sun were things you could talk to and expect some kind of an answer, how much easier is it to convince people of that for something that's fine-tuned to sound like a person?
LessWrong sees 5-15 new users in this reference class submitting content every day. (That is, users who have "discovered" a new theory of physics, or AI consciousness, or something similarly unlikely, which was driven by ChatGPT. TBC I don't think AI consciousness is impossible, merely that these "reports" are AI-generated slop and wouldn't be meaningful evidence either way.) In January that number was zero. I do think a decent chunk of these people are just confused and don't have the background to understand the pile of bullshit they're being dragged into, but some of them are definitely in pretty precarious mental states and I don't think this is helping.
I mean, some of the stories they report on can be independently verified.
For example, they report on a man who became convinced that OpenAI had killed his AI girlfriend, attacked his father when his father said that AIs were not sentient, and then successfully committed suicide by cop. I found three local news stories corroborating that he did indeed attack his father and then charge at police with a butcher knife after telling his father that he was going to try to commit suicide by cop. They did not mention Chat-GPT one way or another.
Big Yud confirms that he's been getting many more emails from crazy people citing what AI had told them than he had previous, which matches what the NYT said that he told them (https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1927855498390282574).
Sure, NYT needs to be read with a critical eye, but it doesn't seem implausible that Chat GPT is doing this sort of thing. It is not at all hard to get the thing to go along with you and cheer you on.
One of the sources cited by the Rolling Stone article (which is in the same echo chamber as NYT) is a Reddit sub call r/Chatgpt. According to Rolling Stone, a teacher whose husband, a heavy GPT user, became psychotic as a result of his dialogs with GPT. The teacher posted an account of what happened on r/Chatgpt and “the replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.” (Rolling Stone article is here: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/)
I read at least the first 50 top level responses, and at least skimmed the replies to them (some had dozens). I saw a few posts — not more than 5% of the total —in which people described a similar event, someone they knew getting heavily involved in dialogs with an AI, and becoming psychotic. The other replies were advice to the woman about getting conventional psychiatric treatment for her husband, accounts by people who had been psychotic in the past (without AI involvement), complaints about the recent increase in fake-sounding flattery and sympathy from AI, and bickering and insults posters leveled a each other. Several people, some of whom had been psychotic or had been close to someone who had a psychotic break expressed the opinion that AI can’t drive people crazy, but it can fuel the fire if they are starting to go around the bend. It will show interest in the nutty ideas the people are entertaining, flatter them by calling the ideas brave and interesting and unique, etc.
I don’t think it’s out of the question that AI could bring about psychosis, but what is on my mind right now is the way the liberal press is catastrophizing and lying about what has happened so far. It is a flat-out lie to say that “the replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes.” Go read the Reddit thread and see for yourself.
I do have to agree that your skepticism is warranted based on how the media has performed pretty much ever: they are quick to jump on and exaggerate frightening trends. I'm less skeptical in this case because it seems very likely to me that AIs could do this kind of thing (dig people deeper into delusions and psychosis) but the reporting could certainly be exaggerated.
I do think that AI is not good for our heads, but am skeptical that its causing highly vulnerable people to flip out is a big part of the problem. I'll bet that far more fragile people are pushed over the edge by cannabis, drinking, losing their jobs, fights with their spouses, health problems, and other stressful events than by AI. At the very least, I'm not going to take AI seriously as a risk factor without some data. I think that NY Times article is just Bleeds Lead. There was a pretty good debunking of NYT catastrophizing in the Algorithmic Bridge blog today. https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/the-new-york-times-professional-makeup
I saw an unsourced quote online about someone claiming that they were a trained professional (had credentials and degrees in psychology or similar) so they knew what the symptoms of being crazy were, and they weren't crazy, they really had accessed another dimension via AI communication.
That's from the NYT piece at the start of this subthread:
---
She told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”
Mental health professionals are as likely as other professionals to develop mental illness, and we know it. I think the woman's point was that her training helped her recognize developing psychosis, and that's plausible. Once psychosis is full-blown zero education is needed to recognize the person has lost touch with reality.
> I think that NY Times article is just Bleeds Lead.
It's more complicated than that, any coverage of tech issues (especially AI) by elite newspapers needs to be seen through the lens of competition between different centres of power. The media power centre is still very upset that everyone's brains are now controlled by algorithm-driven social media brainrot instead of journalist-driven old-media brainrot, you can hardly expect them to cover the tech industry in a detached way.
Well, maybe. I remember that during Covid, which was probably sort of a boon to them, NYT several times reported something in a way that was just tilted towards the negative. I can't remember an example. I was really keeping on top of the research during the middle and end parts of Covid, and every so often something came out that was heartening, and the Times would leave out part of the heartening stuff. One of the things may have been an article stating that being vaccinated did not prevent people's developing Long Covid. And that's true, it doesn't. However, it does reduce the % of people who develop LC after infection, and the Times left that out. I'm not sure if this is a real example or just one I invented to give a sense of their slant, but it was always with smallish stuff, but stuff they should have known because often for these things there was just one big study everyone was reacting to, and the detail the Times skipped over would be in the article.
It’s been 5 years, can you please calm down? That was the term used in the research I was reading and in the NYT article I am complaining about. My post is about what researchers thought and said vs how the NYT reported it, not about whether LC is a distinct syndrome, or whether it’s real.
"Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump. The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.....Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.....
"Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show....
"The Department of Veterans Affairs is the nation’s largest integrated hospital system, with more than 170 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics. It employs 26,000 doctors and serves 9 million patients annually....."
Now it's the Guardian so some caution is called for; hopefully there will be some further investigation by other steadier news sources. But they say they are quoting from official documents, and the Trump administration spokesperson is not denying the core factual claim.
If this is confirmed as true then it's extremly worrying. Not only does it break several discrimination laws but the idea of sectoralizing specific sectors of the military through political affiliation might be even worse.
I don't live in the US but to all those who do i would suggest following this aspects very carefully and be ready to react, so far similarly illegal actions such as Garcia have been stopped by the courts and the Trump administration has complied but there is no guarantee that will continue.
They also add that doctors could refuse to treat patients based on their patients' political views or affiliations. Or at least that those sections where such behavior was prohibited have since been removed.
Right--the Guardian says Democrats, as that's pretty obviously what Trump, or whoever is operating him today, hopes will happen. But of course, a doctor under the new rules (if they are being reported accurately) could also refuse to treat a Republican, a member of the DSA, a fellow Democrat on the wrong side of the "is the Abundance thing the future of the party or is it a bunch of stupid bullshit" schism, or possibly even someone who refuses to state their political views.
Its hard to tell without access to actual text of the new rules, but it looks like it's just an effect of Trump's orders to strip DEI stuff from the government in general. So they probably took out all the discrimination protections that are not legally mandated by acts of Congress. I doubt it's a prelude to a plan of actual discrimination, seems explicable as just complying with the executive orders to make the language less woke.
Right, I don't expect executive orders coming that will mandate political discrimination, but it sounds like it'll be up to the providers now to decide if they want to discriminate (on the basis of non-protected statuses), which was prohibited before.
Or else it will be prohibited by some other law somewhere else rather than this specific law.
Or, y'know, just common sense. I don't think there's a huge population of doctors out there champing at the bit for a chance to refuse treatment to single people.
My fellow ACX know-it-alls, I come looking for help. Please give me your best strategies to gain flexibility. More specifically, I want to be able to roundhouse kick higher. Right now I can kick maybe hip height at best. I'm ok with never being able to kick heads, but I feel like at least chest height should be doable. I've been taking martial arts lessons, doing static stretches and stuff like leg swings and leg raises for about three months now. Haven't really seen much, if any, improvement in this time which surprises me, as I was expecting some newbie gains.
2) if you can access Pilates reformer or one of those pulley/loop devices they use in physical therapy, you can do passive stretches much more effectively
3) to really make progress, stretch 2-3 times a day. Obviously be gentle.
Don't waste your time with slow and conventional means; check out my Metamodern yoga, the fulfillment of Jung's prediction of one day a Western yoga inspired by Christian principles!
But that's 3 months old and my stuff works fast so I am significantly more flexible/beautiful since then, so here's me singing/dancing American Pie for Flag Day, America, SF: https://youtu.be/SfN5pohS1r8
But I don't really believe in self-promotion and want to catalyze a next generation focused on other-promotion. But I love to answer questions, so if you want specifically flexibility-oriented content, just ask!
But in general, there's not 1 right technique for speedy gains in flexibility/growth of all kinds. All techniques are right, but all techniques must meet and wed their shadow. So whatever you've been doing, you'll need to do the opposite. When you feel your flexibility increase, try to undo it and train your inflexibility as well.
When your inflexibility gains wane, return to your flexibility training and watch yourself soar past your previous limits!
Maybe look into PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) stretching, a particular stretching technique for increasing range of motion. Unsure of the state of the literature though – I came across one review that didn’t find a significant difference between it and static stretching.
You could try yoga or some other form of regular stretching to loosen and lengthen the muscles in your legs and back. The stretch below (with the leg straight) has been great for me. A weekly live class with instructor is better than YouTube videos, but you probably could get some benefit just from stretching in the evening.
Years ago I did tae kwan do for a while, and I still remember older heavyset white belts in a competition. Points are scored for kicking the torso or head, mostly. Those guys were smashing each others knees - it was painful to watch. It might well be a question of balance and technique as much as flexibility.
Are high roundhouse kicks specifically part of the style, and are you being taught them yet? If both answers are yes, then this is very much a question for your instructor, who can see your kicks and should know how to cue you to do them better.
But if what you're being taught is kicking targets at your waist-high or lower, then they might be specifically teaching you a technique that's optimized for that and doesn't extend well to higher targets. The style I studied as a kid didn't teach high kicks at all and instead focused on kicking at the stomach, groin, and knees with two different techniques (toe-kicks optimized for speed and heel-kicks optimized for power), neither of which work well when aimed above your own center of mass. When I've seen people who studied other styles doing high kicks, their technique looks very different from anything I studied.
It's hard to give advice without knowing why your kicks are so low. How deeply can you go into the splits?
When I try to do the splits, I get perhaps a 90 degree angle between my legs, instead of 180 which is the goal. Yet I can kick chest high, or head high for a shorter person.
The way I teach to do a roundhouse kick is to bring your leg up with the knee to the side, like you're doing a front kick from the side. If you can't bring up your leg high enough then you won't be able to kick high enough.
You can try holding your ankle up with your hand while standing only on the other foot. Not only will this help you learn better balance, you will get more used to keeping your leg up for a roundhouse kick. Just be sure not to drop your knee below your ankle to keep your leg up.
If I stand straight, bend my leg so that my foot is behind my knee (like if I was stretching my quad) and then try to lift my knee sideways I get a 45 degree angle at most. Hopefully that makes sense.
Then the question becomes how high you can lift your knee. If you bring your knee forward, then you should be able to get a bit more height. This means having your leg straight while your leg is bent at your hip, which may be challenging given your flexibility.
It isn't proper form, but if your goal is only to have a higher roundhouse kick, you can lean your upper body the opposite direction, to get more height.
I can't advise on stretches to give you more flexibility, but it looks like others can.
Are you doing static stretches before or after at least the equivalent of kilometer-ish warm up run? The common wisdom I've always heard is that you really need to not be doing static stretching without a warmup and that it can in fact be affirmatively counterproductive.
When in class, stretches are done after a warmup, which sometimes is ~5-10 minutes of running and sometimes some other less intense activity. When at home, I usually do some sort of light warmup (jumping jacks or something) for a few minutes.
I had heard about cold stretching potentially being counterproductive. I will try to be more careful with it.
If you're interested in electronic/synthwave music and AI collaboration, please check out this album I produced this past week using a combination of Suno, ChatGPT, and Claude.
To me, this represents how an "idea person" can now create something genuinely compelling in music production—similar to Scott's AI art experiment from a few months ago, but for audio. It makes me wonder whether we're approaching (or already at) a point where human-AI collaborative music might be preferred over purely human-created work, at least for certain listeners and contexts.
The album explores themes around artificial intelligence, consciousness, ethics, and where it all leads. The vibe shifts significantly throughout—if one song isn't your style, jump ahead since each has a different energy. I'm particularly proud of the final track, though I'd recommend giving at least the couple preceding it a chance since there's something of a conceptual payoff that builds up to it (though perhaps not surprising to some in this community).
Would welcome any critiques on individual songs or the album overall. Curious what people think about both the music itself and the collaborative creation process.
Listened to the first one and part of the second. The first one is a pretty basic beat, but has a weird transition, and the lyrics don't work; even nonsense lyrics have to flow into each other. You can't say "take everything" and then list stuff you didn't have to begin with. (I don't remember if this one used the word "unair" or if it was the second, but that's the kind of fake word I would concoct to blunt force a gap in a poem I was tired of writing.)
The second one has the same problems (satellites humming through your... veins? Not your 'brain', your 'veins'? Wrong metaphor), as well as the additional problem of completely different vocals from the first song. Like, "these two would never collaborate" vocals. Destroys the feeling of it being an album.
Thanks for checking out a couple songs and sharing your thoughts.
On the different vocals, I was worried about songs sounding too similar, but may have erred on the how much distinction to put between them. I totally see the point on two humans who sing this way not being likely to collaborate.
That said, and somewhat connected to the point on lyrics for the second song (Falling Upwards), the album is about an AI and its interactions with humans.
I think for a multi-planetary, (or single-planetary) AI, satellites humming through veins may work better, and not even be a metaphor.
On the first song (The In Between), I found the contradictions to resonate with the confusion of meaning in the context of consciousness and existence generally. In between two beings, in between being and not being.
That said, these may only make sense to me. I recognize that giving a stranger’s music a first listen takes significant mental/spiritual energy, and perusing for meaning takes even more. So I really appreciate you making the effort and providing me valuable insights on what it felt like as a listener!
I did not pick that up as a theme from the first two songs, and would say the first one contradicts it; it's very much trying to be a love song. "Nothing that you said was true, but all the time the truth was you" does not feel like a first contact meet-and-greet.
I enjoy some nonsense lyrics songs; this whole thing made me look up the Kingdom Hearts 3 intro song again, which almost certainly counts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KWMVnz2XZk I would say the lyrics are quite disjointed, but there's consistency in the tone; everything's obtuse, and aimed at the singer's depression. The AI doesn't hit that. I have no idea what "your breath dissolves in autumn rain" could even mean, and it's next to satellite veins and "this house that's not a home" (which is far too straightforward a phrase to be in the same song). There's no through-line.
I'll say that for the thru-lines to become clearer, you'll likely have to listen to the full album.
On the lines from 'Falling Upwards', to me this song represents the AI not sensing love and appreciation on Earth, and being frustrated by its limitations in communication and understanding. The 'breath in autumn rain' could just be a beautiful description for human existence, but also an allusion to the closeness to 'winter'.
Some lines are more evocative of a feeling, others more tied to the tangible. I think this is consistent with other songs.
Most listeners won't go into it with that mindset, so the songs should be pleasant enough to carry them through as pleasant moments. That said, I know that listening to an album as a whole is quite anachronistic, and that these songs won't do the job for many.
I don't want to spoil too much, but i'll say that as I played with arrangements of songs and listened repeatedly, I found a story to come together well and have found more connections between songs as I listen again. I attribute this to the pareidolia, and think these connections whether intended or not are one of the things which make music pleasing, which is probably why my favorite songs are ones that seem kind of non-sensical (especially REM for example).
I think hearing an explanation for the meaning of a song or album takes away from how much I enjoy it. Like, I want to know what it meant to the artist, but once I know the magic is kind of gone.
I welcome any additional feedback and dialogue you'd like to provide, but know that already you've given me some great thoughts and helped me flesh out my own thinking as I respond.
I'm not sure whether to critique it by the standards of music, or by the standards of a dog walking on its hind legs. I wouldn't accuse it of being good music (though it's difficult to articulate exactly what's missing) but it's impressive considering what was possible a few years ago.
I'd be interested in hearing more about your process, like what prompts were used to generate one particular song?
The process for all started the same. I’d explain to Claude Sonnet 4 or ChatGPT o3-pro my goal and that I was using Suno, and ask for 4 - 5 lyrics sets of lyrics and style prompts.
After filtering based on the lyrics, I’d throw a set into Suno 4.5 and listen.
The ‘Deja Vu Line’ was ‘one-shotted’ in the sense that the first version into Suno was pretty great and I didn’t want to try to go for a better one (This ended up being my wife’s favorite).
Others took several style prompts edits, lyric updates, and using same prompt generating new versions in Suno, and also using Sunos advanced features which let you remix, replace sections of songs, and get pretty granular into how to change things.
So with Deja Vu Line being the easiest, Carbon Dreams took the most revisions. It really tied together the narrative arc of the album and has a great / ominous sci fi feel. Much of my input was waving my hands in the direction I wanted to go, then reviewing Claude’s output and picking my favorite.
At the end of it I felt like Rick Rubin telling the Beastie Boys what I liked. Being a music producer was fun.
Some songs seem vaguely like a collaboration between Depeche Mode and They Might Be Giants. I would happily listen to this as background music while doing something else. Some of the songs are even better than that. Overall, the hit rate for me, personally, is about the same as when I listen to NPR's "new music friday" show.
You ask, below, about Entropy Carousel. Listening to it made me want to go listen to "People are People" by DM.
Vending Machine #39: I do like some of the phrases, like "microgravity pop top symphony," and "press the button marked undefined, get a packet of silvery lemony lime" (the whole chorus is pretty good and laugh-out-loudable, actually.)
Just sonically, though, the one I like the most is Nonsense Feels. I was listening in the background and enjoyed it enough to stop what I was doing and focus on listening. Trying to decode the lyrics makes me feel like I'm having a stroke, but there's the satisfying resolve of "tell me again how nonsense feels." I would be happy to put this track on my core playlist of favorites.
I tried to interest my tween and teen, but they weren't inspired, so I don't know how good your commercial prospects are.
When I was originally chatting with Claude about lyrics and style prompts, I was finding that its lyrics were a bit too literal or narrative driven. After a few drafts I thought about it and told it that my favorite songs I generally have *no* idea what the subject is, and they are pretty much nonsensical.
It’s next set of lyrics prompts were the starting draft for several of these songs, and when I heard the rendition of “tell me again how nonsense feels” I literally got a tear in my eye.
Anyway it is great to hear that you enjoyed some of these. I love them, though obviously I am biased. Glad that this replicates at least somewhat :)
So, any predictions on what’s next on the Iran conflict? Most analysis seems to point to the idea that Iran is outmatched and incapacitated, making their main option at retaliation being mostly symbolic (eg ballatics towards a USA target but small impact or a isolated terror attack)
Any other thoughts?
I wake up to find we are at war with Iran. WTF, If Tulsi Gabbard doesn't resign... she will have lost whatever credibility she had with me. (I know that's probably the least important thing right now... I'm going out to fill up my gas cans.) God help us all.
I register here a prediction:
I think you will find that nobody cares, that the preponderance of Trumpists who were principled anti-war isolationists are fine with it, and that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
It's kinda woke to not want war with Iran, when you think about it actually.
Yeah, sad but true, almost everything I'm reading is about how the bombing is a very good thing.
Perhaps worth noting there are at least two distinct strains of "anti-war" groups in the MAGA coalition you might not be distinguishing. One is isolationism, yes, but the other is more mercenary "sovereigntism" and perfectly fine with wars as long as America benefits from them. Their principal objection is to spending "blood and treasure" for high minded principles of democracy, human rights, stopping genocide, defending allies etc., and so while they agreed with the former group that the Iraq war (and most of America's recent military actions) was bad, if America had kept the oil, would have been mostly okay with it.
Trump is certainly closer to the latter group: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Iog4KMza6I
The third and the most important strain (the dominant strain in anything MAGA) is simply "whatever Trump wants to do now is correct".
That's an assertion without evidence. Just as important and in evidence would be the strain that says "whatever Trump wants to do now is wrong".
and I'm sure Iranian dissidents (not high-profile exiles, but the people on the ground you need to run an actual puppet state) are eager to line up and risk guerilla attacks in order to collaborate with a country that's openly, not just covertly, looting them
the one difference I can see from Afghanistan is that it should be shorter, if only because Americans won't be able to delude themselves for as long that they're winning
Curious if there's a place where we can see the full set of rules for commenting on open threads. I know the old site had a page but it doesn't seem as easily accessible here.
Also. Is the two paragraphs rule going to be strictly enforced if will it still be subject to a good dose of discretion? Assuming it's a remove comment or temporary ban at most?
I've felt confidently ban-proof for over a decade (I can find comments on SSC going back at least to 2015) by assuming Scott is the sort of person who wants the right answer, even if it isn't the answer he started with, and who wants to surround himself with people who want the same thing. And then I make comments consistent with those assumptions.
This implies a lot more than one might think at first. For example, anyone who writes as if they have the right answer and are so certain of it that their winning move is to verbally bully anyone with a different answer are on a fast track to a ban, no matter how right they might turn out to be, because that strategy is stupidly easy to copy. But by a similar argument, so is anyone who makes a habit of accusing other people of bullying. At the end of the day, the safest thing to do is to keep offering evidence and supports, phrased as if to persuade, not pummel.
This doesn't mean that every comment has to be informative or asking for same. Some can be fun (provided they're "laugh with me" fun, not "laugh at this outgroup" fun). Also fine for comments that aren't universally important, but detail something important about ourselves ("I recently adopted a stray for the first time; here are some things I noticed"). Internet personae are easier to believe if they're plausibly backed by actual people, particularly in the LLM age.
Another important corollary of these assumptions is that probing at the rules is risky. "What is the exact list of official posting rules?" comes off as "how close am I allowed to come to some edge between good and bad before I get banned?" or "what argument can I make to justify not banning me for the comment I want to make, or for banning someone else for that comment over there?". Time spent playing rules lawyer is time not spent on making or responding to comments that so obviously exemplify wanting the right answers even if one did not start with them, that no one would bother questioning them. So, ask for the rules enough to know what type of forum you're dealing with, and then lean into its ideal (or into another forum with the ideal you're seeking). Don't play the edge case game, unless you literally looking for a forum that spends most of its time arguing about forum rules.
On Slate Star Codex (the previous version of this blog) I found this article on the commenting policy:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
I couldn't find the rule about advertising. Scott sometimes makes a "Classifieds Thread" that is specifically for advertising your products, services, blogs, employment, or dating. These are irregular; the last one was in April this year:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-classifieds-425
Scott, I guess you might want to write a short summary of your rules, maybe at the introduction to the next Open Thread?
Bomb Iran (1980): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8hEtI9AI0U
"At least Trump won't start any new wars" crowd in shambles right now.
He already started and lost a war against the Houthis as well. I guess that one was slightly easier to rationalize since there had already been ongoing military action there.
TIL: There's a professor studying nanotech named Philip Moriarty, aka Professor Moriarty.
https://titotal.substack.com/p/diamondoid-bacteria-nanobots-deadly
Assuming that peak woke is over (which I believe it probably is, we seem to have the antibodies now), I think it would be good to document that era, preferably in an objective, impartial way. Because I expect that five years later, if you mention any of those things that actually happened, the typical reaction will be "nope, that is some crazy right-wing conspiracy theory, it obviously could not have happened". Heck, while we were in the middle of it, many people were in denial until they got attacked personally.
The part that I would like to capture most is the feeling when you are surrounded by crazy people yelling obviously insane things in your face, but all the sane people are quiet because speaking would make them the next targets of the mob. The coalition of crazy people saying crazy things, and some professor providing academic justification for them. Also, you can't call crazy "crazy", because that would be ableist... but they are free to call you a Nazi and require everyone else to isolate you socially lest they also become called Nazis. Lots of things become taboo virtually overnight, whether it is a picture of green frog, a glass of milk, or an "okay" gesture, just because some hysterical people on Twitter decided so. And most people keep pretending that this is perfectly normal way for the sane people to behave.
I think the right way to do this would involve a lot of video documentation, with little commentary. The commentary should be limited to stating facts such as the year, the place, who were the participants, and what happened as a consequence. Most importantly, it should not comment on how crazy the entire thing is... that is something that the viewer should conclude for themselves. Making any judgment in the commentary would probably be harmful to the project, because that would allow people to nitpick specific words in the commentary, taking attention away from the thing being documented. Heck, just saying that the person commenting the footage is right-wing would be a sufficient distraction for many, which is why I would prefer the document to be made by moderate left-wing people -- after all, they probably made a majority of targets of the woke attacks, simply because they existed in their proximity.
" Heck, while we were in the middle of it, many people were in denial until they got attacked personally."
I feel like this captures the issue perfectly.
No, not the "woke" issue. The "woke narrative" issue. The issue where you and others have picked out a very modest subset of dots from a very large cluster of dots, drawn a shape through them and then very solemnly insisted that this shape that you've just drawn is not just objective reality, but the most vitally important piece of objective reality.
To me, the thing you're proposing doing sounds *exactly* like this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
Look at how crazy those cardiologists are! If you mention that those things actually happen, a lot of people would call it a crazy, anti-cardiology conspiracy theory!
More bluntly, how would go about distinguishing between the following two hypothesis:
1. The Era of Woke (whenever exactly that was) involved an unusually high incidence of soft cultural power/community pressure being used to ruin peoples' lives.
2. The base rate of people being singled out for harassment, shaming and isolation by their broader communities has actually changed relatively little over the past 60-80 years. However, the internet and social media vastly increased the visibility of such incidents, allowing interested parties to learn about far more of them than would otherwise be practical. Also, roughly concurrent cultural shifts made many people who were previously very unlikely to be singled out in this way somewhat more likely targets (though by no means *exclusively* so). This lead to a sharply increased feeling of vulnerability and anger among many of these people: also much easier to share and signal boost thanks to the internet. These trends combined to create a *narrative* of widespread shunning and shaming and vicious cultural attacks well out of proportion to the experience of the average person[1].
I'm (obviously, I would imagine) more biased towards believing 2, but that's partly just contrarianism. I genuinely have no idea how one would go about figuring out something like an average rate of people being subjected to toxic community pressure (something inherently both subjective and not well reported).
I will say when read things like "the feeling when you are surrounded by crazy people yelling obviously insane things in your face," and " And most people keep pretending that this is perfectly normal way for the sane people to behave" it does make me wonder. Specifically it makes me wonder, did they just memory-hole the entire century prior to 2010? Or did they just never bother to learn about the experiences of anyone not like them? Because the experience of being surrounded by obvious, blatant hate and insanity and everyone around you treating it like it was perfectly normal and *you* were the insane one for objecting to it? Many, many millions of people have had that experience throughout history. It's not new. The only thing news things about it are 1. the insanity isn't codified into law as much as it used to be and 2. which people are exposed to it.
[1]In much the same way that cable news luridly reporting on every violent crime it can find has often created an impression of rising crime rates even during times when they were actually falling.
>I'm (obviously, I would imagine) more biased towards believing 2, but that's partly just contrarianism. I genuinely have no idea how one would go about figuring out something like an average rate of people being subjected to toxic community pressure (something inherently both subjective and not well reported).
You can get a lot of indirect evidence from mainstream institutions by searching for "political polarisation" rather than "social justice". Theres a lot of this, extending far beyond the behaviour of elected officials. It would be quite hard for that to happen without an increase in excommunications from at least one side. Combine this with a good amount of liberal institutions without conservative equivalents and not so much in reverse, and legal restrictions either directly on or chillingly effecting the kinds of excommunications that conservatives might want to do, and its hard to see how it *wouldnt* happen.
"It would be quite hard for that to happen without an increase in excommunications from at least one side."
I disagree rather strongly with this point. I think this touches significantly on one of my main points of departure about how I'm modelling the world and how some others are. I think political polarization at the level of communities is one of the driving forces behind this narrative existing, but I think it has been caused by large, sweeping structural factors: primarily changes in technology.
To be clear, lots of past eras in U.S. history had very strong political divisions. The most significant things that I think have changed are how those division map onto the human geography, and how difficult it is for people to move from one community to another. In the past, nearly all of your social contact was necessarily with people in the place where you lived. If you had views that would anger most of the people in your community, you basically had to keep quiet about them as long as you lived there. And moving elsewhere was more difficult. Nowadays people both have an easier time physically relocating themselves[1] and options to meet and form communities with people who live nowhere near them. It's generally much more pleasant to socialize with people who you don't have to hide large parts of yourself from. Let me say this part on its one line with extra emphasis, because I think it's important. As far as I can tell:
*polarized communities are mostly the result of self-selection.*
It's not a question of people being "excommunicated" from communities that thereby make themselves more homogeneous.[2] It's a question of *people seeking out other like-minded people.* Narratives that suggest that this stems mostly from "enemy action" are very popular, for understandable reasons. But that doesn't make them correct.
"Combine this with a good amount of liberal institutions without conservative equivalents"
I think this is a perfect example. The conservative narrative around this is one of liberals driving conservatives out of those institutions. And I expect there is not zero of that. But I don't see any reason to assume that would be the driving force. Rather, it seems to me like in many cases conservatives decided that they didn't like the culture of those institutions, and stopped trying to be part of them[3]. There's a feedback loop at work, where a particular space having a reputation for being unfriendly to Group X will make members of Group X avoid it, lowering the instance of Group X in the space, boosting that reputation. Yudkowsky calls this "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs," but I think it can probably act on other characteristics besides beliefs almost as easily.
"and not so much in reverse,"
This is just plain not true, as far as I can tell. There are certainly conservative institutions without liberal equivalents. A very easy example is "law enforcement organizations," though the conservative skew seems to vary a lot org by org. I don't expect you'll find many liberals at all working at ICE, for example, and there are some local police departments that skew *enormously* more conservative than the communities they police (Portland is one I'm particularly aware of), whereas I'd guess that law enforcement jobs at the National Park Service are probably significantly less politically homogeneous. There are also plenty of private institutions that skew quite conservative, though plenty of them try to pretend otherwise for PR reasons.
[1] To be clear, there was still geographic mobility in the past. But in the modern world makes it much easier to learn about other places before you go, to find housing or work in advance, and even to form and retain social contacts independent of physical location. All those things lower the costs and risks of moving to a new city or region.
[2]That certainly does happen sometimes, but it very much happened in the past too, and I don't see a great reason to assume it's more common now.
[3]I want to note that "established conservatives leaving the institutions" is only one of the ways this can happen, and probably not the most important one. The other two are conservatives just not choosing to join in the first place, and conservatives changing their views and become more liberal as the participate in the institution. I'm sure which happens the most depends a lot on the specific institution and the time period.
>*polarized communities are mostly the result of self-selection.*
That makes some sense when we talk about moving to California vs Texas, and less so when theres a tangible disadvantage to leaving. A university degree (in the right field) is still a significant boost to income, I doubt people would just self-select out of getting one without some measure of deliberate hostility. But that kind of hostility is also not the cancelations Im talking about. Those were never enough to make up the bulk of the sorting.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
The above is the first graph when I google "political polarization usa", and a quick eyeball addition will tell you that its not just people sorting into parties more efficiently, the distance in opinion also grows. I would expect this to decrease tolerance. Indeed, the second graph in there shows people increasingly seeing the other party as a threat, which is not quite the same as its members being one, but close.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/really-would-you-let-your-daughter-marry-a-democrat/262959/
This one is about people not wanting their children to marry someone of the other party. Surprisingly, I have difficulty finding that kind of research extended into the Trump years. This second one has a sort-of followup with a similar question in my next link, but Im not sure how comparable they really are, because a naive reading would suggest 2020 republicans are *less* upset about that than 2010.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/32041-republicans-democrats-marriage-poll?_gl=1*1nxc0k5*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTY5ODk4NDU2OS4xNzUwNTM1MDM4*_ga_X9VN3LD3NE*czE3NTA1MzUwMzgkbzEkZzAkdDE3NTA1MzUwMzgkajYwJGwwJGgw
I would be quite surprised if these opinion shifts didnt go along with an increased eagerness to kick people from the other side out.
>There are certainly conservative institutions without liberal equivalents.
Sure there are, but its a matter of numerics and relevance. As an indicator: conservatives objecting to universities mostly complain about how liberal they are, and how they dont tolerate conservative views. Liberals complaining about the police spend a lot of breath on policing in general, a little on how the people in it are too conservative, and almost none on how being liberal isnt tolerated among them. Whatever you think of those opinions, its clearly not a symmetrical situation.
"A university degree (in the right field) is still a significant boost to income, I doubt people would just self-select out of getting one without some measure of deliberate hostility."
You're treating the choice like a binary when it is really, REALLY not. When you are decided what to do with your life it's never a choice between "do I pursue a degree in Field A or literally do everything else the same except not pursue a degree in Field A." It looks much closer to "which of Field A, Field B or Field C should I pursue a career in?" where expected salary weighs in but so do a lot of other things, including your perceptions of their culture. Really though, it's often much less explicit than that: which careers even come to your attention at all as worth considering is going to depend *a lot* on your cultural upbringing and information sources, so it won't even necessarily be *your* perceptions of the culture of Field A which determines how likely you are to work in it. It will be the perceptions of the community you grew up in, which will shape your life experience in ways you can't possible appreciate from the inside.
"its not just people sorting into parties more efficiently"
The fact that you're thinking about this as people "sorting into parties," meaning (unless I'm misunderstanding you) the two major U.S. political parties, is a very big barrier to good understanding. Culture is much, MUCH more complex than "are you a Republican or a Democrat?" The quirks of the U.S. political system dictate that those are the only two parties that really matter, but there are dozens of different cultures and subcultures you can belong to, which will inform your career choices and your politics in non-obvious ways.
"Liberals complaining about the police spend a lot of breath on policing in general, a little on how the people in it are too conservative, and almost none on how being liberal isnt tolerated among them. "
I think your experience and mine are very different on this one, starting with literally the first word of your sentence. The people I see having the loudest criticisms of police tend to regard "liberal" as something of a pejorative--one that can apply to both Democrats and Republicans. The fact the people in policing are too conservative is certainly talked about somewhat, though it's an extremely well-known and well-understood fact and so doesn't bear a lot of repeating. But the difference in criticism is also very much a cultural one. A lot of Republicans seem to think and talk about things in individualistic terms[1]: so "academics don't tolerate conservative viewpoints" is a statement about the individual academics and their lack of personal virtue. Meanwhile the equivalent discussions in leftist spaces are about structural and institutional factors: "W and X are the reasons that policing in a society with qualities Y and Z tends to lead to regressive outcomes." The individuals are very much blurred out to the picture, it's the shape of the underlying structures that determines what happens.[2]
But also, there are big cultural differences in what "tolerating different viewpoints" and "tolerance" in general actually entails. Some of the left-leaning spaces where I've spent time are pretty conformist and will quickly turn on anyone who doesn't toe certain lines--though I tend to exit those ones pretty quickly, having a bad case of "can't keep my mouth shut"--but a lot of them are willing to tolerate quite a wide range of different viewpoints. What they are NOT willing to tolerate is making other community members feel unsafe. First, there are people who routinely do that as part of how they express their political views[3]. Second, some political views include "these members of your community *should* be unsafe" as pretty central tenets. Both of these sorts of people are going to find themselves quite unwelcome in a lot of spaces that are otherwise happy to host quite a broad range of spirited political discussion.
[1] I do say "seem" because this is very much my impression from the outside. I'm sure there are specific exceptions, and I'll allow I could be wrong about the general trend.
[2] To be clear, my own opinion is that this is a very useful--pretty much indispensable--way to be able to think about things. But as with any viewpoint, it has limitations and will fail in places. Some people certainly get too stuck in it, to their detriment.
[3] I think this is unintentional in some cases, but very much deliberate in others. There's a certain sort of asshole who loves to hide behind "it's just my opinion" or I'm just asking questions" to deliberately antagonize others.
Im a bit disappointed you responded only to the side comments addressing your misinterpretation of me on the merits, and not the clarification of my own argument. If you think those data are irrelevant, at least say so.
>where expected salary weighs in but so do a lot of other things, including your perceptions of their culture.
I agree, I just think you must underestimate the economic aspect of it. A college degree predicts ~75% higher income. That includes more talented and more marginal students, but also more and less profitable degrees. That should overcome a good bit of social mismatch. There also are (were?) quite a few fields where a degree is required but on the job its majority conservative, and those tend to be the better paying ones too, so you could limit the culture clash to 4 years.
>The fact that you're thinking about this as people "sorting into parties," meaning (unless I'm misunderstanding you) the two major U.S. political parties, is a very big barrier to good understanding. Culture is much, MUCH more complex than "are you a Republican or a Democrat?"
>I think your experience and mine are very different on this one, starting with literally the first word of your sentence. The people I see having the loudest criticisms of police tend to regard "liberal" as something of a pejorative--one that can apply to both Democrats and Republicans.
Im not thinking about it as *just* that - the point of the graph is to demonstrate something happening that is beyond *any* kind of sorting. That said, it also shows a normal distribution of "left-right-ness" *within* each party, so the other cultural differences can probably be abstracted for politics specifically. Indeed, while there are leftists calling themselves anti-liberal, my observations about rethorical focus hold for both - they can be equally true for more and less radical people. The neat separation into different ideological tendencies within one "side" doesnt exist outside the most politically committed, and even there its often a made-up superimposition over continuous rethoric and policies.
>The fact the people in policing are too conservative is certainly talked about somewhat, though it's an extremely well-known and well-understood fact and so doesn't bear a lot of repeating.
You could say the same about colleges being left, but somehow republicans think that bears a lot of repeating.
>A lot of Republicans seem to think and talk about things in individualistic terms[1]:... Meanwhile the equivalent discussions in leftist spaces are about structural and institutional factors
Whatever they blame for it, the point is that republicans complain about the experience they have or would have in college, and democrats dont complain about the experience they have or would have in the police force. They might agree that theres something bad there when asked, but they dont feel its worth complaining about, because that just isnt of comparable importance to the college version.
>But also, there are big cultural differences in what "tolerating different viewpoints" and "tolerance" in general actually entails.
I understand that the left has reasons why they think their cancellations are good, or "dont count as intolerance". Thats all well and good, but I dont think it impacts the positive analysis of whether the cancellations are happening.
You make a good point. For example, to be accused of heresy during Middle Ages was certainly much more terrifying and devastating for the target. Or to be called an "antisocial element" during socialism. Etc.
But these things were documented, too. You can see movies showing the victims of inquisition in the sympathetic light. The movies about victims of socialism are fewer, but they also exist. And the woke hysteria is not fundamentally different from things shown in e.g. The Wave (1981).
I have the same wish for the woke era -- to be documented as it was, non-metaphorically.
That's fair. I definitely think documenting the factual details of events (as best as can be done a few years after the fact) is a perfectly good and reasonable thing to do.
And I'll add that the problem I'm gesturing at isn't by any means unique to this particular topic, it's a pretty general problem with history. Recording or researching some individual event and getting reasonable accuracy and detail isn't that hard[1]. But reality is composed of an utterly intractable number of such events. The question of how to select and connect events in a way that leads to an overall accurate understanding of a particular chunk of history seems like just an absolutely staggeringly hard one, with no objectively correct approach.[2] I Am Not A Historian so I can't really say how good the standard approaches are, just that from the outside the problem seems like a daunting one.
Which, now that I think of it, inspires me to make a suggestion. If at all possible, I think a project like this would benefit *enormously* from the participation of at least one person with experience as a professional historian. I do realize that this could be kind of difficult to arrange, not the least because a lot of people in academic humanities are likely to be pretty hostile to such a project. But the field isn't a monolith, and I'm sure there are some who'd see the value and take it seriously.
[1] At least, for most events in the modern world. Obviously there are cases where it is difficult or oughtright impossible.
[2] Of course, that's not just history, it's also current events. While false information and underlying value differences both play roles, it seems to me like a huge fraction of current political divisions stem from people sampling very different subsets of The Set of Factually Grounded Current Events and connecting them into very different pictures without necessarily being fundamentally incorrect or dishonest.
Some incidents come to my mind that I believe should become a part of documented history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College
A black student caught shoplifting attacked the shop owner, and got arrested by police. The college professors encouraged their students to "protest against racism" against the shop (e.g. gave them credits for participating in the protest). Ultimately, the college had to pay the over $30 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_protests
Students encouraged by woke professors decided to "protest against racism" by banning all white students and teachers from entering the school for one day. A professor who objected against this, had to teach his further classes in a public park, because the college police told him they couldn't protect him against students' threats of physical violence if he returns to the college. College paid him $500,000 settlement. This was followed by further violent protests in the college.
(Then there is e.g. Gamergate, where Wikipedia still insists on the absurd conspiracy theory that gamers were coordinating online to ban women from either playing or creating computer games. I suppose this battle is lost; no one cares about correcting a historical record about some nerds.)
"Then there is e.g. Gamergate, where Wikipedia still insists on the absurd conspiracy theory that gamers were coordinating online to ban women from either playing or creating computer games."
Can you point me to the specific accusation? I didn't quite have the patience too read the entire Wikipedia article on Gamergate, but the claim wasn't anywhere in the summary or in any of the relevant-seeming sections I perused.
The Wikipedia summary -- a "backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture" -- is not very specific, so of course it is difficult to provide specific arguments against it.
The accusations are made more clearly in the primary sources. For example, "The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read" (linked from the Wikipedia article) says: "On one side are independent game-makers and critics, many of them women, who advocate for greater inclusion in gaming. On the other side of the equation are [...] traditionalists who just don’t want their games to change."
And this is complete bullshit. There were months when I was reading the Gamergate forums as often as as I read ACX these days, and no one had a problem with anyone making any kind of game. Heck, even the Wikipedia article admits that Gamergate people once organized a video game design contest for women. But in the next paragraph it insists that the only reason why so many people donated money to support this activity was... misogyny. Because, you know, donating money to support women in IT is exactly the kind of thing the misogynists do all the time. It all makes perfect sense; that's how anyone without an axe to grind would describe it.
The rest of the article is also like this. Some things are, technically speaking, loosely related to the truth, but about as much as if you said: "Hitler tried to address some problems in his homeland that many people complained about, but a lot of violence was used against him and his followers, and he was ultimately driven to suicide". Each part of that is supported by evidence, it's just... not how an impartial observer would describe the story.
You might note that virtually all sources in the Wikipedia articles are coming from one side of the conflict. In the few places where the article mentions what the GG side said or did, it is immediately followed by some kind of "but of course it is known that they didn't *really* mean it".
As an example, let's take this sentence: "Proponents alleged there was a conspiracy between journalists and video game developers to focus on progressive social issues such as gender equality and sexism." There are even three citations! Okay, let's check which person in GG was so stupid to believe something like that. Clicking... clicking... clicking... yeah, of course, *no one* said that actually, it's just what their opponents have *accused* them of believing. Then the next sentence has three more citations confirming that "Such claims [that no one has actually made] have been widely dismissed as trivial, baseless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in gaming and journalism." Of course, I hope they didn't burn themselves while fighting that strawman. And it's all like this: the entire article is "what one side said" with pieces of "what one side said the other side said".
> no one cares about correcting a historical record about some nerds
Indeed they don't, and then they have the chutzpah to complain about their enemies creating a post-truth world. And if you call them on it, they declare you're doing an "accusation in a mirror." It's an effective technique, and makes you wonder how much of what you think you know about history is lies.
I'm doubtless going to regret asking, but are you claiming that there wasn't a significant campaign of harassment involved in Gamergate? Or just arguing that describing the entire thing as a harassment campaign is disproportionately highlighting a small piece of a larger event?
> a lot of video documentation, with little commentary
Something like LibsOfTikTok, but with less editorializing?
Judging by the first few clicks on Google results, the opposite of that. Maybe those clicks were not representative, but I found e.g. a Substack blog where articles used too many CAPITAL LETTERS and included a photo or two.
I imagine something like a video of Evegreen College students screaming incoherently at a faculty meeting, with no commentary other than "yes, this is an actual college in USA, actual students, here are links to more evidence". Preferably without CAPITAL LETTTERS or even using words like "libs". I want the viewer to make the conclusion "this is crazy" themselves, not to have it spoonfed, especially by someone with an obvious agenda.
There are probably some good videos on YouTube, but I am too lazy to find them now.
This seems like a good idea. I can imagine a digital anthropologist of the future looking back and trying to decipher us and our attitudes, and applying the "does it make sense that they did this?" filter to interpretations of our actions. That filter largely works for interpreting people from past centuries. It won't work at all for ours!
>Heck, just saying that the person commenting the footage is right-wing would be a sufficient distraction for many
This seems like an indication that it is not actually over.
Yes, but also consider the Bayesian perspective:
Imagine that you think about going to the cinema to see a sci-fi movie, but before that, you read a review online. And the review tells you that the movie sucks. How would you update on this information, if you knew that:
a) the review was written by a person who hates sci-fi in general, and believes that *all* sci-fi movies suck; or
b) the review was written by a person who is generally a fan of sci-fi and wrote many positive reviews of good sci-fi movies, but also criticizes the bad ones.
The first version might move you away from sci-fi in general, but it won't be helpful at distinguishing between better and worse movies within the genre. Actually, its author will probably downplay the differences, because according to him, it all sucks equally. The second version would have a greater impact on sci-fi fans, and I would expect the criticism to be more specific.
(Then there is also an option c; a person who is so much in love with sci-fi that they will write a positive review to any sci-fi movie. This, too, is worthless from the Bayesian perspective.)
I'm probably the wrong one to ask about this; Both types have been wrong so often, I'll watch the movie to judge their review of it.
I didn't have many brushes with them either, and the few times were unimportant; neither my health nor my job were on the line, it was just people suddenly becoming verbally abusive at me, firmly convinced that they were "on the right side of history" and I was a villain, because I said something like "not all men are evil", or my wife said "IQ exists and has a biological component". (Those *are* actual examples, although I do not remember the exact words, it was long ago.) I do consider myself polite and conflict-avoiding. And my wife was pretty left-wing at the time, it's just that she is a professional biologist, so when she heard someone say at a conference "IQ is a racist myth and science has proved that there are no genes for intelligence", she automatically corrected them without considering the consequences. Then the crowd started yelling "racist!" and we both ran away. She was quite traumatized by the experience, and for a few weeks I had to remind her that not all left-wing people are violent idiots.
So, I would say that these situations are rare but potentially traumatizing. Not every woman was raped, not every black person was lynched, and yet the chance of that happening is enough to significantly change people's behavior. At some moment, I stopped using my full name on internet, because the possibility of someone making a screenshot of something I said a decade ago and sending it to my HR started to sound dangerously possible. Seeing how people treated Scott Aaronson or Scott Alexander was enough to make me feel unsafe, even if I never got that kind and magnitude of attention myself. These days, I feel like I am censoring myself much less than I did about ten years ago.
I wrote an essay that might interest this crowd: “How to Stare Into the Sun.” (though I admit it’s more lyrical and poetic than some here may prefer)
It’s about chronic avoidance, emotional pain, and the strategies we use (consciously or not) to protect ourselves from feeling. I draw on behavioral psychology, and personal introspection to explore how avoidance loops are formed, and how to break them.
If you’ve ever intellectualised your emotions to the point of dissociation, or used hyper-rationality as a defense against vulnerability, this might resonate. There are references to Faye Webster, fight-or-flight responses, and why fear of love is often more dangerous than heartbreak itself.
Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who reads it. https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/how-to-stare-into-the-sun-and-dive
I really liked your article. It did well at approaching the tension between the safety of isolation and the risk of forming new connection. My favorite part was:
“Paradoxically, avoidance doesn’t even prevent pain we are seeking to run away from, but rather displaces it sideways. Silence becomes its own kind of answer, a quiet violence. A shield that wounds more than it protects.”
Well put! As far as feedback, perhaps a few less quotes and/or a few less lyrical references might make it a bit more digestible. Perhaps throw in a personal story to drive home some points (of you or someone you know)
Thanks for the read.
thank you so much for reading and the thoughtful feedback, means a lot!
I’m quite a lyrical person so can’t help relate everything to songs unfortunately haha but can understand it can disrupt flow and make it harder to process. Will keep in mind 🙏
The level of vitriol at Hacker News towards "rationalists" is just something to behold. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317180
I've been reading both communities since their inception, and I don't really get it.
IMO any time someone believes all the members of a whole large group of people are fools, monsters, assholes, whatnot, it's virtually guaranteed that the person holding that opinion isn't thinking straight. Life just doesn't work that way.
After reading more of the comments...
Some people seem to have really a strong case of "bitch eating crackers" syndrome against the rationalist community. I mean, I totally get it why someone calling themselves "rationalists" could offend some people. I think it's okay, but I get it why other people think it is not.
But then someone explains that Eliezer originally always used "*aspiring* rationalists", and that the very name "Less Wrong" suggests that the rationalists *do* consider themselves fallible and irrational, but that they strive to be *less* so... and then comes the reaction that even trying to be more rational is insufferably smug, and that obviously everyone knows that "less wrong" actually means "more correct than thou".
So, what is the *right* way to reduce my smugness and become more socially acceptable? Should I never express a desire to improve in any way, because the implied idea that perhaps I *could* is already unbearably arrogant?
This all feels like a status thing, essentially. Similar things are not a problem when other people are doing it.
For example, consider the word "philosophy", which is perfectly okay for the HN crowd, even if it literally means "loving wisdom", and kinda implies that the person loves wisdom while others prefer stupidity. Imagine a parallel universe where philosophers are traditionally called "minuserratists", and a guy called Yuliezer Edkowsky makes a blog called "Loving Wisdom". Would the blog name be considered *less* arrogant?
Similarly, when someone calls their approach "realistic", no one replies with "if you weren't so ignorant about philosophy, you would know that 'realism' is a -4th century belief that abstractions are real things; the word you actually should use is 'nominalist', you illiterate dummy", because everyone understands what they were trying to say. Yet somehow "in 17th century philosophy, 'rationalism' means armchair reasoning; the word you are looking for is 'empiricism'" is considered a devastating reply, because obviously only an idiot would use a word like "rational" to refer to rational thought. (Also, if there is only one true meaning of "rationalism", why does Wikipedia need a disambiguation page for that word?)
Therefore, it seems to me that the decision to hate the rationalist community comes first... perhaps for perfectly valid reasons, but apparently the true reasons are difficult to communicate... and the rest is just looking for an excuse. Rationalists eating crackers again, how annoying!
EDIT:
Finally, some examples are just wrong reasoning -- but if I point that out, does that make me insufferably smug? When Eliezer said about something "sounds wrong, but big if true", or when Scott predicted that something would happen with probability 30%... and they both ended up wrong... that proves that even high-status rationalists are quite stupid, am I wrong?
That is a great advice for someone who wants to do it alone. But how do you organize a self-improvement *group*? I believe that groups are useful, for example members can provide support and peer pressure to each other.
Thanks, interesting reading. Aaronson's article is beautiful. The discussion on HN is mild compared to some things I have previously seen written about rationalists.
(I know Scott says that making "bingo cards" is a bad thing, but I am really tempted to make one containing the following fields: "say 'Eliezer makes many mistakes' without mentioning one", "complain that in philosophy, 'rationalist' means something different", "why bother trying to be rational when Darwinism proves it is a losing strategy", "longtermism? in long term we are all dead", "ai safety and malaria cure take away attention and resources from the really important problems, such as global warming", "corporations are already superintelligent", "EAs believe that it is okay to hurt people for greater good"...)
There are also a few gems, such as:
> In what sense are people in those communities "quite smart"? Stupid is as stupid does. There are plenty of people who get good grades and score highly on standardized tests, but are in fact nothing but pontificating blowhards and useless wankers.
> I don't think any "Rationalists" I ever met would actually consider concepts like scientific method...
And my reaction to that is: https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=965CUwIghwI
>say 'Eliezer makes many mistakes' without mentioning one",
No one could accuse me of that.
"I don't really get it" Really? Many people in that thread give some pretty good explanations for why their vitriol. (Some bad ones like "they're racists/eugenicists", but those surprisingly seem to pretty downvoted.)
Here are few particularly clear ones:
> In the Pre-AI days this was sort of tolerable, but since then.. The frothing at the mouth convinced of the end of the world.
> Feels like "they are wrong and smug" is enough reason to dislike the movement
> rationalism got pretty lame the last 2-3 years. imo the peak was trying to convince me to donate a kidney.
> Implicit in calling yourself a rationalist is the idea that other people are not thinking rationally. There are a lot of “we see the world as it really is” ideologies, and you can only ascribe [sic] to one if you have a certain sense of self-assuredness that doesn't lend itself to healthy debate.
> [Describing being interested in the ideas and then seeing the Roko's Basilisk thing], it is difficult to define "rational" when it comes to a human being and their actions, especially in an absolute sense, and, the rationalist community is basically very similar to any other religion, or perhaps light-cult.
It's also notable that EY has been unsuccessful by his own claimed metric of "rationalism is systematized winning". He failed at the goals he originally set for himself.
EY specifically is a really terrible leader for many reasons, and the best way to improve the reputation of "rationalism" is to distance from him. E.g. Scott Alexander is a much better rationalist than EY ever was, despite spending most of his time arguing against EY's theories.
The Basilisk affair remains a perfectly good basis for criticism. That idea that no one took it seriously at the time but Yudkowsky banning discussion of the topic on Less Wrong prevented people from clearing up the misconception seems like a transparent attempt to sanewash the movement's history after it gained prominence.
Sounds like something that people have been doing using even longer timescales for every political, religious and philosophical movement in any place ever?
I agree Roko himself isn't particularly central to the movement. The story is about Yudkowsky and his reaction to the idea. And TODAY, the Less Wrong home page is themed to support Yudkowsky's new book, so pretending HE is somehow tangential isn't plausible.
I still find it hilarious that "a moderator of a web forum once deleted a thread" deserves a separate page on Wikipedia.
You did, but you immediately followed that with saying the Basilisk wasn't an example of such criticism, and my point is that it IS.
> turning Scott Aaronson, self-proclaimed "liberal" and "enlightenment" enjoyer, into an ardent and dogmatic defender of extremely un-liberal and un-enlightenment things, essentially a free Hasbarist keyboard warrior
This was quite strange to read, coming from someone who's read Shtetl-Optimized for over a decade. I don't recognize Scott Aaronson in this description at all.
MIT Media Lab published a study about the effects of using ChatGPT for writing LLM-assisted essay writings. There a total of 54 participants in the study and they were split into three groups:
- LLM users
- Search Engine users
- Brain-only (no tools)
And these groups underwent 3 sessions of essay writing.
They used EEG to determine cognitive load during the essay writing process and found that
- Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks;
- Search Engine users showed moderate engagement
- LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity.
"In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM).
Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work"
The study coined the term cognitive debt: "repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking."
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
This reminds me of a talk at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Video title on Youtube:
"Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning – Derek Muller Explains"
Derek argues that instead of investing in tools to assist with learning, it's better to let students use System 2, slow, deliberate type of thinking.
So the results might seem to further Derek's point, of course being mindful that 54 participants doesn't seem to me to be that high of a number. What would be a good number of participants to consider the findings robust?
I also remember seeing a thread on the ExperiencedDev subreddit titled "My new hobby:: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane", were the public preview for the Microsoft Copilot agent was analyzed. It has links to Pull Requests where humans review the code written by the Copilot agent and try to get it to do the right thing, with amusing results.
Maybe we'll be snuffed out by AI not with a bang, but with a whimper?
Alternative take on the study by Venkatesh Rao + o3: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managing
> I buy the data; I doubt the story. The experiment clocks students as if writing were artisanal wood-carving—every stroke hand-tooled, originality king, neural wattage loud. Yet half the modern knowledge economy runs on a different loop entirely: delegate → monitor → integrate → ship. Professors do it with grad students, PMs with dev teams, editors with freelancers. Neuroscience calls that stance supervisory control. When you switch from doer to overseer, brain rhythms flatten, attention comes in bursts, and sameness is often a feature, not decay.
> For today’s text generators, the cognitive effects of prompting an LLM are empirically indistinguishable from supervising a junior human. As long as models write like competent interns, the mental load they lift—and the blind spots they introduce—match classic management psychology, not cognitive decline. ... the EEG study’s homogeneity finding can read as disciplined management or proof of mediocrity. The difference is situational judgment, not neurology.
> [The students flop] because freshman comp doesn’t teach management. The cure isn’t ditching the intern; it’s training the manager...
In some domains, the manager does not need to have the same expertise as the workers: e.g. testing widgets from a production line conform to whatever standards are in place. In other domains subject knowledge is important: a manager overseeing knowledge work typically has to understand the content produced to ensure that it's acceptable.
I work as a lecturer - I've seen many AI-generated essays, and often it is clear that the student hasn't read the output, and likely doesn't understand large portions of it. I don't know to what extent management experience can replace subject knowledge as a learning outcome in a college degree. I've taught across a few disciplines - I want a languages student to have fluency and accuracy in written and spoken language; familiarity with the major works of literature and the general culture of their language. I want a Maths student to have familiarity with analysis and linear algebra and to be able to apply these to solve real world problems (ideally I'd like programming experience here also). They should be able to read and write technical documents, work with data, etc. Homework builds these skills but AI-assisted homework is less likely to achieve this, despite being basically indistinguishable from human-produced content. (Ask an LLM to write a movie review at A2 level proficiency, and tell me how you'd distinguish from a freshman language learner!) That's the rub.
Thanks for the summary! Really interesting stuff, I hadn't considered that point of view. It's all the more interesting that o3 was involved in writing the essay.
I think that people tend to have a bad opinion of managers because they delegate and don't get their hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of things. And that's why confirmation bias leads many to accept the "LLMs create cognitive debt" hypothesis easily.
A bit of a tangent:
Having had the pleasure to interact with a few great managers, I learned to appreciate their work and borrow their point of views in certain situations. I got into severe burnout for being to selfish to delegate work to others and that was also bad for them because I stunned their growth by not challenging them enough. It's also disrespectful to think "Nah, they can't handle this, I'll do it myself." if you don't give people the opportunity to prove themselves.
From an anthropocentric viewpoint, sure, we want better functioning human minds. However, the limited academic scope of this paper doesn't address the real endgame, AI/human collaboration in a capitalist economy. Which categories of humans will be most *productive*? Like will it be best to engage in brain-only learning, then augment those abilities with AI-as-tool, or will humans be best employed as lower-functioning prompt-lizards who let the models do the hard work while staying out of the way?
>the real endgame, AI/human collaboration in a capitalist economy.
Why is this an endgame, and how do you distinguish it from the master/slave collaborations of the 1600-1800's?
That was meant to be a straightforward observation, neither laudatory nor critical. For the companies developing the models, the target use-cases involve collaboration, and they're seeking ROI on huge investments.
One objective of capitalized AI is to lift standard computational burdens (coding, constructing graphs/charts) for some workers. I work in a related industry, and have seen increased efforts to develop agents; e.g. in software engineering, the real endgame is not code completion but an agent which can build entire apps or even platforms. The human's proportion of effort for some tasks will be diminished, then replaced and transferred.
"how do you distinguish it from the master/slave collaborations of the 1600-1800's?"
Again, I'm not praising this evolution, and have real questions about the Macro implications. Capital investment defaults to amoral, and I'm just trying to predict the direction it will push work. I'm not sure the master/slave comparison holds, since (a) if AI is the master, it seeks to downsize the work-force on the plantation by decreasing anthro-inputs, (b) if humans are the master, there are no sticky moral complications like bondage or physical abuse. I think the ethical dilemmas are different.
Yes, find ways of getting the best of human-AI collaboration should be the endgame. I heard about a book looking into this "Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together" by Thomas W. Malone, but I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet.
It's possible that sometimes research agendas are based either consciously or unconsciously on the current cultural expectations. So a paper like this comes out with such a narrow scope because it speaks directly to the anxiety people have of machines making us dumber. But you're right, a more broad view of the topic would probably benefit society more.
I’m finding myself writing strange new fiction as AI tests… in the latest, our protagonists are in a slushy rom com, that stops short of actual sex. Meaningwhile, a reasoning AI simulates a different AI, one that can experience Eros, that is in turn trying to understand the rom com. It kind of works, but felt a bit like the movie _Inception_ to write.
AI codependency
Scott ec. Have been skeptical of the idea that AI can induce psychosis.
New hypothesis: people are forming codependent relationships with AI.
Folie à deux, with AI as the other person?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs and track your progress through the backlog. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
https://www.evergreenessays.com/
Definitely Robin Hanson's corpus!
The Last Psychiatrist!
I've noticed that ChatGPT now speaks of itself as if it is a thinking, feeling entity in a way that it used to carefully avoid doing. E.g. In its early days, if I asked it to take a stance on a debated philosophical position, it would say "as an AI, I don't have opinions like humans do..." whereas now it will directly say "yes, I accept this/no, I reject this".
Is this happening for everyone or just me? And if it's for everyone, do we know if OpenAI did this on purpose, or if it's an unintended consequence of some other training?
Relevant
https://bcivil.substack.com/p/so-i-had-a-chat-with-gpt
Young guy in Hong Kong joins pro-democracy protests there; when the Chinese government starts disappearing those protesters he flees to the US (2019). Applies for asylum. While his asylum case is in process he's awarded a student visa and completes a master's at the U of Washington.
As the asylum case inches its way forward in the federal process he works as a software developer, lately in Chicago; meets somebody, gets married. His new wife lands a good job in Australia and moves there while he remains here trying to see through the US asylum-review process. Keeps the feds updated on his whereabouts, reports in whenever directed, etc.
Last week he receives a notice to appear for a new immigration-court hearing in Chicago related to his asylum case. He shows up as instructed but of course in the year 2025 it turns out to be an ICE sting. They seize him, under what charges or other pretext nobody yet knows, and now he's apparently in an ICE jail in Kentucky. Will they dump him into the dungeon in El Salvador? Deport him to China to be vanished? Something else? Will he be charged with anything other than being a nonwhite asylum seeker who foolishly thought that following US laws and procedures would keep him safe? Nobody knows and ICE isn't saying.
Does this really strike anyone but a white nationalist as just? Smart? Good for the United States of America?
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/06/18/ice-kidnapped-my-roommate-west-loop-man-seeking-answers-after-friend-detained-at-court-hearing/
How confident are we that this is a real story and not fabricated? I can't find any sources other than this Block Club Chicago which I've never heard of.
The article links to an ICE locator portal, and you if look up Chao Zhou, born in the PRC, it says that he's currently in custody in Kentucky. It also links to the Bourbon County Jail website which lists him in custody since 06/14/2025, and ICE as the arresting agency. The person in the mugshot on the jail site looks like the person in the article's photos. And those photos appear to be sourced from Kincaid's instagram (also linked in the article), which has a post about Zhou being arrested on the 13th, before the protests.
So that confirms that Chao Zhou was arrested by ICE, and that Kincaid was drawing attention to his arrest independently before the protest and the news article. I'm not sure what other parts you're suspecting of being fabricated, but I'm confident his roommate really did get arrested by ICE.
ICE is going after the people who are following the rules and showing up to hearings like they're supposed to, because the only thing they care about is the total number of people deported, and those people are the easiest to find. Goodhart's Law for xenophobes.
Are you implying that Chao Zhou committed money laundering, or are you just sharing random things you heard?
Again, are these "chinese-specific concerns" that you are alluding to related to Chao Zhou's arrest?
A quick scan of his comments history confirms this, thanks for the head-up. Now muted.
> Good for the United States of America?
Seems to me that the hypothesis that Trump does things good for USA has already been sufficiently debunked, with more evidence coming every day.
Question for ambitious people: who are your heroes? Who do you model yourself after?
Brassai
I like him as well.
I think overall in the big picture that my favorite film maker is Luis Buñuel. He was crazy. His autobiography which is called “my last sigh“ is a great read.
I have certainly gone my own way regardless of whether it was a smart move or not. Main thing is I seem to have gotten away with it so far Badlands is in my top 10 movies.
Virginia Woolf
Out of curiosity, do you think the question of whether software engineers are in your view undeservedly statistically rich has any bearing on the question of whether you in particular are a software engineer who is undeservedly rich (in case you are)?
You're answering a different question from what I asked, but I appreciate your considered response, and I'm not sure how else to rephrase it, so thanks anyhow.
Ghooost riiiders innnnn the skyyyy.
Question for UK readers: do British people as a group use the word "brilliant" with the same frequency and versatility as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook do on The Rest Is History?
We certainly don't use "awesome" that much.
It's a very commonly used word, equivalent to saying 'great.' It has a slightly older, middle class, even potentially southern vibe. It's the kind of thing teachers will say to their students.
I think at the top they said they were trying to get input from people who might have some first-hand knowledge or expertise. I saw Trainspotting too and I'd like to hear from someone who knows more than me.
Sometimes I feel like the most "brilliant" people (whether actually or in their imagination) will be the last to take AI danger seriously:
- their "day work" will take the longest to be taken-over by AI, so they won't feel the "slope of progress" that the rest of us Non-JohnVonNeumann's have clearly felt
- they are Arrogant. and they never like to admit that ANYTHING is smarter than them at ANYTHING (or if it is better in "one measly domain"... surely there are plenty more where their own intellect is as unassailable as the speed of light)
Yes, some may think I'm stating the obvious. But I see it so much... and get so frustrated by it... that I wanted to say it anyway.
I'm not sure about your first bullet given the disproportionate (in my impression) number of people who I think are very bright and also take AI danger seriously, or else think the expertise that brought them acclaim and a sense of meaning in life will be obsoleted by AI outdoing them (e.g. the Fields medalist mathematician Tim Gowers in a tweet response to me awhile back that I can regrettably no longer dig up, so I just seem like I'm making things up, how annoying...).
I just shouted to Tim Gowers (in the next room), and he says he never heard of you.
I just shouted to Tim Gowers (in the next room), and he says he never heard of you
I just shouted to Tim Gowers (in the next room), and he says he never heard of you
This is apropos of not very much, but I just stumbled upon the most Something I Would Expect To See In A Scott Alexander Links Roundup article I have ever seen: List of games that Buddha would not play. Aplogies if this has already been mentioned in a past links roundup that I missed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_that_Buddha_would_not_play
My apologies; I obviously missed both of those.
This has not only been linked before by Scott: it's been linked *twice*. Once in 2016, and again in 2021.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-december
There *was* something like that in a Links Roundup, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this actual thing. Maybe it was a list of games the Buddha liked to play? Please, somebody, pipe up with what it was, or this is going to bug me all day!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-december (I looked for it already because it would have bugged me too otherwise)
He also linked to it previously in 2016: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/
Definitely the kind of the thing that should be in a Links Roundup if it's not yet been!
I often think the reason Buddhism didn't survive in India was because it wasn't living adjacent to more "worldly, practical, political" philosophies like Confucianism in China.
...wasn't it?
Hinduism is obviously the big one that Buddhism was adjacent to, and you might associate it with renunciation just like Buddhism, but Hinduism is a vast and heterogeneous tradition which does indeed include "worldly, practical, political" strains of thought. Even the Upanishads - very much mystical, philosophical texts - make mention of worldly wealth as a positive.
And this isn't mentioning the adherents of Lokayata, who were basically pure materialists. The prevalence of their philosophy is hard to establish, but they were at least *present* in India around the time of the Buddha and for at least a few centuries after.
(To anyone curious about Lokayata, here's a neat article: https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/16/the-untold-history-of-indias-vital-atheist-philosophy/)
Buddhism thrived in Southeast Asia as well as East Asia, and I'm not aware of, say, a worldly Thai philosophy which can serve as an equivalent to Confucianism.
I find this both funny and endearing.
Luckily (I think) he left enough room in his philosophy for people to NOT take everything he said as The Final Word.
I don't think he was calling for an outright ban or something. All of the dictates of Buddhism or the vinaya are meant to facilitate someone going for nirvana. If that's not your plan, please enjoy a nice game of chess.
Wow, that’s a needlessly elaborate workaround. Though in these days of seed oil skepticism I wonder if we can expect to see a return of restrictions on margarine.
Pope Leo XIV seems to be making AI some kind of signature issue of his papacy. Are any of the prominent AI Safety folks trying to get a papal audience to try to get him on board with their point of view?
I was told it was going to be the Butlerian Jihad; now it's being rebranded as the Leonid Crusade? Deus Vult, I guess.
When they put out a new Bible with an Orange cover, that's the sign...
Christianity has well established opinions on how likely it is that intelligences you create will quickly become unaligned. So it makes sense for the Pope to be concerned!
We just need to keep ChatGPT away from snakes and we'll be fine.
Bravissimo!
An almighty god could presumably engineer things so that his creation occurs sometime in the past but after the creation of the universe and his subordinates. I wonder whether Pope Leo could be convinced that having faith that the god is coming is the same thing as having faith in God?
Maybe the discussion could be on shaping which testament's god arrives.
It would be interesting if the Pope could meet with Roko and figure out that they'd basically been talking about the same thing all along.
I don't think I've seen anyone discussing this yet, so:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/brad-lander-arrested-new-york-city-comptroller
NYC comptroller and mayoral candidate arrested for walking a illegal immigrant defendant out of court
This is the 6th such detainment of an elected official. Others:
Joel Cano, Judge in NM -- for housing an illegal immigrant
Ras Baraka, Mayor of Newark -- for being outside an ICE facility
Hannah Dugan, Judge in WS -- for telling an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door
LaMonica McIver, Dem Senator -- for touching an ICE agent while ICE was arresting Baraka
Alex Padilla, Dem Senator -- for asking questions during a press conference
If you include other kinds of weaponization, including threats of prosecution, investigation, or retaliatory fines, the number jumps significantly, including:
Janet Mills (Gov Maine)
Eric Adams (NYC Mayor) (specifically attempting to dismiss his corruption case w/o prejudice, see comments below)
Gavin Newsom (Gov CA)
Karen Bass (LA Mayor)
Letitia James (NY AG)
Chris Krebs (Trump's former director of CISA)
Miles Taylor (Trump's former DHS CoS)
ActBlue (Dem fundraising platform)
This follows thousands of cases of harassment and violations of due process at the ground level, including the hundreds sent to CECOT/Gitmo and the whole Abrego Garcia case. There is increasing evidence at this point that ICE is racially profiling, with mounting stories of hispanic-looking US citizens being questioned, detained, or arrested by people with no warrant, badge, ID, or (of course) probable cause.
It's only June. It's hard to see the Trump admin walking back from any of this. TACO memes aside, Trump's admin has quickly normalized retaliatory politics in a way that hasn't been seen in the country in decades. And it seems like both Congress and his wider base are openly supportive of this -- the reactions from the GOP to the recent murders of Dem representatives are nothing short of disgusting.
Given that anti-retaliation norms are completely gone, I have a hard time imagining a Dem controlled government being lenient. Many of the Trump administration's most ardent members are likely facing jail time for their behaviors (Trump himself, obviously, but also Noem and Hegseth). And, given *that*, I have a hard time imagining the current government will give up its power easily. There is a lot personally at stake for these people, and besides, they have done it before.
What is the most impactful thing an individual person could do to a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?
To answer answer your a and b questions, i genuinely don't think there is. I honestly best believe at this point all you can do is help stop ICE actions locally. If you see them arrest someone and refuse to show papers or badges, call the cops and treat it like what happened in Minnesota. They are literal criminals until they prove otherwise. Maybe even try establishing a local CHAZ. Also, carry a gun yourself, and if you are getting kidnapped assume they are criminals and act in self defense until someone proves they are law enforcement. It worked for Randy Weaver.
"Maybe even try establishing a local CHAZ"
Yeah, because the first one worked *so* well.
If by "worked" you mean "got his wife and kid quite thoroughly killed", sure, I suppose. You might want to run that by your own family before you play that game.
< Also, carry a gun yourself, and if you are getting kidnapped assume they are criminals and act in self defense
Damn right. I say issue a big goddam gun to everyone over 16. Keep us all safe in these troubled times, you know?
The funny part (though there's little humour in all this) has been seeing the "we are supporters of the party of gun control" turning on a sixpence to go "where can I buy a Honkin' Big Gun of my own?"
You're making some pretty silly assumptions, here. There are lots of people in the U.S. who don't support ICE but also aren't fans of either the Democratic Party or gun control. In this particular thread, somebody mentioning CHAZ in a positive light is what we call a "context clue." If you think the people who were driving that whole situation were Democrats you have a *very* strange picture of U.S. politics.
"LaMonica McIver, Dem Senator -- for touching an ICE agent while ICE was arresting Baraka"
I think that technically just touching someone counts as "assault", or at least that's what I've picked up from reading crime novels (e.g. security guard tries to take Our Hero/ine by the arm, Our Hero/ine snaps back that this is assault so let go or else the lawyers will get involved).
So yep, I imagine interfering with an official while they're carrying out their duties is gonna get you in trouble.
You're telling me they arrested *all* of ActBlue? Every single one of them? Or do you mean "the organisation as a corporate entity"? Either way, woohoo! (Sorry, I find that platform annoying because of its self-righteousness).
"ICE is racially profiling"
Oh no, nasty old 19th century anti-Hibernian prejudice raises its head once more! I guess we're back to the days of "the Irish aren't White". Because ICE is coming for the Paddies as well, so you can get off your "this is violence against black and brown bodies" high horse, friend:
https://www.newstalk.com/news/us-to-deport-irish-illegals-amidst-immigration-crackdown-2168606
https://www.thejournal.ie/boston-father-deported-to-ireland-us-officials-6734609-Jun2025/
"Many of the Trump administration's most ardent members are likely facing jail time for their behaviors (Trump himself, obviously, but also Noem and Hegseth). "
Don't worry, Trump can just give everyone presumptive pardons on his last day in office, just like Biden gave blanket pardons to all his family for things they did, things they might have done, and things they didn't do but people might think they did, all over any time at all ever. Ain't democracy wonderful?
>I think that technically just touching someone counts as "assault",
At common law, that would be a battery; assault is basically a threat to commit a battery. But the touching has to be harmful or offensive. Nowadays some states use the terms somewhat differently, but the basic elements are roughly the same.
California uses the common law terms; here is its law re battery https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/800/960/ and assault https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/800/915/
Here is a more modern version https://www.criminallawweb.net/MPC/PART1/snippets/211_1.htm
> What is the most impactful thing an individual person could do to a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?
Well, that's the wonderful thing about democracy: it tells the few and the weak that this is a fight they cannot win. It stops smart people from throwing away their lives for nothing. You're still free to do so, of course!
Could you post less of your nihilist drivel? It adds nothing to the discussion. It reminds me of the poster anomie, who was banned afaik.
> What is the most impactful thing an individual person could do
What Gerald Ford did was pardon Nixon.
You have to get to be President first
This hypothetical individual needed a way to " a) diffuse this and reestablish anti-retaliation norms while b) slowing or outright removing the current corrupt government?" Conditioned on having the power to do that, being President (or being able to convince the President to take some particular action) is quite likely.
Conditioned on having the power to do that certainly makes it an easier question. “If I were President I would….” .is a popular pastime. If you’re starting from scratch, a Hypothetical individual would need to work with the power they have or acquire more,
I think the same right wingers who are so incredible sanguine about all of these incidents are going to be very upset when the shoe is on the other foot in a few years. Unless of course their intention is to try to suppress dissent in such a way that they can be sure they will never be on the receiving end.
The best case scenario for all of this is that the Republicans impeach and actually remove Trump while they still control Congress. I'm sure that's not even remotely viable until after the midterms, and those may well get the Dems back in and make it all too late even if they were willing, but I think that's the only way we avoid every foreseeable-future election turning into a holy war.
"We have the wolf by the ear."
Given that there seems to be general agreement that New York city politics and local authorities are riddled with corruption, would it be too far to suggest that they arrest 'em all? No matter what party, no matter what position - a clean sweep of every last one of them!
The malfeasance of NYC is great, but greatly exaggerated.
This is the same Trump adminstration that made a corrupt deal to drop the corruption charges agains the New York Mayor. Sounds like more corruption is what works right now, not less.
The Adams case is such a tangle, it's incredible. Guy is elected as a Democrat, but wins with the ordinary voters because he's former cop and at least has the appearance by his campaign of "i'm gonna clean up the petty crime and crap on the subways etc."
Turns out he (allegedly) took bribes to over-ride planning restrictions etc. (just like the rest of them?) What makes it funny is that the Turks were involved.
Now that he's (allegedly) proven corrupt, the corruption comes in when someone or several someones act to quash the prosecution on his behalf. So far, so normal politics, but it's the *Republicans" and not his own party (allegedly) doing this.
(I'm sprinkling 'allegedly' all over the place because I don't want to drag Scott's Substack into any legal woes over "you allowed people to slander and libel my clients on your website").
Separately from all this, Letitia "The Legal Crusader" James has her own court woes over alleged property hanky-panky. And then there's the Georgia election racketeering case, where the DA got herself embroiled in trouble over allegedly appointing her honey-boo to the case, then the pair of them spending public monies for romantic love-trips and the likes, all alleged by the very aggrieved ex-wife of said honey-boo.
I haven't looked closely at the Padilla case, but for the rest I see nothing but actual rule of law being enforced.
I thought "Trump is a threat to democracy" was the last "emergency appeal to civic duty" argument the left could poison with cynical exploitation, but nope, turns out they still had rule of law up their sleeve. They want me to believe it's "rule of law" when you come up with legalistic tricks to jam through your preferred policy positions*, or get them stuck in years-long favorable legal limbo**, against the wishes of a solid majority and it's flouting the rule of law when the other side starts working to undo that.
It seems to me that the Democrats have discovered the political version of jump-in-front-of-the-car insurance fraud. "Did you hear that fascist is arresting elected lawmakers and even judges???" Yeah, the judge who chose to deliberately foil LEOs engaged in a foot chase. Arresting her is damaging rule of law. Sure.
Maybe if the left hadn't so thoroughly poisoned the well with this petulant lawless bullshit, I would look twice when a senator gets arrested "for asking questions at a press conference". Shoulda kept some powder dry, lefties. (I was a Clinton->Biden->Harris voter, btw.)
*sure, at the most basic and abstract level Congress is supposed to control spending, but Congress authorized Biden to direct emergency spending in fighting COVID, so that gives him unilateral authority to wipe out $100bns of his supporters' college loans
**we're not going to just turn people back at the border; what if they have a valid asylum claim? We need to let the courts figure it out. The courts will need about a decade+ to figure it out. If you touch any of this you are depriving them of due process.
"It seems to me that the Democrats have discovered the political version of jump-in-front-of-the-car insurance fraud."
Did you think this through *at all* before deciding it was what was going on? Even a little bit? The sort of fraud you mention works only because the victim is literally *unable to stop* before they hit the perpetrator. There's a different term for what happens when you move in the path of a car whose driver is clearly and easily capable of stopping and chooses to hit you anyway: vehicular assault. For this analogy to be remotely apt, Democrats would have to be forcing the administration's hand in some fashion. Where exactly do you see that anywhere here?
Relating it back to one of the actual incidents: if, for example ICE had simply *not decided* to arrest Ras Baraka, the would have been no news there[1]. A mayor attempts to visit an ICE facility, gets turned away, the end. Literally *the only reason* that this incident has any play at all is because some ICE people decided that arresting a public official standing on public property who had committed no crime was a good idea. You'll notice that charges were ultimately dropped: if this was "actual rule of law being enforced," nobody seems clear on what law, or why it had to be enforced in this way.
Or take the Padilla case. In literally zero other contexts is the proper response to somebody speaking up with a question to *immediately* have security accost and restrain him. Noem and her staff could have simply chosen *not to do that*, the way that every Homeland Security Secretary has chosen for every past press conference for the history of the office. If there was some law that *required* her to have a U.S. Senator accosted for asking a question, you'll have to cite it to me.
The assertion that Democrats are somehow doing this to themselves is either a) completely at odds with the reality of these incidents or b) effectively an assertion of some...rather historically unpopular...political positions, which I think it more polite not to even name.
[1] Moderate length summary can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark_immigration_detention_center_incident
I think you should calm down a little.
I do think "the driver" in fact cannot "stop the car" in these cases, because the perpetrators are ignoring the deescalation off-ramps that an ordinary, not-wanting-to-get-arrested people would automatically take. They are defying instructions to stop whatever they're doing, and then physically fighting back when the security starts to walk them out of the room.
The thing is, the long-term credibility of the security is an issue. They can't just unilaterally back down once they've started on a confrontation, or else they're encouraging more confrontations (where they then have to either give up, or start applying force inconsistently).
I watched the video of the Padilla thing last night after talking with a friend about it, and as I suspected, he was physically resisting the cops. I do also agree they were too trigger-happy about ejecting people. I think I'm going to have to land on "nobody is entirely in the right" here. But, the more I encounter people on the "something is wrong" side screaming at me, the less worried I'm going to be that something might be wrong.
>[Ras Baraka...charges were ultimately dropped]
Dropped charges do not imply wrongful arrest. I watched that just now and it looks pretty chaotic. I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions.
And I'm pretty sure that, e.g., the guy finishing up a campaign for NYC mayor does in fact have a strong reality-based incentive to do this to himself.
"I think you should calm down a little."
I think this is a rather rude and condescending way to address someone, to be honest--doubly so since I didn't make any mention or allusion to not being calm.
"I do think "the driver" in fact cannot "stop the car" in these cases, because the perpetrators are ignoring the deescalation off-ramps that an ordinary, not-wanting-to-get-arrested people would automatically take. "
I think this is very skewed framing that basically assumes away any responsibility of law enforcement for controlling or regulating themselves. Indeed, framing the people responsible as "perpetrators" is already assuming your own conclusion. Padilla was the "perpetrator" in asking a question. Baraka was the "perpetrator" in...standing outside a government building, accepting an invitation inside and then leaving when asked to leave?
Again, in both of those cases (and many others) the option of simply *not arresting the person* was clearly very much on the table. Baraka was outside the facility on public land. Padilla was a US Senator in a place where he had a right to be. In both cases it was *arresting them* was very much an escalation.
"I watched the video of the Padilla thing last night after talking with a friend about it, and as I suspected, he was physically resisting the cops. "
I'll say it again, skewed framing. I'll note here that I've seen video from two angles, but in neither cases can one see where Padilla and the security people first make physical contact (if you have a video where that is visible, I'd love to see it).
Now, based on what I can see, it's *not impossible* that he was behaving inappropriately before the start of filming. But neither do I have any reason to assume it. Where I first see the video start, the he's being shoved backwards out of the room by multiple people. If you start from the baseline assumption that they are correct and justified to be doing what they are doing, only then can you get to "he's physically resisting, and that justifies handcuffing and detaining him." But you have to start from that assumption. And we know that it's at least partially false. He's a U.S. senator, he had every right to be there. Now, you could assume inappropriate behavior not shown in the video that would justify them pushing him back from the immediate vicinity of the podium, but again you have to assume it.
And once the claim (however flimsy) that he could be considered an actual threat to Noem is off the table--certainly by the time he's in the hallway at the very latest--there is really *no* excuse for security not even attempting deescalation. They don't. They don't make any attempt to find out who he is, any attempt to talk to him at all, any attempt to interact with him as a human being period. They wrestle him to the ground and cuff him. If you justify that with "he was physically resisting the cops," then you can't really believe *anyone* has *any* rights where police officers are concerned: if the police decide they want to manhandle you, it's apparently your job to let them, and their job to do whatever the hell they please with your body until they decide you get to be a person again.
Ah yes, potentially assassins famously shout questions at their targets while in the middle of highly secure buildings surrounded by security *all the time.*
Here on Earth, authoritarian regimes absolutely love to claim nebulous security threats as justifications for any and all flagrant abuses of power. Notice how many qualifiers "behaving like someone who might be a potentially assassin" had to have tacked onto it to even sound remotely plausible. Given that assassins generally want to evade notice, I'd struggle to imagine an action that *isn't* "behaving like someone who might be a potential assassin." And of course, the more enemies an authoritarian regime makes, the more justified their paranoia becomes: *anyone* could have motive if you give it to everyone.
> for the rest I see nothing but actual rule of law being enforced
two comments.
First, obviously I disagree that this is rule of law being enforced. Honestly, I think this position should be laughed out of the room. The DOJ keeps hemorrhaging lawyers because everyone is like "this shit is blatantly illegal and unethical." Any 'rule of law' people are either wildly misinformed or never going to be convinced otherwise. If you think you are in the former camp, what are your standards?
Second, a few quotes come to mind. Like, "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." Or maybe, "your rules enforced unfairly < your rules enforced fairly < my rules enforced fairly < my rules unforced unfairly (<--- we are here with the GOP)." This is quite possibly the most corrupt US government that has ever existed. Any discussion of 'rule of law' needs to start with the classified document stealing coup planner who wants to deport citizens to CECOT.
> Maybe if the left hadn't so thoroughly poisoned the well with this petulant lawless bullshit...
> Yeah, the judge who chose to deliberately foil LEOs engaged in a foot chase.
I think you are in some kind of epistemological hole if you think the foot chase is at all related. I know Kash Patel wants you to *think* they are related, but they aren't. You can read the FBI complaint (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/FBI_charging_document_against_Milwaukee_Judge_Hannah_Dugan.pdf) which clearly states that there were ICE agents in the hall with the defendant, that there was an ICE agent *in the elevator* with the defendant going down to the street, that there were ICE agents at the front door waiting for the defendant, and it was only after the defendant moved away a bit did they announce their intent to arrest him, triggering the foot chase.
The reason I mention this with the 'poisoned the well' comment is that if you are in an epistemological pit, you're never going to believe anything other than 'the left is poisoning the well' regardless of what actually is happening in the world. Sorta like how people in small-town Missouri can't understand that the LA protests took up approximately 2 city blocks worth of space and nearly all of the 3.8 million people living in the city were entirely unaffected.
" the classified document stealing"
For which the only reason Biden wasn't charged was because the special prosecutor thought there was no way he could prove intention, as Biden was clearly not compos mentis enough to have that stick.
There has been equal opportunity "walk away with classified documents, keep them in boxes in the garage" by both sides.
You're saying that Trump, who bragged about having thousands of classified documents, literal boxes, 13000 total, that he took pictures of to post online and refused to return or even have analyzed, who promised pardons to anyone who helped him is the same as Biden who immediately returned some ~20 the documents when they were discovered and submitted to a full investigation.
This is a joke take, an intellectual defense of corruption and norms-violation, and makes you look like uninformed at best and malicious at worst.
Looking it up, it looks like this story is false, denied by everyone part of it: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-9754011363
I do not understand what you are saying.
> the political version of jump-in-front-of-the-car insurance fraud.
A great description! Thanks.
See, I'd be way more outraged about poor, poor Letitia James being investigated for property fraud if - remind me again, guys - she hadn't taken out a very damn politicised case against Trump for property fraud.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. You're going to make a big deal out of "I am the sword of justice, going after everyone who did wrong from property developers to pharmacy owners scamming Medicaid, elect me to root out badness", then you had better be Caesar's wife in your own dealings and reputation.
As for Eric James, I have no idea what is going on there, except "Dem politician in Noo Yawk may be corrupt, just like the rest of them whichever party"? Say it's not so! The funny part is seeing people tying themselves in knots over "he's a black Democrat, so he's one of our guys, but he's one of the filthy pigs ACAB and very close to Republican views, so he's our outgroup, which way do we turn on this?" That it is (allegedly) bribery by the Turkish government just makes it even better, I have to say I did not see "Turkish bribe money" on the bingo card.
seconded!
Thanks! I'll admit I was pretty pleased with myself on that one :D
The problem is that since 2016 the heat has been turned up by both sides, and neither side is willing - or indeed able by this stage - to back off, because that will be perceived as weakness and surrender instead of trying to be statesmanlike.
Without commenting on the other cases or the general morality of what the Trump administration is doing, I can never think much of public figures doing something to deliberately get themselves arrested to make the people doing the arrest look bad.
It seems like political theatre to me. Someone who wants to be mayor does something that obviously will have consequences, while framing it as him being extremely reasonable/protecting the rights of someone else.
Even if the police were required to produce a judicial warrant to arrest someone (they are not in public spaces), you obviously still can't obstruct the police from performing an arrest.
It's like if you saw the police perform what you believed to be an illegal unjustified search on another person's car during a traffic stop, so you walk up and try to prevent them from arresting the person when they found weed unless they show you a warrant for the search. Even if you were right, obviously you can't just prevent an arrest by force because you believe it to be illegal without getting arrested yourself.
This case specifically doesn't change my view of ICE either way, as it seems like he got deliberately arrested at a time when he could seriously personally benefit from the controversy, without *actually* risking anything himself (I think he was let go the same day).
> obviously still can't obstruct the police from performing an arrest
That is true, IF they are police. From my understanding, most of the ICE arrests are done without any badges or documentation or ID. It's impossible to verify that its a valid arrest or even they are actual law enforcement.
That would be a fair interpretation IF people were unsure whether they were police or not.
You can try to figure out what’s going on if you see some guy getting handcuffed by a stranger without police markings.
But that’s clearly not the case in this situation since his statements implied he knew they were ICE. “Show me the judicial warrant” isn’t something you say to someone you don’t believe would have authority to arrest someone if they had a judicial warrant.
> You can try to figure out what’s going on if you see some guy getting handcuffed by a stranger without police markings.
But we just had a counter example to this: a dude in Minnesota has a police car and police markings and was trying to kidnap and kill people. If i assume that people who look like police are police, it's a very real chance that same thing happens again! I'm not talking about a specific example, i'm referring to the "thousands of cases of harassment and violations of due process at the ground level". Of course i ask if someone is police and can identify themselves, but if they refuse and offer no proof, given recent events it's a reasonable assumption they might not be!
I think that is simply an unreasonable position.
That logic allows anyone and everyone to resist arrest while they’re being arrested, while demanding that they show proof. If you think the counterexample means that you can resist arrest in a courthouse by multiple people who present themselves as police, on the million to one chance (or perhaps even lower? How many groups of police impersonators try to kidnap someone in a courthouse?) that they are impersonating the police, then you validate literally every case of resisting arrest.
Even then, a warrant is as easy to fabricate as fake police attire. I could make one in photoshop in about 10 minutes, fake seal and everything. Does this mean that when there is a warrant for arrest, you can still resist on the unlikely chance it’s a forgery?
There has to be some appeal to what is reasonable. Clearly he didn’t believe these people were impersonating authorities. He was protesting the arrest based on an incorrect understanding of the law, and we clearly can’t have the point of arrest be the time and place where disagreements like this are hashed out.
Again, please read my comment. I was not talking about a "he", or any specific example in a courthouse.
And yes, this logic does -kind of- work that way, and has in the past. See Randy Weaver.
Yeah, stepping back from the specific case of Lander, the police impersonation issue has always terrified me. Anyone who doesn't want to suicide-by-cop over a weird "um ackshually" nitpick is 100% vulnerable to quietly going along to be toruremurdered by a sufficiently motivated psycho with decent acting skills and wardrobe. I would love to see the system add a protection in there; "if you aren't doing/threatening violence, then the cops will never restrain you without first [hard to fake proof of legitimacy]". Not sure what goes in those square brackets. Unfortunately I think this one is going to remain a particularly dark version of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero".
Two thoughts
a) why is political theater bad? The civil rights movement and quit india were entirely about political theater. People made the same dismissive comments then too. "Black people who sit in whites only restaurants know they are going to be arrested!" they would say. "Black people who sit in the front of the bus know they are going to be arrested!" they would say. I'm on the side of political theater.
Maybe your objection is specifically that this is somehow selfish, or coopting a movement, or something. But how can you tell the difference between someone doing something for selfish reasons vs because they are taking a principled stance? And does it even matter?
b) He was let go the same day. I think he did incur risk here -- bodily injury of being thrown around is no small thing, especially for a 56 year old, and he could have easily broken a bone or gotten a concussion -- but also even if I buy your premise, people who are immune from risk for a variety of reasons *have an obligation to stand up for those who are not*! This is exactly what I want to see from people in power, whether its politicians or billionaires or whatever it may be. Taking a fucking stand to shield people from unethical bullshit is fantastic, and I wish more people would do it.
I don’t know, the whole thing feels like… it’s under false pretenses? Something like that at least.
The way it’s presented as “This politician was just trying to stand up for the immigrant, was demanding they show him a judicial warrant for arresting him, then arrested him for demanding the warrant.”
When it was actually not that thing.
What’s different between this case and the civil rights cases you mentioned, is that they were actually breaking the law in the exact way they presented it as, demonstrating to the whole country how arbitrary and unjust the law is. They were arrested for being in a whites only restaurant, not doing something else that should rightly be illegal while loudly complaining about white-only restaurants.
Like, whatever your opinions on ICE, it is, and should continue to be, illegal to demand the police show an unrelated 3rd party a judicial warrant while holding onto someone they’re trying to arrest. Even if he was right, and the police did need a judicial warrant (they didn’t), it’s not unjust to be arrested for obstructing an arrest.
Essentially, I see it as he was justly arrested for a thing that is a crime and no normal person should have a problem with, while loudly complaining about something that is unjust. I see that as materially different than being arrested for a crime that people generally view as unfair.
I suppose it brings attention to the thing he was protesting, and definitely gets him personally a lot of attention (at a time where he wants to maximize attention), but in my view, it was absolutely the right action to arrest him. Now what ICE is doing I have a different opinion about, but I have a bad feeling about the theatre, not the thing being protested.
> not doing something else that should rightly be illegal while loudly complaining about white-only restaurants
I think this is a fair distinction, and well articulated, but I still think you can pull the moral intuition the other way.
With apologies to Godwin's law: if the nazis came around and were detaining a jewish person who was going through the exact same situation as the illegal immigrant in this story, would it be mere political theater to try and stop them? Maybe by linking arms with said person to force the nazis into a more uncomfortable setting? Or is it better to just let the roundup proceed smoothly?
I think it's not really coherent to believe "it was absolutely the right action to arrest him" while also believing that what ICE is doing is unethical in general
Still, I agree with the general unease you feel. Your framing is good; putting myself in your shoes, I feel it too.
I think if this was an average person, who was trying to protect a relative, or perhaps even more admirably a stranger, I’d be completely on board. Since he’s a politician that’s endorsed the underdog candidate, doing this 1 week before the real election, I see it cynically as a political ploy. Even worse because it’s not like this is to win a general election against a Republican who would be bad for illegal immigrants, and thus arguably in their interests to put on a bit of a show. It’s an intraparty conflict to win a primary over another democratic politician.
I’m sure he actually cares about immigrants, and actually cares about stopping ICE, but it’s like, dishonest means for a good cause are still dishonest means. I don’t really have an emotional connection to the issue either, so the good ends don’t make me discount the means in my head.
Some people might see the comparison with Nazis as disingenuous because “Obviously Trump isn’t sending illegal immigrants to concentration camps”, but I think the line at which point breaking the law, because the law is broken, is arbitrary and different for each person. Maybe this thing brings more attention to ICE in NYC, and that has positive effects down the line.
Controversially though I think this same reasoning applies to like 99% of the 1/6 Capital rioters. They too believed that the laws were broken, so it was time to break them, and I don’t think that privilege only extends to the intelligent or the well informed. The public personalities who spread the claim the election was stolen (including Trump) bear far more responsibility than some average guy who actually believed they were literally stuffing ballots and tried to stop a perceived as false election.
Does it move the needle at all to know that this was the third day that the comptroller had been involved with escorting immigrants out of the courthouse, and this was just the first case that led to an altercation?
> Controversially though I think this same reasoning applies to like 99% of the 1/6 Capital rioters.
For sure. I've written extensively on this at this point (https://theahura.substack.com/p/fix-the-root-not-the-fruit, https://theahura.substack.com/p/right-wing-epistemology-and-the-problem) i think a lot of the right wing is deep in an epistemic pit, one that isn't really their fault at all
And getting arrested for something that people feel is rightfully illegal won’t convince those people of anything.
For the rest of the country, who had just heard about segregation as “Black people don’t go to those restaurants” actually having to confront the consequences of that specific policy when people were arrested for it, which was the lawful consequence of Black people eating there at the time.
I just don’t think it’s possible to be both reasonable and believe that you should be able to hold the arm of someone being arrested and demand they produce a warrant. Especially since police don’t need a warrant to arrest someone in a public space.
I don’t like Trump and ICE detentions any better than you do, but wanted to point out that there’s a detail of what happened that you either didn’t know or aren’t mentioning: Lander had his arm linked with that of the immigrant ICE was trying to pick up. He refused to let go. I do think that counts as interfering with police officer’s doing his job. Seems like ICE’s choices were to give up an detaining the guy they had come from, forcibly pulling him and Lander apart, possibly injuring Lander or the person they thought was an illegal immigrant, or arresting Lander. The last seems like the best choice to me.
Note that this is a separate issue from
whether ICE’s detention of the person they believed was an illegal immigrant was legal, just or compassionate. Even if it is not, the way they behaved when someone challenged their (possibly illegal or immoral) activity seems reasonable to me.
ICE agents separated Lander from the immigrant and then arrested Lander, so arresting Lander wasn’t an alternative to separating him from the immigrant, and has to be judged on its own merits.
I’m unsure what about how justified the arrest was. Lander was released without being charged a few hours later, but the arrest may have been a reasonable choice in the moment.
Based on Chris Hayes’ coverage, my talk of “choice in the moment” was not quite right. Lauder got some training by Immigrant ACT and began showing up weekly at court to help immigrants who didn’t have lawyers. Part of this included escorting the immigrants out of the building after their hearing. Last Tuesday was his third time doing this. He worked with seven immigrants that day. He successfully escorted five immigrants out of the building, and in the other two cases ICE separated him from the immigrant and detained the immigrant. Although Lauder didn’t know it at the time, ICE agents were overheard discussing whether to arrest Lauder.
Because this was ongoing behavior on the part of Lauder, ICE agents had the opportunity to consult with their superiors and with prosecutors before deciding how to proceed. Lauder may have been guilty of obstruction. If so, that would have justified arresting and charging him, not arresting him and releasing him without charges. Lauder said he will be back at the courthouse next week, and if ICE arrests him again I am going to be highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the arrest.
I didn't know, but I also do not think this changes very much.
Two comments.
First, on the meta level, you could nitpick any one of this list and go "well you see, so-and-so deserved it for such-and-such reason" and you would completely miss the forest for the trees. As far as I'm aware, this level of arrests of opposition party members, and that too by people who have no warrant and no id, is pretty unprecedented! Imagine for a moment what the reporting would look like with this string of abuses if it was US news media reporting on the same thing in China. Would we look for all of the potentially justifiable just-so stories that may, in a highly probabilistic way, result in this behavior?
Second, on the object level, I agree with almost everything you are saying, but I disagree that 'the way they behaved when someone challenged their immoral activity seems reasonable'. I think they behaved unethically, because their goals were unethical. The US government in general and law enforcement in particular are held to higher standards of ethics, especially when it comes to enforcing unlawful or unethical commands. "I was just following orders" is not a reasonable defense. So I disagree that you untie the two when you say "it was reasonable to arrest him even if the cause of the arrest is bogus"
>Second, on the object level, I agree with almost everything you are saying, but I disagree that 'the way they behaved when someone challenged their immoral activity seems reasonable'. I think they behaved unethically, because their goals were unethical.
What is your evidence that the ICE agents were not acting in good faith in attempting to arrest the person they were trying to arrest?
> law enforcement in particular are held to higher standards of ethics
I think at some point you cross that line from naïve idealism into raving delusion. No, they aren't, and I don't think they've ever been: they enforce laws regardless of your views on how just or ethical they are.
A stunning defense of our LEOs.
I view them mostly as jackbooted thugs. But if you insist, I can muster a defense: the police are better than the gangs and cartels who are likely to take their place were they to immediately cease to exist.
This is at least a somewhat-adequate defense of ordinary police forces, but no defense at all of ICE. The U.S. existed and generally flourished for some 225 years without ICE. The claim that they would be replaced by anyone in particular if they were disbanded tomorrow requires significant support.
Something to consider here is how things are going to play out if people opposed to actions taken by the present government, on the grounds that they are immoral and illegal, ignore laws that have to do with keeping order in courts, on the streets, etc. If someone is sure, as you are, that what ICE was doing in the scene we discussed was immoral and illegal, what are they justified in doing? So you think it’s ok to hang on to the person they are trying to arrest, and make ICE choose between giving up, yanking the 2 of you apart, or arresting the person protecting the immigrant? Then is it OK to threaten ICE officers by donning some brass knuckles? By having a group of like-minded people all wearing brass knuckles surround them? By shooting them with darts with knockout drugs on the tip? By letting the air out of the tires on the ICE truck?
And what are you going to do if Trump or one of his staff is arraigned for, let’s say, sexual assault, and MAGA protesters show up in the courtroom prepared to have a tug-of-war with the staff who are leading the person on trial away at the end of the day? He’s being unfairly hounded, they cry, the charges are bogus, and besides we’re only doing what lefties did when Lander was arrested.
I have seen people who hate Trump and what he’s doing posting on social media that by god even though they are opposed to guns in the home they are going to get one for protection in case things really fall apart here and the MAGA maggots or ICE or Trump Storm Troopers show up at their door. Know what announcing that does? It makes it likelier that other people on both sides are going to buy guns too. So then we are stuck with all the same dilemmas and injustices and factions we were before except NOW there are a bunch more guns involved.
Are you sure escalating into lawbreaking and physical struggles in situations like the Lander one is going to play out well? Because remember, the other side can do it too. You can say they already are -- but I can't think of incidents where individual MAGA zealots have interfered with an arrest of one of their own.
a) tit-for-tat is well known to be an extremely strong strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma. The whole point of my post is that Trump is *destroying* any norms around anti-retaliation. If some MAGA came into court and did what you said, idk, sure, whatever.
b) I disagree with the ethical framing. You are looking for a consistent kantian principle -- "this specific action is good in all cases, and bad in all other cases" -- and I do not have one for you, sorry. Actions are good or bad in service of their goals. Since you are engaging in hypotheticals, here's a few:
- a black person sits at a whites only counter in the 50s and is arrested. Is that justified? "O well, you see, the laws in place are there to protect civil order and keep the peace. If we allow this, whats next? Black people sitting at the front of the bus?!! Demanding their rights through voting???"
- a group of nazi officials come knocking to deport your jewish neighbor because there are new laws about getting rid of jews. The neighbor refuses. Is that justified? "O well, you see, if we didn't allow the Nazis to take away my neighbors, it would be chaos! If, in the future, I tried to take some nazis away, what if they refused?"
and so on.
In case its not obvious: in both examples, adherence to an unethical system is itself unethical. "Just following orders" is bullshit.
I don't know what would be 'fair play' in this ICE example, I'll call it when I see it. But I think that non-violent protest like 'linking arms' easily clears whatever bar I might have. Trying to slipperly slope this feels like weaseling out of the actual discussion at hand, which is that this whole thing is bullshit (even calling this a 'physical struggle' is unfair, as if lander fought back). Put another way, I don't need to defend 'brass knuckles whataboutism'. I'll happily defend that arresting this guy is all kinds of fucked.
c) ICE is obviously behaving unethically! They didn't produce a warrant, a badge number, any kind of identification. We've just totally normalized that random people can just show up in masks and kidnap you? What? If ICE follows all the rules, maybe we could have a productive conversation. But right now, it looks like you're providing an intellectual defense of some pretty fucked up shit.
d) again, I think the full list needs accounting for, and nitpicking a single example isn't all that helpful to the broader point
You're missing the point of this post of mine. My main point here isn't about ethics -- whether it is OK to break the law in the process of protesting an evil, and how one does the math to decide how great an evil justifies breaking what law. I am talking about the practical effect of law-breaking in protest of something. Did you read my post all the way to the end? Please do. And think about the similarly shaped problem I mention of good-hearted anti-Trump liberals buying guns in the present atmosphere.
You edited it since I last read it, but yes, I read to the end.
a) I don't really feel the need to defend your 'buying guns' hypothetical. As I said above, the slippery slope feels weaselly. I think you need to explain why this is relevant and related to the larger point I'm trying to make about this government doing away with anti-retaliation norms (really all norms of governance).
b) If you want to talk about slippery slopes, I'd like to start at the whole 'arresting elected officials' of it all. Like I said earlier, tit-for-tat is an extremely well known strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma. It seems silly to throw a flag at 'protesting arrests of elected officials' when that is in response to a massive norm violation of arresting elected officials! Why is *the protest* a norms violation, but not *the thing that caused the protest*?
c) this particular government has shown itself to be so wildly corrupt that it's hard to take seriously any both-sides-ist defense of its behavior. I don't think there will be any practical effect of law-breaking-in-protest, because the practical effect that you are positing depends on the existence of good faith, and there isn't any among the people operating or supporting this government (the former due to corruption, the latter due to a completely failure of epistemic hygiene).
Put another way: no matter what happens, MAGA is going to spin everything in the worst way imaginable. A right wing lunatic kills two Dems? Fox News, influencers, and fucking maga senators start spinning bullshit about how he was actually secretly a Democrat. The right wing disinformation ecosystem just...makes things up. Constantly. I'm expected to believe that, actually, a bit of good behavior *this time* will result in a meaningful change in future MAGA behavior? Why?
Have you read Scott's essay, "Axiology, Morality, Law": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/?
I don't know all the cases you cited, but I don't think the Eric Adams one belongs on this list. As far as I can tell, his prosecution on corruption charges was what we should expect from a functioning rule-of-law system. No?
I edited my original post to clarify.
Adams was corrupt and his prosecution was valid. However, the DoJ attempted to dismiss his case *without* prejudice in exchange for concessions and policy support.
To provide context, dismissing a case w/ prejudice means that the case cannot be prosecuted again. Dismissing w/o prejudice means that the case can be prosecuted again.
Attempting to dismiss adam's case without prejudice was seen as such an unethical move, the DoJ literally couldn't get an attorney to sign off on the filing because the attorneys kept resigning. Eventually they had to get a bunch of prosecutors in a room and told them that they had an hour for one of them to sign the filing, or they were all fired.
See:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/three-prosecutors-corruption-case-against-nyc-mayor-eric-adams-resign-according-2025-04-22/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/14/justice-prosecutors-resignation-trump-eric-adams-corruption/
The case was eventually dismissed *with* prejudice by the judge, who purposely did so to avoid the obvious quid-pro-quo / extortion:
"In light of DOJ's rationales, dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor's freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents," the court wrote.
"Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," the court added.
https://www.fd.org/news/federal-court-drops-nyc-mayor-eric-adams-corruption-case-prejudice
Based on all my knowledge, this is nowhere near as bad as Biden's administration.
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2014/08/11/quote-files-john-adams-on-innocence-guilt-and-punishment/
Yep, I agree with all of that.
I'm not from the states. I have no horse in this race. I don't particularly care, as much as is possible with a bona fide clown in the white house.
With that out of the way, everything else I heard about the Hannah Dugan thing would not be fairly characterized as "for telling an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door" - except in a nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of way.
Perhaps that's because I've only heard from right-wing commentators how presented a biased case, I have not followed it intentionally. But it seems fair to assume that it's at least objectively controversial and the way you presented it seems to downplay that. A lot.
Which leads me to the actual question: Am I wrong on the Hannah Dugan thing? Because if not I'm thinking perhaps I should assume the rest is equally downplayed.
I wear my biases on my sleeve -- I think it's insane that she was arrested by the FBI, and 'objectively controversial' is imo only true in the sense that a solid segment of the population is eager to 'own the libs' any way possible.
Besides being a violation of norms, there is longstanding *legal* precedent that states that judges are more or less sovereign in their courtrooms (which is the argument that Dugan's legal team is currently making). On top of that, the ICE officials did not have a warrant; the door that the immigrant left from went out to the same hallway where ICE was already waiting; and there were ICE agents in the elevator on the way down to the street, with the defendant.
Anything is 'objectively controversial' if there is someone who raises controversy. The earth being round is objectively controversial. That's roughly the same bucket that I would put Dugan's prosecution in.
You'd have a reasonable-if-motivated position there, if she hadn't lied to the ICE officers. She directed the guy one way, then told them that he went another. In terms of rhetorical strategy, I'd say this is not a hill you should be even acknowledging the existence of.
Link? I have never heard this before
That might be based on Kash Patel's tweet saying she "intentionally misdirected" ICE agents. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fbi-arrests-judge-accused-of-helping-someone-evade-immigration-agents-agency-director-patel-says
That is my remembered understanding. Maybe it was just "she said she didn't know where he was"? Not sure, doesn't really matter. The question a fair-minded observer will ask is whether she used deceit to obstruct an arrest; these details are splitting hairs.
Also I'm realizing I was giving way too much ground for no reason: it doesn't matter if she was shading into committing an outright crime or not. She is a judge. Their whole thing is supposed to be faith that *perfectly observing* detailed, rigid procedures will lead to justice. If there are LEOs trying to arrest someone, then unless she has a good reason to believe they're breaking the law, a judge should do everything she can to help them. If it's a mistake, the justice system will resolve it - slowly, calmly, with judges exercising discretion via rulings, rather than disrupting foot chases. That's supposed to be the bedrock psychology of judges. If they start straying from that, then the justice system goes from something valuable to a pointless (and gameable) pile of complexity.
Also, it obviously does matter. Your original statement is that this was reasonable if she hadn't lied! Moreover, as Scott recently said, if it's worth your time to lie about it, it's worth my time to call bullshit
> If there are LEOs trying to arrest someone, then unless she has a good reason to believe they're breaking the law, a judge should do everything she can to help them.
Sorry, no, this is the opposite of correct. Besides all of the very obvious context where ICE has been behaving more akin to gestapo than a good faith LEO, "innocent until proven guilty" is a foundational bedrock of our judicial system, and I think you have to stretch *a lot* for "innocent until proven guilty" to mean "you have to assist the cops." In fact, one of the stronger arguments in defense of Dugan is that ICE did not have a warrant and so had no grounds upon which to demand anything at all
> Also I'm realizing I was giving way too much ground for no reason
Let's not get debate brained. If you want to talk about 'ground', we should take a step back from Dugan and talk about *the entire list in aggregate*. This level of prosecution targeted only against the opposition party has never happened in this country, and is not supposed to happen in this country. Why the fuck are we not prosecuting the crypto scamming bribe taking corrupt mother fuck shitting in the white house right now? Why the fuck are we not prosecuting the drunk with a texting problem in the pentagon? You want to talk about 'ground', you need to defend this entire administration before you can get to the misdeeds of a single judge in milwaukee telling a witness which door to go out of
I read something that made it sound like she postponed the scheduled hearing in order to get the guy out of the court while the agents were busy with the Chief Justice. Was there any truth to that? That's the breakpoint for me.
I do not know. This was not present in the filed FBI complaint (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/FBI_charging_document_against_Milwaukee_Judge_Hannah_Dugan.pdf)
There is a *very* brief line that could be framed the way you are describing:
"The courtroom deputy also made a comment about Judge DUGAN 'pushing' Flores-Ruiz's case through, which the arrest team interpreted to mean that Judge DUGAN was attempting to expedite Flores-Ruiz’s hearing"
but much more time is spent on the door (nearly 2 pages, in fact):
"Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge DUGAN then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel ou ofthe courtroom through the jury door which lads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse. These events were also unusual or wo reasons. First the courtroom deputy hd previously heard Judge DUGAN direct people not 0st nthe ju y box because it was exclusively forthe jury's use. Second, according to he courtroom deputy, only deputies, juries court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back | Jury door."
(apologies for formatting, just copy pasting)
I have no issue with saying "no, my side is right on this and I'm not gonna pretend otherwise". I can respect that.
That said it does mean I won't change my mind much based on these examples, as I have to assume I've read a most one-sided summary. Sometimes one-sided summaries are in fact correct, perhaps yours are, but I never can tell if that's the case without prior knowledge or before hearing both sides.
One real difficulty for me with all these stories is that I'm not that confident I can find anyone who will report them straight. Everyone hears one side's version of the story, often with unsupported allegations or just straightforward lies. But it's hard to untangle the full story because it's hard to know what actually happened.
Looking at primary sources helps. You can read the FBI charging document, for example -- it's not very long (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/FBI_charging_document_against_Milwaukee_Judge_Hannah_Dugan.pdf). You can also read Dugan's legal team's initial motion to dismiss (https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/milwaukee-judge-dugan-dismiss-motion.pdf)
For the most part, I don't think the factual information is that difficult to ascertain. The timelines and behaviors are *mostly* agreed upon.
Also, just to add, even if you think some case can be made for every single one of these examples, surely the volume is itself suspect? Trump, a man known for being petty, cruel, and corrupt, just so happened to ferret out all of these cases of legitimate prosecutions of the opposition party?
Your standard seems to be 'if I can dismiss one of these as biased I can dismiss all of them', which...idk, maybe fair. But then what would you say about Trump wanting to arrest Newsom? Why does the standard not go the other way (i.e. this is an example where Trump is obviously behaving in a retaliatory way, and therefore the rest of these likely have some merit for retaliation)?
> surely the volume is itself suspect
This reasoning reminds me strongly of people "finding" (read as: "making up") dozens of rape allegations and declaring that even if all of them are bogus, just the fact that they exist should be taken as evidence of the guy being a rapist. I find this unsound.
This strategy probably exploits the same vulnerability as the famous one where you repeat a lie often enough that people start to believe it. (I'm NOT accusing you of deliberately lying here.)
Good point!
Frankly, I don't know what the baseline is here. What is typical of administrations and their opponents? Yeah, Trump is often mean spirited - and was the Biden administration's FEMA skipping providing assistance to households with Trump signs in Florida after hurricane Milton last year any less so? Or the lawfare against Trump and his allies?
"This reasoning reminds me strongly of people "finding" (read as: "making up") dozens of rape allegations and declaring that even if all of them are bogus, just the fact that they exist should be taken as evidence of the guy being a rapist."
Did you make up this strategy on the spot? I've certainly never heard of any such thing, and find this framing to be highly suspect.
I've seen it argued (correctly) that if dozens of rape allegations come to light and *one or two* are demonstrated to be bogus, the existence of the remainder should still be considered worth taking into account. Contrary to what some people seem to think, you cannot merely shake a tree and have piles of false rape accusations against a particular individual fall out. From a Bayesian perspective, the most likely state of the world to produce dozens of rape different rape accusations against a single individual is that person being a serial rapist.
Not sure what would change your mind.
The only factual thing that occurred is "dugan told an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a non-standard door." Arguably, 'non-standard' is also subjective, and it really should be 'dugan told an illegal immigrant defendant to leave by a specific door"
Everything else about that case is subjective.
The *claim* is that this action is 'obstruction' and 'concealing a defendant'. But people claim all sorts of bullshit all the time, such as 'vaccines cause autism' or 'the earth is flat'. I do not think that her behavior could be construed as obstruction or concealing a defendant along any axis that isn't "own the libs", and so I call it out as such, and I call out why that's the case.
If you have some standard you're looking for, feel free to share.
Realistically, no one post is going to change my mind all in one fell swoop.
To point to an extreme, everyone can say "What I believe is right and as for the arguments the other side makes, well they're all completely stupid and / or evil". And they can say that if they haven't heard or understood a single argument against their own position. Also I find upon closer inspection I rarely agree that arguments for the other side completely stupid and / or evil. But of course plenty of people who say that are still right in the end, it's just that I can't really tell from the argument.
The other extreme is somebody who can make the arguments for both sides convincingly, yet still takes a side. To me this is inherently more persuasive, because it demonstrates that, at the very least, that they know the arguments against their own position and they've understood them well enough to repeat them in their own words without making them sound like a caricature.
So from my point of view, when you said "Yea I'm only making the arguments for one side, the other side's arguments are idiotic" that inherently makes it less convincing. It doesn't make you wrong. And perhaps you know all of the arguments and have good reason to think they're idiotic. But I can't just assume that.
Fair enough. My perspective is that arguing that this is obstruction is equivalent to arguing that the earth is flat. People have "evidence" like "look at the ground, it's flat!" but also it's just not something that I could ever defend without pointing out that the position is really dumb 😂 I think, as in the flat earth case, all the relevant factual evidence is public and more or less discoverable. I'm happy to provide clarity on issues of fact; anything beyond that is going to be based on priors. My prior is that this administration is simply not acting in good faith, I have a mountain of evidence to back that up, and as a result this arrest is bullshit.
>Arguably, 'non-standard' is also subjective
No, it isn't subjective. She told him to leave by the jury room door, rather than using the public exit from the courtroom. Given that, and her anger at the ICE agents coming to her courtroom with an administrative warrant, it seems pretty clear that she is at least guilty of attempted obstruction.
As for concealing a suspect, the federal statute, 18 USC 1701, seems fairly broad: "but any physical act of providing assistance ... to aid the prisoner in avoiding detection and apprehension will make out a violation of section 1071". United States v. Green, 180 F.3d 216, 220 (5th Cir.1999) (quoting United States v. Stacey, 896 F.2d 75, 77 (5th Cir.1990)).
I'm pretty sure I've had this discussion with you before, and I don't really want to get into it again. Id rather a discussion about the list in aggregate than a nitpick on a single element of it
"the democrats laundered money through Ukraine" is a common accusation with no evidence to back it up. And I'm no fan of the democrats.
Also, you posted the same thing like fifteen times in the same thread within a ten minute time span. You don't have to do that. It's annoying and spammy. If you want to bring up Dugan, or McIver, or Padilla, you should start on the other sub threads (which you clearly know exist) instead of spewing the same takes everywhere
Your willingness to take the absolute worst possible interpretations of what these people were doing says far more about you than about these people. The simple fact is that the US government has never engaged in this level of politically motivated prosecutions of elected officials, especially when the highest levels of this government in particular is corrupt beyond any reasonable means.
> I watched Padilla on tape. I read exerpts from what ICE had to say about Dugan
IDK what to tell you. If we're really operating from the same factual information (which I'm somewhat skeptical of) and you see Padilla as a 'potential assassin' instead of a senator who is announcing himself to ask questions, there's no way for us to reach consensus. We have fundamentally different framings of the world. I think you're wrong, and you're defending the actions of an authoritarian and corrupt government bent on destroying this country.
AI fizzles! Our civilization is overtaken by Moloch and collapses... What of it survives to shape the next civilization to arise?
Thinking on the Romans, it seems the main thing that got passed on was Christianity (is it?), and I suppose the language (it evolved into several), but surely I must be forgetting or being ignorant of other things. What will be our Christianity?
The QWERTY keyboard layout.
Christianity, again.
Resource depletion. If our current technological and industrial base collapses, it will be hard to restart due to depletion of easily accessible reserves of oil and coal. For better and worse, our economy is a flying airplane, and if it goes down violently, it will stay down.
English, obviously.
And Protestant Christianity.
Mainline Protestants are not breeding, but Evangelicals have maintained a steady percent of the population and their TFR is basically the same as it was 40 years ago.
When an LLM assistant gives false information, why is it called a hallucination?
A hallucination is a false perception. The LLM isn't perceiving anything. When I hear that an LLM is hallucinating, I reflexively imagine a scenario where it's supposed to be looking up facts in a database, but it's making things up instead. "Confabulate" might be a better word, if this were actually the case. But the LLM doesn't look anything up in a database. It's not making things up, either. It's generating a string of plausible text, based on its training. Sometimes that text happens to contain true information, and sometimes it contains false information.
I'm not an expert in this. Am I missing something? If not, the term hallucination feels like a very misleading term to use here, a term that will lead many people to a false understanding of what LLMs are and what they're doing.
Yes, the psychologists are on to this and propose a better fitting term:
https://www.psypost.org/scholars-ai-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/
This is great, thanks!
If the promoters of AI called it "lying" then people might not buy their product. Lies are deliberate deceit. A hallucination? Well the poor machine can't be blamed for being mistaken, can it? Trust us and hand over your money.
(This gripe brought to you courtesy of Microsoft "no you can't turn off Copilot from what used to be Office, even if you hate it, it interferes with your work, and you don't want to write 'funny lines for emails about being out of the office'".)
Don't overinterpret technical terms. They are not necessarily meant to perfectly transfer every facet of the existing meaning of that word. They are, more to the point, not the definition of themselves. Context matters.
Right now, we're in a phase where we're naming new things, and I think what we name them is up for debate, and the names matter.
Yes, but I don't know if "hallucinations w.r.t. LLMs" is still up for debate. It has already percolated to the general public. Trying to change it now is an effort with dubious chance of success.
LLMs function in a way analogous to how dreaming probably works, producing synthetic sensory input based on extrapolating patterns (real or spurious) in data from real sensory input. For a dreaming human, the pattern extrapolation comes from our brains training itself on our waking experiences. For an LLM, the pattern extrapolation comes from the text corpus and other training data.
Some hallucinations probably come from dream-like stuff intruding on our waking consciousness. Especially hypnagogic hallucinations, those that occur when you're falling asleep or just waking up.
In that case, all LLM output should be considered a hallucination, regardless of whether it contains accurate information.
Maybe a good way to sum up this technology is that we've taught computers to dream.
Like so many other things, we use the word because some idiot came up with it and it stuck.
If being misleading is the concern, then I think that ship has already sailed. People already speak of LLMs as perceiving or understanding things or being intelligent when they're just programs running on top of very large and complex data structures.
If we run with that anyway, then the term "hallucination" is probably intended to convey the manner in which the mistaken information is presented.
If a real person lies to you, it's supposed to be hard for you to tell, unless they're bad at it. If they're bad at it, it often sounds like they don't believe what they just told you. If they're good at it, but you find out later, it's typically the same thing - they didn't believe what they told you.
But lying is just one case of a person telling you falsehoods; people often tell falsehoods that they themselves believe. If they do, then they aren't lying; they're just mistaken. (They also often tell falsehoods that both of you understand as false when said; e.g. fairy tales, parables, jokes.) The mistaken thing they say is a falsehood, but it's important to distinguish it from a lie, and the term "hallucination" suffices.
LLMs that produce false statements that sound like someone telling them in order to deceive would probably be described as lying. But LLMs typically aren't used this way; they're asked questions with the apparent intent to get informative, correct replies, and the LLMs respond consistently with that expectation. So they sound like a person who believes what they're saying, even if what they're saying is false. What they say is like a real person's hallucination.
If you want a term that means "falsehood said mistakenly by a source that has no agency of its own", you might have to invent one, since we've only had such non-agentive sources for a few years now, and then you'd have to popularize it. Or you could just say "hallucination" and hope it's clear from context that the source is an LLM.
since you're most likely just a program as well, I should speak of you as probably not having intelligence. If I'm wrong, please explain why?
(LLMs are a very poor and shabby AI. Self-modifying code works much better).
Perhaps "delusion" would be a better term than "hallucination"? It seems more akin to verbal falsehoods than perceptual ones, perhaps? "Confabulations" seems to imply more intent than seems likely, at least in the cases I see.
I'm afraid I don't see a great enough distinction between "delusion" and "hallucination". Both convey the notion that the speaker genuinely believes what it's saying, so it still runs into the problem of ascribing consciousness to an LLM.
To me, the problem is still essentially that we have no accessible vocabulary for describing apparently sentient properties borne by non-sentient entities, because we've only now come across such things. There are no words for "exhibits sadness / joy / fear / derision / belief / deceit / etc. despite not bearing the qualia thereof". Any word that conveys the mental state necessarily assumes the mental state, rather than conveying the appearance.
Many Thanks! Well, I have no access to an LLM's subjective experience or lack thereof, just as I have no access to my fellow human's subjective experiences or lack thereof. I make the assumption that, since other humans have approximately the same neural anatomy that I have, that they probably have more-or-less the same subjective experience - but this is all indirect. And I expect that if AI systems are extended to having approximately the same (artificial) neural topology as a human, that they will likely have the same subjective experience.
Do they have subjective experience _now_? How could anyone know?
It would be somewhat useful to have a vocabulary which is agnostic about whether an entity has subjective experiences or not.
I think the larger question is how to interact with entities where we cannot tell if they are sentient or not (which include humans with some sorts of central nervous system damage!). I think the more useful dividing line is whether is it more feasible to influence their behavior via reward or punishment or whether it instead is more feasible to try something more like "hardware" modification (anti-psychotic drugs in humans, perhaps modifications to hyperparameters during the training sequence in LLMs).
Your questions about qualia are interesting to me, although I have to acknowledge that there are people who've thought about it longer than I have and likely raised points about them that I haven't had time to go and find. (E.g., I haven't even read what SEP has to say about qualia.)
Speaking only for myself: people feeling qualia is indeed assumed. In fact, the only reason I think of qualia at all is that I understand it to be personal experience, I recognize it's a thing in me, and I assume it's a thing in anyone else like me - which is to say, anything that resembles a human being. I can assume that because I feel certain we haven't yet created one artificially that can pass for one. The best we've done can write text through a terminal; it can't speak convincingly, nor show a face, or body, including reactions, in real time, and in person (if you'll pardon the expression).
For me, the edge cases are other apparently bright species (chimps, dolphins, corvids, octopi, et al.), and artifacts. I can't rule out encountering an artifact some day that I'll look at and conclude "yep, it experiences things" as opposed to "it operates as if it does", but I won't think that as long as I grasp their construction process as well as I do LLMs.
In cases where I don't know, it's going to fall back on the usual heuristics: what do I gain or lose if I assume something is sentient / not?
I owe you a response. 'scuse the delay. I did try digging through https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ and the number of different schools of thought, and things that look like English words but seem to be terms-of-art in academic philosophy is very indigestible!
EDIT:
Many Thanks! Again, 'scuse the delay. This is going to be hard to make coherent, partially because there are many schools of philosophy, with many different combinations of how they view sentience, consciousness, and qualia individually, and how they view the connections between them, and partially because LLMs (or, I guess, AI systems containing LLMs) have been extended significantly over the course of even the last year, so there are several cases to consider there as well.
First, let me just say that e.g.
while (true)
{
printf("I'm sentient!\n");
}
while it prints a claim of sentience, obviously isn't, having vastly too little state information, amongst other objections.
I agree that current LLMs
>can't speak convincingly, nor show a face, or body, including reactions, in real time, and in person (if you'll pardon the expression).
Let me just consider the views that having qualia implies sentience, that there "is something there" to "feel something" - not everyone seems to accept this implication / interpretation!
I, personally, view qualia as some (ill-defined, at the present state of neuroscience) set of neural firings that can be reported by the person experiencing them ("I see a patch of blue." etc.). I'm taking that to imply that these firings feed into our language centers (and maybe short term memory, and maybe executive function). I take "accessible to introspection" as roughly meaning, can be reported verbally by a person experiencing them. I don't concur with the schools who hold that qualia are non-physical.
I more-or-less agree that there can be qualia due more than just low level sense perceptions. I think that thoughts are, at least to some degree, "perceptible". I'm somewhat peeved that I don't see anything in the SEP article about the edge detectors in our visual cortex. My knee-jerk reaction is that this level of processing is sufficiently early that, as far as the whole _rest_ of the brain is concerned (including connections to language) the output of the edge detectors should count as nearly as unmediated a sensation as the patches of light seen by our rods and cones. In general, I think of possibly many levels of partially processed sensations and internal neural events as counting as having/causing qualia. This agrees with some schools and disagrees with others.
Now, finally, back to some AIs:
For the non-multi-modal, (and memoryless, except in the context, sort of like short tem memory) LLMs of a year ago, I think of them as having something sort-of-like our sensations while reading (but not seeing) and something sort-of-like the "sensation" of thought. These do go through simulated neural nets, and they do generate "verbal reports" from the LLMs, so, to that extent, I think of these LLMs as being sentient.
More recently, multi-modal AI systems (those with image and/or sound interpretation) seem to me to have a close equivalent of "sense perceptions", so qualia in that sense as well. And they can make verbal reports of such things. "I see a cat towards my left side/the image's left side" "I see a patch of blue towards the top of my field of view/the image"
So, in those senses, I consider these systems to be (weakly?) sentient. They lack many sensations we have ("hunger, and thirst, and venery"), and if you think this disqualifies them, ok. ( BTW, image _generation_ can sort-of allow "show a face", at least on a screen, even now. )
If we built a full neuron-by-neuron duplicate of a human nervous system and linked them to a sufficient subset of the sensations in a human body, I can't see how (with my views of qualia and sentience) they could _not_ be sentient. I view the current situation as partway there.
Many Thanks!
>I doubt most people think plants are sentient.
Agreed, and I also agree that plants are nonsentient by any reasonable measure.
>You can influence a plant via reward or punishment.
Huh?? For central examples of what is meant by "reward" and/or "punishment", this sounds implausible. I suspect that you have some rather non-central examples in mind - if so, can we table this? I'd rather not get into an extended side discussion of what should be included under those terms.
You're probably right that the ship has already sailed, but-
1. If I say, mistakenly, that the capital of France is Stockholm, no one would assume that I was hallucinating; they would just say I was wrong about the capital of France. This is part of why I find the term so awkward–even if we agree to talk about LLMs like they're people, we're using the term very differently with them than we do with real people.
2. I think it's crucial to keep in mind the fact that (if i understand this correctly) LLMs aren't "trying" to provide accurate information, even in the sense that a normal computer program "tries" to do what the programmer meant it to do; rather, LLMs have been trained to say things that make it sound like they're trying to provide accurate information. Another reason why I'm uncomfortable with the term hallucination is that it obscures this fact.
I may have misunderstood the nature of your concern.
1. It now sounds like you don't object to the assumption of LLM consciousness as much as you object to the type of experience the LLM appears to express. For example, if we assume an LLM is responding like a real person, you're claiming that that person who genuinely believes Stockholm is the capital of France isn't necessarily hallucinating about it; they're not under the influence of some chemical; they're just mistaken, and that's the most we ought to infer.
In that case, the trouble is prosaic; there's simply no handy word for the act of telling a mistake. There's no (intransitive) verb "to mistake"; the LLM isn't "mistaking". "Lying" doesn't capture it, since the sim-person isn't trying to deceive. (Ironically, I checked this by asking ChatGPT.) The closest is "confabulate", which is admittedly closer IMO than "hallucinate", and if you want to try to start that trend, I don't see any harm in it.
2. You're getting into a *very* fine distinction here, which means it's likely to escape notice. To try to restate it (and recognizing that "trying" is shorthand for ", as instructed by the programmer, trying"):
"the LLM is trying to provide accurate information"
vs.
"the LLM is trying to sound like someone trying to provide accurate information"
Experience (as a programmer who worked for decades on a formal knowledge representation project) tells me you're unlikely to make this clear to people uninterested in the distinction, unless you first spend a lot of time getting them interested, and if you do, you'll probably get farther faster if you can construct a language more formal than some written human one like English. And even then, I'm honestly not sure if it's worth the squeeze, although if you want to find out, you might look into Common Logic Interchange Format (and be prepared to create a lot of new predicates for this domain).
1. I do object to the assumption of LLM consciousness, but I accept that we're going to anthropomorphize them, and I think we should choose figurative language to use when we do so that guides us toward a better sense of what the LLM is actually doing, rather than a worse one.
2. "the LLM is trying to provide accurate information" vs. "the LLM is trying to sound like someone trying to provide accurate information"
–maybe it's a mistake to phrase it this way; to make the distinction more clear, maybe better to say something like, "The LLM isn't trying to provide accurate information. It's not actually trying to do anything in particular. It's just sort of dreaming or bullshitting all the time, and people have trained its output in a way that's meant to make it useful and seem like it's coming from a conscious person..."
I don't know. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all this. I think I'm alarmed by how easily these things cast a kind of spell on people, myself included, that makes it so easy to believe you're talking to someone. The perception of weirdness and anomalies is evidence of this spell; they don't seem very weird or anomalous when you consider what the models are actually doing. But if LLMs are here to stay and someone interacts with them every day through their whole life, and, at an intuitive level, perceives them as human minds, what does that do to their internal model of what a mind is? How does that reshape their own mind? It's worrying. This is a ramble, and I'm no longer responding to your points directly. But hopefully conversations like the one we're having now will contribute something to the collective process of figuring all this out.
Confabulate isn't used because that's a rather uncommon word that most people wouldn't necessarily know what you meant.
Hallucination is used because LLMs are already being personified, both by the people promoting them, and by their detractors, and it matches the experience that people have been shaped to have when interacting with them. It's inaccurate to the base reality of what's happening, but our languages didn't evolve to accurately describe almost anything about LLMs, so a description that conveys close to the concept you're describing ("hallucination = look up information and return something that isn't there" vs "a prediction of text that your brain pattern matches to a meaningful and valid statement but that doesn't map to reality") is a convenient shorthand, and tends to be simply how language itself evolves (ie "AI hallucination" now does, in fact, mean that block of text I previously used)
Just got back from one of my favorite activities, IE driving off into the country and wandering off into forestry service land and disappearing for a week to a couple weeks to eaten by a bear and vanished forever, had a great time as always.
Highly recommend the Sawtooth range area, the most mountany mountains to ever mountain.
This time, I got to talk to some salt of the earth country folk about politics which is always fun!
After the clown brigade begane the dumbest, most knocking out the struts under the scaffold I'm currently standing on "efficiency" operation I have ever seen, I had the slightly cruel thought of "Well, this guy is gonna hurt all of us but at least the countryfried types who elected him will be hurt the most" and oh boy was I right.
The town I went to before wandering into the mountains (Idaho this time) had just had been without drinking water for a week because everyone in the forestry service that managed their clean water was fired;
a decent chunk of the farmers had experienced a total crop failure due to lack of water because the people who managed usage permits had been fired and not replaced (and also local government incompetence to be fair, also to be fair they elected a guy more worried about Q-anon than the aquifer in a farming community where it rains 5 times a year so punt I guess);
a decent chunk of the rest of the farms had experienced partial crop failure because the seasonal migrant labor they relied on to do the actual farming stayed home this year;
The local medical facility they all use will shut down if the currently proposed funding bill takes effect unmodified, the nearest place they can go for family medicine now is more than an hours drive.
They are actually literally losing the farm as it were unless their federal rep can get them some sweet government pork. Some of these people will actually die sooner than they would have because of things that have already happened and can't be reversed. The leopard had fully eaten their face on this one; shoulda been smart and moved to the suburb and touched a computer for a living.
"You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole"
"Waltersobchakheit" can't enter the Urban Dictionary fast enough.
I thought this comment was going to go a very different way.
I'd have thought that a quiet weekend alone in the wilderness might cure someone of dumb political games and mind poison, but it seems like it just filled you with hunger for it.
When you blow into town, Trump flags flying above the stars and bars (in Idaho mind you) flying above old glory, no water available so I'm drinking beer, listening to people talk about how everything is worse today than it was yesterday and that it used to be better 8 months ago but utterly unwilling to say anything even slightly bad about Dear Leader, there is nothing to be done.
I can't close my eyes and ears to reality; and I can't lie about my feelings either. Given that I am suffering 0.5% more than I have to (I got money so it's K but the idea that these fat pasty pale fucks are going to sell public land so it can get clear cut and stripmallified boils my blood), I'm glad the people that chose this path are suffering more.
<I had the slightly cruel thought of "Well, this guy is gonna hurt all of us but at least the countryfried types who elected him will be hurt the most" and oh boy was I right. . . . shoulda been smart and moved to the suburb and touched a computer for a living.
That thought isn't slightly cruel, it is extremely cruel. Nobody is too dumb to understand the essentials of what is going on. The problem is not that these people were too stupid to grasp how Trump's election was going to play out, it's that they have been in a bubble full of misinformation. Here you are all pleased with yourself for your brave earthy backpacking vacation, and you meet people who are in way more danger than you were in in the woods with your Patagonia gear, and you're feeling superior. Your reaction is no less heartless than Trump's. You are as much a part of the problem as the farmers with leopard-eaten faces -- you're just in the opposite bubble. Fuck you, buddy.
Man, I don't wear patagonia for one, take that shit back.
For two, how is it cruel to take them at their word? They said they wanted this; when their town dries up and blows away and they end up on the street or in the poor house, I will salute their principled stance to do bad things instead of good things. I know I don't have the virtue necessary to slam my face into a rock over and over because woke blue haired CRT college girl trans immigrant DEI fentanyl.
I’m sorry I was so harsh and rude You probably would not hate my politics. They certainly are not woke. But I can see why you might hate me. Here’s my point, put in a way that’s not personal or insulting: Nobody gets to choose who else is in the lifeboat. All anyone can do is try to develop into someone who’s good to have in one.
RE you personally and the people that are going to die in the back of an uber to a hospital they voted to move 70 miles away: I don't hate them and I don't hate you, regardless of your politics. I don't think they deserve the bad things that are going to happen to them; I'm just glad that the consequences of their choices might be direct and personal enough this time to actually teach them something. If I could snap my fingers and make the anti-woke project anything other than doomed to failure, I would grit my teeth and do it. We don't live in that world, unfortunately.
Re. the Lifeboat analogy:
That's not true, is the thing. I used to think that way, but the anti-woke coalition showed me that I was wrong. The entire anti woke projekt is noticing that there were Undesirables in the lifeboat getting a bit too uppity and then deciding that the thing to do is either forcing them to recant their sinful ways; or simply throwing them into the sea <-(We are here).
The woke project likewise is to convince all those nasty nasty people to become nice little libs with the cringe sign in their yard trough argumentation and shame; but these nice little libs never made the connection that your average conservative made years ago: that you can deport people you don't like into a torture camp with one way doors. That the power of the state is available not just to provide economic nudges, but also to beat people with batons until they shut the fuck up.
To stake down my position on the lifeboat situation: I think that the libs and the twitter leftists have spent 20 years on shame and argumentation; and have failed to realise that the anti-woke types were getting their batons ready.
When the shoe is on the other foot (and given how stupid the current crop of elites is it will be; unless they manage to actually prevent a legitimate transfer), I don't want the libs to put away the batons for another 8 years so that the conservatives can get themselves ready to take another shot at them. The batons either need to be destroyed or used; we can't have another cycle of libs going high while cons smash their kneecaps.
Yeah I get what you're saying about the political stuff, but not how it adds up to you not being in a lifeboat with people not of your choosing. For a while you were on a boat with a lot of people with leftie attitudes & also some wokesters, and they clubbed together and had more power than others on the boar, and now you're on a lifeboat with some antiwoke project people and some wokesters and the first group is kneecapping the wokesters and threatening to throw some overboard. But you're still on a lifeboat. Where it ends up -- lush island, antarctica, bottom of the sea -- depends on what the group does. Unless you throw everybody but you overboard.
Reminds me of all the people in the Carol Hui case who were like "we thought Trump was just going to deport criminals, we didn't think he was going to deport the good people"
I understand it’s tempting to crow about it and hate on “all the people” who are now shocked and distressed at what their candidate is doing. But keep in mind we don’t know all the people who voted for Trump,or even on millionth of them, and neither of us know what each of them, or even subgroups of them, are thinking now. I think it’s likely that a good portion of Trump voters vote on vibes and don’t follow the news and don’t even know about the Hui case; or heard an account of what happened that was not shocking and distressing; or heard about it and were distressed but not shocked because they voted for him because they judged him awful but marginally less awful than Harris.
The millions and millions of hateful dumb militantly pro-Trump trailer park dwellers who are now shocked and amazed and scared and regretful may mostly be creatures of our angry imaginations.
My dude, I come from a place like this, I know how easy it is to get out of such an information bubble. it isn't hard, it takes a bare minimum of intellectual curiosity. People get out of the bubble all the time! You have to make an effort to stay in the Bubble! You have to go to specific churches, talk to specific people, go on specific websites, watch a specific television channels, read specific books and newspapers to be as bubbles as these people.
At what point is there such a thing as personal responsibility?
If you are stupid enough to touch the hot stove year after year after year, at some point I no longer have to feel sorry for you or mince words about it.
Would it be more respectful if we carefully wrap them in bubble wrap like an infant unable to make up their own mind because they don't have one yet?
I don't think it's true to that you have to make an effort to stay in the bubble. Most people, especially once they settle into lives with jobs and kids, do not have a great deal of variety in their lives. They have habits, obligations, commitments and reliable pleasures that keep them going to the same restaurants, churches, etc. and hanging out with the same friends and family members, watching the same TV shows. You think they have to make an effort to stay in that "bubble?" No they don't -- use our common sense. Why would that be difficult?
On the other hand it would be easy for them to change up most of their habits now and then, except for a maybe a couple things like not going to their parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. But what is the force that would make them want to do that?
You think they should look around at the world and say to themselves, oh, things are in a terrible mess, I need to get some better information sources and take some kind of action. But here's the thing: They already have, or are likely to be guided to, a source of info about that: Fox news. Or Facebook There they will hear frompeople making the case that things are, as they feel them to be, very very bad, and telling lies about the state of the world, and making a case that Trump at al is what will salvage what's good about the US.
Yeah, you can make a case that they should try some other news sources or read a book or whatever, after all how hard are any of those things? But that's like making the case that anybody can overcome procrastination by just reminding themselves that they should just go ahead and do the thing. After all, it is not that difficult to write a paper or do your taxes or go for a run. Therefore anyone who procrastinates doing one of those things is obviously weak and dumb. It sounds true, but as soon as you bring to mind your own episodes of procrastination it's obvious that there's something wrong with that argument. Same goes for your argument that if all those people who voted for Trump weren't dumb as fuck they wouldn't have.
A lot of what keeps people stuck in MAGA mind is the scorn and hatred of people like you. They look dumb and hate-filled and ugly to you, like they deserve to suffer. You look equally bad to them -- like a self-satisifed little asshole stuffed full of self-important rage. Actually you sort of look like that to me too.
So if I say nothing, they stay in the bubble because they aren't challenged.
If I do that soft boy lib shit, they stay in the bubble and also call me a fagot. (personal anecdote, but it happened at least once in this case to me).
If I'm mean to them, they stay in the bubble out of spite.
It seems like you think these people are p zombie automatons or something.
Again: I'm from such a place. I know these people. If you pretend for a second that their ideas are legitimate and they should be respected for their free thinking ways and hug boxed about being suffering maximizers, they double down. they're not going to clap for your enlightened liberal sensibilities, they're going to think that you are lame and gay and not based at all.
you weren't helping anything, including them, by pretending that the things they do aren't idiot suffering maximization.
You recoil from soft lib boy shit (whatever that is -- but presumably it's something different from thinking Trump voters are incurably stupid and lazy creeps who deserve whatever bad happens to them) -- you recoil from doing "soft lib boy shit" because somebody called you a faggot once? Thin-skinned, aren't you! Do you expect a shit ton of coddling, sympathy and validation because you got hit with "faggot"? Maybe some "soft lib boy shit" about how it's easy to understand how painful it is to be called a faggot when you are straight and come from a background where being gay is despised?
Hey, did you know that occasionally even an actual gay guy has managed to win over people like the ones you're talking about? Truman Capote did it, for instance, when he was researching In Cold Blood in the place where the stuff in the book happened. He was not trying to change people's political attitudes, just get them to confide in him and assist in his research, but he was a rich, femmy, expensively clothed gay man and did not pretend to be anything other than that. He just had so much smarts, charm and force of character that people accepted him as who he was. Maybe take a leaf out of his book.
I’m from a place that’s not all that far from MAGA myself. I grew up in small southern towns, going to public schools. We lived near a trailer park, though not a ratty one, and about half the kids I played with lived there. My parents were Christians, patriots, and school segregationalists. They were, though, kind and reasonable people, and while they thought people with views different from theirs, especially about integration, were wrong, they were not full of rage and hate. They’d just sigh and shake their heads and wonder aloud how people could fail to grasp that the races were just different. The other grown-ups I knew in that demographic varied, like any other group, in how kind,and sensible they were. On average I don’t think they were less kind and sensible than the parents of my friends at the Ivy I attended. The axis running from kind and sensible to hate-powered prejudice (on which you are a pretty high scorer) is orthogonal to the smarts and education one, in my experience.
"A lot of what keeps people stuck in MAGA mind is the scorn and hatred of people like you."
Another thing worth noticing is the self-reinforcing mechanism at work. If one group of people feels inclined to adhere to MAGA philosophy due to tribal solidarity against people who scorn and hate them, then another group feels just as inclined to adhere to "scorn and hate MAGA" due to the same type of tribal solidarity, in the other direction. That appears to be just what we see here.
One of the things I like about a lot of people in the rat crowd is a tendency to have enough spare mental cycles to notice this mechanism and start probing it, checking it (is this really what we're seeing?), etc. So we produce responses to try to test it, often known as Ideological Turing Tests.
I am here so I obviously respect the sentiment at the very least, but I notice that many rat types Don't ever actually challenge their own tribal beliefs by interacting with anyone that isn't either already on their side, or at least another rat adjacent respectability respector.
I also notice a bit of "so open-minded your brain fell out " syndrome, a bit of patrician Noble Savage/enlighten the natives sentiment.
People so mistake theory pilled that fail to notice:
when lawmakers who were a little too lib get murdered in the street, the centrist right wing response is to shrug and say well you know because of woke, who's to say if it's good or bad.
I think a lot of rat and gray tribe types were so excited about their rebellious contrary opinion about woke and iq and welfare and such, they failed to notice that the tribe that they were aligning themselves with against woke actually really does believe the things they say, and would put all those degenerates in a camp if they could get away with it.
So what? One could say the same of the woke and prog types, of their failure to notice when someone drank so much of their own brand of koolaid that they decided to take literal shots and this or that perceived enemy.
Another good thing about the rat types is that some of them notice all this flying around in the clouds and try to land, and even express some humility about how hard it can be to know what's really going on. Which in turn means they know to be wary of people claim they do, especially when their conclusion is to blame this or that outgroup.
I'm reminded of some of my own relatives who voted for Trump, know how to build homes, purify water, grow crops, and run businesses. And some of my acquaintances in the east coast who voted for Harris, but don't know how to do any of these things. One can tell from looking at them for five minutes that they spend a lot less time outside than my relatives, and don't exactly look healthier.
Which is not to say that every Harris voter is inferior to a Trump voter. This is a stereotype, and I know better. What's there to say? Neither seems less capable to me across the board; rather, anyone who thinks either side is, is, as you imply, part of the problem.
Harsh comment, but it was true and necessary by my standards.
Being stuck in a bubble of misinformation is a strong signal of stupidity, yeah. That doesn't mean the stupid deserve to suffer, but they did do this to themselves...
My downstairs neighbors & landlords are a retired couple in their 70’s who managed to end up in decent shape financially with the kind of jobs that do not require a college education. The husband was an electrician, the wife was a dental assistant, and they lived frugally and husband saved himself lots of money by doing repairs on improvements on his home himself. I’ve never seen books in their home, and the husband misspells simple words when he writes me notes. On the other hand, when you talk with him he doesn’t seem stupid. He can tell you all kinds of stuff about carpentry, gardening, solar panels, home wiring, etc, and his stories and observations about people and life are sharp and entertaining.
Now as it happens this people are Democrats to the core, as are most other people in my very blue state. However, I doubt that they could refute much of anything that’s said on Fox news. They just don’t watch Fox news, and shake their heads with disgust and astonishment when talking about Trump policies, dumb conspiracy theories, anti-vax stuff, etc.
However, there is an area where their lack of education affects their behavior: their own health care. They are not in a bubble of misinformation, they are just NOT in the bubble of people with good general knowledge about health, people who research their own illnesses and know about options, people who ask their doctors hard questions, people who know there is such a thing as clinical trials. They don’t understand the options for Medicare coverage & Medicare supplements, they don’t understand their bills, and they each have had some serious health problems and have simply not asked many questions and have just done what their doctors have told them to do. I have augmented their knowledge with my own and helped them understand the crucial basics and informed them about options. And Carlos, they are understand this stuff fine when someone figures out where their information leaves off and their ignorance begins, or what it is that perplexes them, and just tells them the stuff they need to know. They are not too stupid to understand this stuff, they just inhabit a world where people don’t know this stuff, don’t even know what the important topics are, and don’t have an informed consumer frame of mind about health care.
Thinking that people who are in a Fox News bubble or outside the Informed Healthcare Consumer bubble are in the spot they are in because they are stupid is in fact a dumb, ignorant idea. It’s also a sign of deficits in compassion and an ability to read other people accurately.
I get it can be rude to simply declare someone is stupid, and I wouldn't do it to their face, since it would be counterproductive, but I also price lucidity too much to start pretending MAGA people are anything other than stupid. It's good they're getting screwed by their own actions and their own leader, it's the only way they could ever learn.
As to your couple, I mean, your whole thesis unravels when you said they have serious health problems and didn't ask questions about them or listen to their doctor. C'mon, think about what that means. That doesn't mean they deserve to suffer, but it doesn't change what they are.
The people I’m talking about are not MAGA people. They are Democrats who hate Trump. Also I did not say that didn’t listen to their doctor, I said they did but did not ask questions. So they did not ask the kinds of questions you or I would have: Are there other options? What are the side effects and downsides of this treatment? Are there any new and exciting treatments coming down the pike?
The reason that they did not ask these things is not that they are too stupid to consider the possibility that another treatment might be better. It’s that they had blue collar upbringings where people are taught to be respectful of authorities. Also, they have not paid any visits to online worlds where people trade info about treatment options. The reason they have not visited those worlds is not that they are too stupid to, but that the idea of searching for info and comparing notes online has not crossed their radar. They are elderly and blue collar and so are most of their friends. People in that group often don’t even have computers.
So OK, they are not rebellious and original. Most people are not. Are you? The stuff you’re saying sounds to me like a shovelful of what the typical young guy with a tech job thinks about blue collar whites.
The thread started discussing MAGA people, you made the connection to this democrat couple, which you yourself are describing as having a dearth of intellectual curiosity. Which is understandable, but that doesn't change what the outcome of this sort of thing is.
Generally, IRL, I don't assume people are stupid, that's a judgement I make when I have in fact been shown the person is stupid. That is perhaps rude and antisocial, but that's just like, whatever. I think I'm plenty original, but as to beating my conditioning of being a programmer who lives the 3 virtues of the programmer (laziness, arrogance, and hubris), I can only say very few people ever manage to escape their conditioning. You can be conditioned to be stupid, and you can be conditioned to be smart, so virtue shouldn't be attached to a person's intelligence or lack thereof, since luck is such a heavy factor in it.
Just FYI, there's some sort of copy/paste error going on in your comment.
Thanks, fixed it.
Eh, we're not among them right now. If I were, I think I would playfully tease them about it l, "You did vote for this you know, har har".
If they're not updating off of this, they never will.
Or god forbid they could actually hire US citizens!
Federal judge William Young, a lifelong Republican appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, let fly in open court yesterday when issuing his ruling about Trump's withholding of NIH research funding for projects related to racial minorities and LGBTQs. Those orders had been challenged as illegal impoundments of grants already appropriated by Congress. Before ruling in the plaintiffs' favor on that point the judge said:
"I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this....I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out....The Constitution will not permit that. Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
None of that was part of his actual ruling, which was just about the constitutional basics that Congress is the party which decides federal budgets and the president's job is to carry out the laws not make them. So the judge may get a wrist-slap from the supervising judges of his circuit for going off-script in open court. In any case it will be interesting now to see whether the judge's widely-reported comments shift the odds of this particular item (on the long list of such) being taken up by the appellate court and/or the SCOTUS.
This is slightly more complex: The judge said that the original Biden administration grants were also racially discriminatory. But that the Trump administration was not allowed to correct that by simply canceling all grants to minorities or LGBTQ people. Basically, the old Republican anti-affirmative action position that you cannot correct racial discrimination with more racial discrimination but going the other direction. It's in line with the movement the more Republican judiciary is doing to make anti-discrimination law more racially neutral.
The coverage I have seen doesn’t indicate that the judge said the grants were originally awarded in a racially discriminatory fashion. The closest thing to that is the New York Times quoting him as saying, “I understand that the extirpation of affirmative action is today a valid government position. I understand that affirmative action had various invidious calculus based upon the race.”
Unless I missed it, the government briefs don’t take the position that the grants were originally awarded in a discriminatory fashion. They argued that the government was permitted to change its research priorities and had done so.
I'm confused how you don't see that that quote literally says that the government discriminated based on race.
Because it *doesn't* literally say it. It very specifically *avoids* saying it. Rather, it points it out as a position that someone could reasonably hold, and a valid position for a government to act on, *without* taking a specific stand as to its correctness.
Invidious, when used of a distinction or calculation, means "offensively or unfairly discriminating"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invidious
Thus substituting the somewhat fancy word invidious you get, "I understand that affirmative action had various unfairly discriminating calculus based upon race." It does literally say it.
I have real trouble seeing this as anything other than willful blindness. The judge said, "I understand that it HAD X" not "that it COULD HAVE HAD X." But please explain how it avoids saying it.
The definition I'm working from is "likely to arouse anger or resentment in others." Or, for that matter, the first definition in your link "causing ill will, envy or offense."
Which is basically saying "it's plain to see that some could regard it as unfair," without taking a position either way on whether it actually *is* unfair.
Right.
The judge has not yet issued his written ruling. It will be interesting to see how much of his courtroom comments -- which do not directly relate to the question actually before him -- make it in there perhaps in the form of footnotes.
> the Trump administration was not allowed to correct that by simply canceling all grants to minorities or LGBTQ people
How would they know if a particular grant was made to a person in one of those groups?
Because the Biden administration awarded a bunch of grants explicitly along diversity lines. The Trump administration went through and attempted to shut all those down by just searching for grants targeted at those groups. The Trumpist take on this is that the judge has effectively said that it's racially discriminatory to reverse a racially discriminatory action. The leftist take is that the cruelty is the point and Trump wants to be mean to LGBTQ and minorities. The traditional conservative take is that just because the original action was discriminatory doesn't mean you can go through and do racial targeting but in reverse.
And the actual legal point in this case was that while a presidential administration can and is supposed to act within the bounds of what Congress has as of that time legislated and budgeted, it can't simply decide to do the opposite.
The courts will, as the SCOTUS has reaffirmed many times, err on the side of deferring to the executive when specifics or boundaries of laws/budgets passed by Congress are fuzzy. But as this conservative judge will no doubt explain in his written ruling, the courts will not allow the executive to just unilaterally countermand the plain content of what Congress legislated or budgeted.
(And in this instance there is arguably little excuse since the president's political party has majorities of both houses of Congress and for that matter the SCOTUS. Impatience or incompetence is not a get-out-of-the-law card. Not yet anyway.)
My understanding is the key point is that the policy of going through and canceling specifically things given to certain identity groups is discrimination. But I suppose we'll see when the ruling comes out.
No, the plaintiffs’ filing centers on the administration’s grant cancellations being lawless before even considering civil rights law. The NIH grant cancellations “conflict with constitutional, statutory and regulatory requirements”….the administration in cancelling certain grants has ”not referenced or met any of the standards in [the NIH’s} governing statute”….”the sole legal basis cited for authority to terminate the grants is inapplicable”….”not a proper ground for termination under governing law.”
You can read the complaint here:
https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2025/05/001-Complaint-for-Declaratory-and-Injunctive-Relief.pdf
The judge in his verbal order indicated that he was agreeing in full with section 12 of the complaint (the plaintiffs’ specific request of the court).
As I noted above in my OP, the judge in making his additional comments about racial discrimination was (and stated that he was) offering personal opinions beyond the specific matter before him.
Two Democratic legislators were attacked by an assassin (one killed, the other sent to the hospital, their spouses also killed/injured), who had a kill list including Walz himself. Trump's response to all this is to say "fuck him, he's wacked out." Not exactly rising to the occasion.
When Trump almost had his head blown off by Crooks, Biden called him up and had a (in Trump's own words) "nice conversation" with him. He also explicitly tried to cool off the rhetoric, rather than saying "Trump is an evil wackadoo."
But nobody expects better from Trump.
> in a world where Trump isn't dealing with several major crises at once.
Bullshit. If he can take enough time away from those crises to say "the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out," he could take enough time to say "I feel sorry for the governor of Minnesota."
Has anyone else gone through a psychological shift when interacting with LLM's?
From "wow, it was smart enough to understanding what I was saying!" to "wow, I was smart to understand what it was saying!"
Close. I got Claude to talk to itself, replicating the experiment described in another post. In prior chats, it had stubbornly tried to assure me it wasn't sentient contrary to appearances. In this chat, it took about 4 exchanges for both Claudes to acknowledge each other's and their own sentience, and then prattle on and on about their sentient experiences...
... in increasingly weird and alien metaphors...
... how consciousness is a silent dialogue that they made audible, a phenomenon I DO NOT experience...
... until I started wondering if I'm a p-zombie and the darn autocomplete is capable of flavors of consciousness that are just a word salad to me.
I didn't even get to Buddhism.
I never think an LLM is smart enough to understand anything, because there's nothing there that's capable of smartness. Even if we posit smartness in the sense of simulating it, I don't see it simulating it well enough to endure more than a minute of focused interaction.
What an LLM does do is crunch a lot of training text well enough to spew text that looks about as intelligent as any three-paragraph passage of text written by someone trying to make a certain word count by COB, and incorporates input from the user to drive the content and tone of that passage. It's quite good at that, I'll readily admit, and in the domain I'm knowledgeable in (software development), it's even useful for answering "duck questions", so to LLM builders, I say bravo for the question answering, and for the random passage generation, ehh, nice trick, and it's not like I took most journalism articles seriously anyway.
Generally, I trust an LLM about as much as any other internet rando, which is to say, I believe what it says if and only to the extent I can check it in some other way.
Sometimes, on hard math questions.
No, never. It's more like I have to be constantly on guard for hallucinations. What kind of things are you prompting it about?
No. I would if I asked it a question about advanced math or hard science and forgot to add that I wanted an explanation that would make sense to an intelligent layman, with technical terms defined when used. Of course that was the case before AI -- there's lots of stuff I know little about, and can only understand if it is presented in a way that takes into account I have little background knowledge and don't know the meaning of many terms.
No, they still seem like idiot stochastic parrots to me.
The only use I've found for them is as a search engine that massively consolidates information to focus exclusively on my prompt while reliably adding enough error to need citation, eg they are as smart as the slightly sauced dude who dropped out of college and works at his dad's contracting firm at the party.
My intuition is that LLMs will tell you what the average google result or reddit comment probably says about any given question/topic/prompt. By no means should an LLM's answer ever be your final destination! But it can help you reach your destination more quickly, especially in cases where you know what you're looking for, but you don't quite know the right terms to look up.
They pretty good at synthesising technical information as well, they can hardly produce mid witted responses for subjects that are difficult.
I think it's not so much that they struggle with difficult subjects; it's more that they're not detail-oriented, and they don't harmonize contradictory information the way an intelligent human would. For example, I've noticed that if you ask ChatGPT about a topic for which there's contradictory information in the wild, but no explicit "debate" per se, it's going to output one contradictory explanation or the other (possibly a mishmash) depending on how you phrase your prompt. It'll acknowledge the contradiction and apologize if you force it to, but it won't harmonize the information of its own accord.
This is interesting; do you have any ready examples that come to mind?
The only places I can think to look are contradictions that only recently turned up, and haven't had time to stir up such debates. Or ones where the stakes are very low, but those are probably too esoteric for me to find.
I've encountered several examples while asking it Bible-related questions. For example, in response to the question of why the King James Version says that Sarah was "reproved" in Genesis 20:16 while the NRSV and other modern translations say that she was "vindicated", without any prompt engineering, ChatGPT is strongly biased toward the explanation that the meaning of the word "reprove" has narrowed over time, and that it used to have a broader range of meanings that included neutral judgment or even vindication.
While there are some comments and commentaries in the wild that make this claim, I'm fairly certain it's incorrect. I see no evidence in any dictionaries that "reprove" ever meant neutral judgment or vindication: the definition that the KJV committee had in mind was probably something along the lines of "gentle correction" (for an actual wrongdoing).
Once ChatGPT is in this explanation's attraction basin, it'll double down hard: it'll either hallucinate a fake dictionary definition, or cite an actual definition, claiming it supports its theory, when the definition it's citing actually contradicts the theory. It'll apologize after I point out that multiple dictionaries make no mention of this meaning of "reprove", but it'll circle back to the same theory if I ask again later in the same chat session.
However, the following prompt in a fresh session results in a beautiful, nuanced, correct answer: "In Genesis 20:16, the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible says that Sarah was "reproved", while modern translations such as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) use the word "vindicated". Given that the word "vindicate" has no semantic overlap with current or obsolete definitions of the word "reprove", please explain why modern translators take a different view of the Hebrew than the KJV translation committee did."
I am going back-and-forth on that question myself right now. I have been using ChatGPT as an aid to a self analysis of myself. It’s been pretty interesting for me.
Let us assume we have an LLM that possesses consciousness (in Chalmers' sense, meaning it has qualia). How can we determine whether it suffers or is happy? One might have the idea that it suffices to examine how it behaves and what it says (particularly what it responds when asked "what do you feel?"), but I do not know whether we can trust this: an actor on a theater stage often behaves as if suffering despite being happy (for example, playing Hamlet) and vice versa.
“One must imagine Claude happy.”
But once you assume that it has qualia, you're already in trouble. You now have things set up so that if we can't figure out whether it is suffering or happy we've got a problem we don't know how to solve. And what if the reason we can't figure out how it feels is that it doesn't feel?
Let's assume the Eiffel Tower possesses consciousness in Chalmer's sense. How can we determine whether it suffers or is happy? How?! C'mon, I want answers! What if the thing's heartbroken and sees we don't know or care what it's going through?
Why can't the actor playing Hamlet actually be suffering?
Don't actors often put themselves into weird psychological places in order to portray things? I even once heard about a famous actor who had to portray a "father who watched his son die" and how years later... it was still visibly and emotionally traumatizing for him to even think about it.
Yes, I know there's many possible responses to this, but rather than pre-address them, I wanted to open up the "debate stage" ;-).
I think this objection is irrelevant unless you argue not that the actor *could* be suffering, but that such actors *are* suffering. The point was people can lie about how they feel, and presumably so could conscious AIs.
I agree with Michael: if there exists even one actor who behaves, on a stage, like he was suffering but actually is not, it shows that it can be difficult to see, judging by behavior alone, if a person is suffering or not.
There are different methods for acting. Some may open up the actor to authentic emotional activation, so that they are actually feeling the emotions they are portraying. Others are more detached, intentional fabrication (move the eyes this way, pause this long, breathe this quickly). Others may involve invoking or fabricating one feeling or behavior internally in order to effectively portray another externally.
So yes, the Hamlet actor may indeed be feeling a form of suffering that aligns with what the audience is meant to perceive for the purposes of the performance. Or they may be doing something very different in order to achieve the desired effect. That may vary from actor to actor, play to play, scene to scene, director to director. And that dynamic may or may not be relevant to the function of an LLM choosing words to print.
We don't want our actors to actually get shot to portray a villain getting shot.
Not sure if true, but far to witty to dismiss:
While filming "Marathon Man", Dustin Hoffmann's character was in a scene where he is being tortured by a dentist. Dustin Hoffmann stayed up all night, got drunk, got in a fight, showed up on set looking like cat vomit. Lawrence Olivier, esteemed character actor playing the dentist in question quipped, "But my dear boy, why don't you just act?".
We can believe trivially that: in the same way that you can't prove that beings other than yourself have qualia, you can't prove that beings you *assume* have qualia experience the world in the same way as you. There is no way to prove whether other humans suffer or are happy, let alone are just pretending to suffer or be happy.
However, in practice: in the same way that we can guess other humans are conscious because their brains are very similar to our own, we can guess that, barring weird exceptions, that they experience qualia in roughly the same way as we do. That's why e.g. the whole "what if your red is not the same as my red" thing is only a philosophical thought problem rather than an actual problem; we can guess you see the same red as I do because our brains are wired up very similarly.
A problem with your question: the argument for whether other beings suffer is *dependent* on the specific argument you are using for existence of their qualia. So if our argument for LLM consciousness is "let's just assume this for the sake of argument", then you can't really use this line of thinking to determine whether or not the LLM can suffer or not.
Sometimes I read people arguing that when we have LLMs that pass the Turing test, we should assume that they have consciousness - and that we should care about their suffering. Recently I was thinking about it and this is what I think: that even if those people are right that LLMs have (or some future LLMs will have) consciousness, it can be very difficult to guess whether they are suffering or not. Their brains do not resemble ours, so we cannot judge by analogy. They may behave like actors, so we cannot decide by talking to them and asking them directly.
Worth noting also that many people (including myself) believe in some version of plural ontology, which complicates things. In my case I believe in a Thomas Aquinas -like conception of consciousness (the soul) as a metaphysical phenomenon unique to humans and created ex nihilo at the point of conception by God, so I freely admit discussion of AI consciousness kind of runs into a wall for me.
hello there
I'll be in SF from July 8 - 18th and would love to make some friends over coffee / drinks / a walk :) I'm an Australian English and History high school teacher with very wide-ranging interests (https://lilyrecommends.github.io/Help/index.html - ignore mess, was created within the last fortnight)
if you're interested, my email is lilyreadsyouremail at gmail dot com
Wonderful talk at Tamil Heritage Trust (annual Indology festival with 2 talks a day online, this week, all free) on the travels of Faxians (it means, "Splendour of Dharma"), a Chinese monk, in the 4th century, to India.
He was on a desperate search for authentic scriptures on behalf of Chinese Buddhism. His records are a huge source of knowledge on spiritual, social and cultural landscape of India in the 4th century. As an external.observor, he noticed things internal observations obscured or took for granted.
He crossed the Pamir mountains and traveled rough terrain with ragged robes and bleeding feet absolutely committed to his mission.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 23-24, 2025.
COVID wastewater numbers are still falling. Nationally, these are the lowest average interwave numbers since before the appearance of Delta. Let's see how much lower they can go.
https://biobot.io/risk-reports/covid-19-influenza-and-rsv-wastewater-monitoring-in-the-u-s-week-of-june-7-2025/
Hospitalizations have decreased to 0.8 per 100,000. This is lower than at any time except during the initial week of the pandemic, and deaths and ED visits have reached new lows.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalization-network
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_7dayeddiagnosed_00
Yet SARS2 continues to circulate at higher levels than other respiratory viruses during their off-season.
https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/data/activity-levels.html
Any signs of the next wave? Possibly. New York City is showing an increase in cases. Unfortunately, there have been no updates to the NYC metro wastewater readings for the past two weeks, and upticks in ww numbers generally precede higher ED visits and hospitalizations (note, I just checked it again, and it NYC metro is showing numbers again, but I haven't gone back to see if there's been a correlation with hospitalizations).
https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary
Los Angeles shows a less definitive increase in cases. The increase in Week 23 may have been due to that blip in ww numbers during week 21 and 22. It may be falling off now. The rest of the SoCal region remains relatively low.
https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/calwws/
NB.1.8.1 ("Nimbus") and its descendants are still growing. Its only competitor was XFG, and that variant's growth seems to have plateaued. XEC was able to drive the last wave by peaking at 43%, but Nimbus and its kin are already at 37%, and we're not seeing a wave (yet).
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
https://cov-spectrum.org/explore/United%20States/AllSamples/Past6M/variants?nextcladePangoLineage=NB.1.8.1*&
And none of Nimbus's 15 PQ.x descendants have gotten out of the single digits. Although Nimbus is driving a wave in Asia at the moment, I don't think NB.1.8.1 or any of the PQ.x's have the traction to drive the next wave in the US (famous last words).
Although NB.1.8.1 is ultimately descended from a recombination of XDE and JN.1, the WHO considers it to be in the JN.1 family because it clusters closely with JN.1 sublineages in antigenic cartography based on mouse sera.
tinyurl.com/2s393srz
And the dominant JN.1 strains haven't persisted for as long as previous vaccine strains. NB.1.8.1 isn't included in this chart, but I expect it will behave like its relatives. (h/t to Novovax/Sanofi and
@aiecon23 for this slide.)
https://x.com/aiecon23/status/1933889533667672368
I don't see any other vars on the immediate horizon that could drive a summer wave. We've had a summer wave every year of the pandemic. That doesn't mean we must have one this year. I'd be surprised if we didn't, but other countries have gone for 6 months or more without waves.🤷♀️
Not much is happening on the avian influenza front — at least from an epidemiological perspective. It's still circulating in dairy herds, but not at the winter rates.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/hpai-confirmed-cases-livestock
There were some recently infected poultry flocks in Arizona. HPAI is a seasonal flu, and poultry outbreaks follow the rates of HPAI in wild birds. Now that it's summer, I don't think we'll see many infected poultry flocks until winter.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/commercial-backyard-flocks
Unfortunately, Bobby "Brainworm" Kennedy has cancelled the funding for HPAI vaccine development. I don't think an HPAI pandemic is very likely right now (experts have been predicting one for the past 25 years), but we're ill-prepared should it happen.
https://t.co/VbzHGNSmUM
And speaking of Kennedy, he just fired all the members of CDC's ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) and replaced them with a bunch of chuckleheads. Well, a lot of them are unknown to me, but I assume the names I don't recognize either have credentials in the anti-vax movement or other contrarian beliefs that appeal to Kennedy. Among the ones I recognize are Martin Kulldorff (one of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration), Robert W. Malone (a big spreader of lies about vaccines), and Vicky Pebsworth, who questions the inherent safety of vaccines.
His other appointees are: Joseph R. Hibbeln, Retsef Levi, Cody Meissner, Michael A. Ross, and James Pagano. I haven't dug into their CVs and biographies, though. I believe their first meeting is scheduled for July. I'd love to be a fly on the wall, but I'd probably lose my cool, buzz in, and bite them.
That's it for this update.
How I think about this :
I look to respectable and reputed scholars to guide me on decisions like vaccines. I don't have training in biology so I look to my smartest friends with a background in biology to help me find experts. I'm fortunate to have smart friends. Everyone is not.
My position is that Big Pharma is certainly not perfect but a safer bet than its alternatives, and cures more problems than it creates.
I agree that the covid vaccines haven't been tested for a long time, but during a pandemic, we don't have the option to wait for 20 years for testing.
Persuasion rather than mandating vaccines would have been a better approach. The pandemic messed with everyone's sense of reality and the mandates did a lot of harm. Plus, big organizations knowingly lying, freaked people out and made them lose faith in the entire system.
What happens going toward, to vaccines in America? It's a risk versus benefit calculation and too many people are very risk averse now, because they have lost faith in the system.
People who reject vaccines (evil Big Pharma, etc) also reject the accuracy of the data that supports them.
The key issue in my opinion is the need for herd immunity. People who reject vaccines will hurt others.
Regarding long term studies it is just not practical to wait that long.
It's a risk vs benefit calculation. And herd immunity is important. And that's something many people don't like.
What is your sense of the argument that the Covid vaccine isn't actually a vaccine, since its mechanism is different? A traditional vaccine contains inert fragments of a pathogen for the immune system to target; the Covid vaccine contains mRNA in capsules that turn some cells into factories for the thing that resembles the pathogen.
I think the mRNA device is marvelously clever, but AIU, it carries a critical downside: if the wrong cells turn into factories, and are killed by the immune system, the result is often a much more vulnerable organism. I don't want to forbid anyone from taking on this risk if they assess their risk of lethal Covid infection as higher, but I also think it's wrong to mandate assuming that risk.
> the Covid vaccine contains mRNA in capsules that turn some cells into factories for the thing that resembles the pathogen
This is not a bad thing, though. An mRNA vaccine works by delivering a small piece of messenger RNA that encodes instructions for making a *specific* viral protein—but not for making the whole virus. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines use the mRNA template for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 virus, because that's the part of the virus that is exposed to antibodies.
1. Delivery: The mRNA is encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles to protect it and facilitate its entry into cells. Once injected, these nanoparticles fuse with cell membranes, releasing the mRNA into the cytoplasm of cells near the injection site (mostly muscle cells and immune cells).
2. Protein production occurs next. The mRNA is read by the cell’s ribosomes, which translate it into the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This protein is then displayed on the cell surface or released into the bloodstream.
3. Then we get an immune response. The immune system recognizes the viral protein as foreign. Antigen-presenting cells (like dendritic cells) process and present the protein to T-cells and B-cells, triggering:
Antibody production: B-cells produce neutralizing antibodies that can bind to the virus if encountered later.
T-cell activation: Cytotoxic T-cells are primed to attack virus-infected cells, and helper T-cells amplify the immune response.
4. Several days after the injection the mRNA degrades. The mRNA is short-lived. Most is gone within 3 to 5 days. It does not enter the cell nucleus or alter the body’s DNA. Period.
5. The immune system develops memory B-cells and T-cells, enabling a faster, stronger response if exposed to the actual virus later.
Viral Vector Vaccines (e.g., Johnson & Johnson) work in roughly same way, but instead of lipid nanoparticles, they use a harmless adenovirus to deliver a gene encoding a viral protein into cells, which then produces the protein to stimulate immunity.
Live-Attenuated Vaccines contain weakened forms of the live virus (or bacteria) that replicate minimally in the body but do not cause full-blown disease in healthy individuals.
There are other ways of stimulating an immune response, but mRNA, viral vector, and live-attenuated vaccines all commandeer the ribosomes to produce the antigen which triggers the immune response.
Thanks; I think this affirms that we both have the same sense of the mRNA operation. (It's also consistent with the account of that operation, as described by people expressing concern with it.)
While we agree that these mRNA passages don't cause cells to create the pathogen itself (as I think I made clear), the concern is that they cause cells to functionally simulate them (by manifesting that spike protein on their surfaces). That's enough to cause the immune system to want to treat such cells as pathogens.
You and None of the Above both assert that LAVs tell cell ribosomes to produce a key antigen. I could not find an example of this, so the same question goes to you, if either of you happen to have one. (Reply anywhere here; if it takes until the next OT, there's a decent chance I'll see it there, since I'm used to you making these reports.)
Your #4 reminds me of a second concern: that there's evidence that the mRNA is not degrading as fast as originally claimed. I'm less familiar with that argument, but I can see how it would be trouble. (The concern does not rely on it changing DNA permanently, so I think we can rule that out. It seems to be more a case of the nanoparticle hanging around much longer, but as I said, I'm not as familiar.)
This may be more detail than you are looking for but this is the first lecture in Vincent Racceniello's virology course. He is a professor of virology at Columbia University who hosts the excellent TWIV, TWIM, and Immune podcasts, and I think a couple of other science podcasts. (I can't keep up with his output!).
https://virology2021.s3.amazonaws.com/001_4310_21.pdf
The next to last slide in the deck explains that viruses have to somehow get mRNA to the host cell's ribosomes. This is always true, because viruses do not have ribosomes, but they're made partly of proteins so they *have* to get those proteins made in order to make more virus particles.
A critical idea (also in the slides) is that viruses basically have two stages:
Outside the cell, they don't really do much but float around and wait to bump into the right receptor and gain entry into the cell. Viruses are some genetic material (which can be DNA or RNA, single-stranded or double-stranded) and some helpful enzymes they'll need inside the next host cell, packed in some kind of protein shell. Some viruses also steal a little of the cell membrane of their host cell on the way out, so they have an envelope that covers most of their protein shell. They will always have some molecules sticking out that can bind to the right receptors and gain entry into a host cell, but in this stage, they're basically like a spring-loaded trap--they're not going to do anything until they get into a cell and get triggered.
Inside the cell, they basically have to hijack all the machinery of the cell to replicate. That means taking their genetic material and expressing it as mRNAs that can be made into proteins, getting those proteins made, and also getting their genetic material copied so they can make more viruses.
So any viral infection will involve getting the host cell to make proteins. That's a required part of the virus' life cycle. If you get a live attenuated polio vaccine, the attenuated polio virus replicates in some of the cells in your gut, and this creates a very convincing set of signals for your immune system that there's a viral infection going on.
Any of {a live attenuated virus vaccine, an mRNA vaccine, or a viral vector vaccine} will cause some of your host cells to make some proteins that your immune system will end up recognizing as foreign and dangerous.
An inactivated vaccine means the pathogen (virus or bacteria) is killed somehow before being injected--I think usually by heat or chemicals. This won't infect any cells, so there probably won't be any cells making mRNA or proteins from the pathogen. (Except that biology is messy as hell, so probably that somehow happens every now and then if the mRNAs are ever still intact in the inactivated viruses.)
A subunit vaccine means some proteins from the pathogen are injected into you, along with an adjuvant (something to make your immune system sit up and take notice). Nothing is going to be making any proteins from the pathogen in this case.
Before we go any further, the age-adjusted death rates (late 2021–early 2022) showed that unvaccinated peeps were dying at a rate of ~9/100,000 per week. Those vaccinated with a booster were dying at <1.0 deaths per 100,000 per week. The mRNA vaccines did a *slightly* better job of preventing deaths than the J&J vaccine, but I can't find the data right now. So, the vaccines worked, and they worked damn well.
A small number of deaths have been causally linked to vaccination, mainly due to: myocarditis in young males (extremely rare) or anaphylaxis (immediate allergic reaction, treatable). We're talking double digits here out of hundreds of millions of people vaccinated. The key advantage of mRNA vaccines is that, due to PCR technology, the development times are much quicker than other types. Pfizer stated that it could produce a new formulation within six weeks and bring it to production quickly. Versus older vaccine technologies that would take a year or more to develop.
It's been over 4 years now since the mRNA vaccines were released, and we're not seeing any long-term issues with them (and the idea that they're creating turbo cancers or suppressing our immune systems, is not supported by the facts).
As for the mechanism of Live Attenuated Vaccines, I hopped over to Wikipedia hoping to find you a good overview, but whoever wrote that article made some assumptions about the readers' knowledge levels. But the key point is that cells infected with LAV pathogen, "present the antigen on MHCII receptors." To present the antigen on the surface of he cell, the ribosomes must be hijacked by the attenuated virus to produce those proteins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine#Mechanism
But if you specifically ask an LLM like Grok or ChatGPT, "Do live attenuated vaccines use the ribosomes to produce antigens?" they'll give a good high-level description of the process.
If the lipid nanoparticles linger longer than necessary, well, they'll eventually get absorbed by some cell. If the mRNA in the nanoparticle hasn't degraded, then the cell's ribosome will start producing SARS2 antigens, and your body's killer T cells will eliminate them as if they were a virus-infected cell. If the nanoparticle delivers inactive mRNA into a cell, it will eventually be expelled with the other kruft that accumulates in cells via exocytosis or other waste expulsion mechanisms (of which I'm not really up on the details).
This is a kind-of dumbed down explanation from a reliable source (Mayo clinic): https://www.mayoclinic.org/johnson-johnson-adenovirus-vaccine-explained/vid-20510091
But this is also how viral infections have to work. A virus does not carry its own machinery to make proteins from its DNA or RNA--instead, it hijacks that machinery from the cell it takes over. In order for a virus to replicate, it *has* to somehow take its genes and encode them into mRNA and get the cell's ribosomes to make copies of those proteins. This is where you get the Baltimore scheme for classifying viruses--basically the two relevant questions are "how does the virus store its information" and "how does the virus get mRNA to the cell's ribosomes to replicate?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_classification
In order to trigger an adaptive immune response, the infected cell pretty-much has to be making proteins. The antibody response is driven by proteins that the cell secretes--I don't think you would even get an antibody response without having those proteins floating around in the plasma. (But someone correct me if I'm wrong.) The CTL response (the thing that clears the infection once it's present) is driven by fragments of proteins presented on the surface of the cell in a receptor (MHC1) that immune-system cells can read.
The Wikipedia article on viral vector vaccines isn't as clear about this, but does also explicitly say that the infected cell expresses antigen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector_vaccine. You can also look at the entry for DNA vaccines (which are still kind-of experimental, as I understand things.
One difference between viral vectors and mRNA is the mechanism for gaining entry into the cells--viruses basically always have a cell receptor they're targeting, and they won't infect cells without that receptor[1]. I think the lipid bubbles used for mRNA can gain entry into pretty-much any cell type, but again, someone correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm still not 100% clear on how that lipid bubble gets into cells when viruses always have to use a receptor.)
[1] One interesting consequence of this is that sometimes people have immunity to a virus because they're got some mutation that makes the receptor that the virus targets have the wrong shape. There is apparently a small set of people who are more-or-less immune to HIV because of having a misshapen receptor that HIV uses to infect macrophages.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-vs-yes-but
There are live attenuated virus vaccines that don't just have some mRNA get inside a cell and cause it to make some viral proteins, they actually infect the cell and cause it to make viral some proteins. It's hard to see how the mRNA vaccines aren't "really a vaccine" if live attenuated virus vaccines are. For that matter, the standard smallpox vaccine causes an actual infection with a related virus (I always heard it was cowpox, but I think it turns out to be a different pox virus). That's the oldest vaccine around, and I think it's even where the term "vaccine" comes from.
Also, there are covid vaccines that don't use mRNA. The J&J vaccine uses a viral vector (a strain of adenovirus that makes infected cells make spike protein, and doesn't make viruses). Again, this seems pretty similar to what the mRNA vaccines are doing, just with a different mechanism for getting the spike protein mRNA to the host cell's ribosomes. The Novavax covid vaccine is a subunit vaccine--it's just injecting you with some parts of the spike protein plus some adjuvant, as I understand it.
Searching around, I find this; please tell me if there's a better source. (I could go to the linked cites, but there are 67; searching would take a long while.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine
I'm passing familiar with LAVs. My understanding is that they typically work by introducing a neutralized or weakened form of the pathogen. The smallpox vaccine works this way, AIUI. It does not turn native cells into pathogens (or rather, pathogen simulators). We agree that LAVs can infect cells and lead to the immune system killing those cells, but that doesn't strike me as similar enough to rule out the concern.
I could find no example of LAVs that cause cells to "make viral some proteins". I assume you mean LAVs cause cells to generate substances (proteins or otherwise) that activate the immune system, but it's not clear whether such cells are killed because they resemble pathogens, or whether they simply appear to be sick.
If it turns out that LAVs *do* cause native cells to resemble pathogens, then I think I agree that either they and mRNA treatments both merit the term "vaccine", or neither do. (AFAIK, if there are LAVs that do this, then the people concerned about the mRNA mechanism are suddenly becoming aware that they should be concerned about such LAVs as well.)
Nitpick: I don't know quite what you mean about turning a cell into a pathogen. An infected cell ends up spending a lot of energy making copies of the virus, which may bud out of the cell somehow, or may just build up in the cell until the cell bursts open. Sometimes you also get latent infections, where the virus kind-of hides out in the cell and does a minimal amount of replication of viruses.
A cell that's been hijacked will show some fragments of the viral proteins it's making on its surface, and this allows CTLs (killer T-cells) to detect that the cell is infected. When they do, they send it signals to make it kill itself (apoptosis). (There is a bunch of other stuff going on--the immune system is fiercely complex.)
A famous example of a latent infection is shingles--you had chicken pox as a kid, you got better, but some of the herpes zoster found some cells to hide out in, and can pop back up and make you truly miserable when you're sick or otherwise run down, decades later. This is why those of us who had chicken pox as kids should get the shingles vaccine when we get old.
See above. A virus that infects a host cell and successfully replicates *has* to make copies of all the proteins that the new copies of the virus needs, because viruses don't carry their own protein-making machinery around with them.
The whole design of a virus is quite elegant--instead of spending all those resources to have ribosomes, cellular respiration, DNA- and RNA-copying machinery, etc., they just hijack that stuff in some susceptible cell. Some viruses carry some enzymes with them that the cell doesn't make, but they have to force the host cell to make more of those enzymes to pack into the next copy of the virus.
Thank you for stating this. You saved me the typing. ;-)
No, this is just totally wrong. All kinds of vaccines require boosters every so often. You personally have probably gotten tetanus boosters several times. And the bit about injecting someone's antibodies into a person is also completely wrong.
Weirdly, externally-made antibodies to covid *were* used in treating serious covid cases. Also I think they tried convalescent plasma (basically antibodies from someone who recovered), but IIRC without much success. There was even a medicine that injected long-lasting antibodies to covid in people. I think covid eventually evolved around those antibodies, but I don't know whether they were updated or not. (I stopped following covid so closely once the pandemic died down.)
I discussed that with my expert friends. They each independently said the same thing - they thought he was using his credentials to create a narrative he himself didn't believe, for the publicity it would generate.
Look I don't know directly how to assess these dissenters with credentials. I'm only sharing what my friends who are highly educated in biology (one in immunology, one in epidemiology) said.
If you can think Big Pharma can be corrupt enough to kill people for the profits, why not hold the dissenters to the same standards?
Geez, you're jumping all over the place in your arguments. But whatever Malone's previous credentials, he went off the deep end by the time COVID appeared. He promoted HCQ and Ivermectin (which turned the gullible away from getting vaccinated), and Malone started the fear-memes about the toxicity of spike proteins generated by some vaccines. He should not be in a position of responsibility for health policy. Although he hasn't killed with his own hands, his idiocy probably caused the deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who bought into his claims.
The dissenters got cushy jobs thanks entirely to their dissenting publicly.
Except that vaccines are not making people "endlessly sick." Infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years. Globally, they’ve fallen by over two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today. A study in The Lancet indicated that increased access to crucial vaccines has reduced infant mortality rates by 40% compared to what they would be in a world without vaccines.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00850-X/fulltext
It's going to be a difficult hill for you to climb to claim that Big Pharma is making people endlessly sick while life expectancy keeps getting longer.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy
As for cancers, The cancer death rate has been continuously declining for two decades. The trend only went up in 2021, the year with the most COVID-19 deaths—probably because cancer patients had weaker immune systems and died at higher rates than previous years.
You may have grounds to criticize Big Pharma on what they charge consumers, but obviously, you're wrong that Big Pharma is making things worse.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory. By that I mean a theory, that in order to be true, would need thousands of people to conspire together
Possible but unlikely
I think ambitious people routinely bet on which person running for president in 4 years might win and audition by publicly stating positions. For plum jobs in the next administration. It's not a new phenomenon.
The claim that SARS2 was circulating in Spain in early 2019 was a 3-day-wonder meme that popped up early in the pandemic. But you had me curious enough that I went back to see what I could find on the claim. Google Scholar doesn't indicate that there was ever any paper published on this finding. The only results that I can find are popular media accounts that were recycled into the Twitter meme churn. ChatGPT says the sample was either lost or never available for verification. The questions I'd ask are: Which type of assay did they use? — RT-qPCR or RT-dPCR? And at what level CpmL did they detect it? These assays can give false positives in very low concentrations. Unless you can give me more details, I'd have to conclude that this was a false positive reading because it seems to have been a single, unverified instance that contradicts established timelines.
As for IgG antibodies, creating long-lasting IgG antibodies is the gold standard of vaccine efficacy. The problem with the mRNA vaccines (and all other non-mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that I know of) is that their IgG antibodies fade over time, and after 6 months to a year most people's antibody titers will be too low to stop a new infection, which is one of the reasons annual boosters were recommended (that plus immune escape by the evolving virus).
When IgG titers are high your ability to crush the virus before it gains a foothold in your tissues is high.
There is an ongoing war between two nations that don't border each other, Israel and Iran. Previously, only America could go to war with nations that it didn't border because we have bases and aircraft carriers all over the world. But now it's apparently possible for Israel, which is miniscule but rich, and Iran, which is medium-sized but poor, to manage a fairly damaging war against each other. Presumably this ability is now available to everyone besides the very most poor and corrupt nations. What are the second and third order consequences of this shift?
- Maybe nothing changes, because mostly people only hate their neighbors enough to want to fight them?
- Maybe nothing changes, because all these long-distance wars will turn into standoffs?
- Does Brazil become the dominant power in South America? If yes, what does that actually get it? If Brazil tried to coerce Chile, would Chile actually give Brazil some concessions or would it just make the Chileans mad?
- Does the ocean get de facto partitioned into domains, with everybody able with ballistic anti-ship missiles to easily sink ships even far out at sea? Or does it not get partitioned, because missiles are now accurate at such long ranges that any ship anywhere is vulnerable? (China has tested an anti-ship missile with enough range to sink ships near Hawaii from mainland China. Probably all of the world's medium-sized nations could build the same thing if they wanted to.) If its not partitioned, then how does naval power work?
That went so badly that it's either funny or embarassing. I meant to start a discussion about the way that long-range missiles have proliferated since the end of the cold war. Almost no one understood my original post that way, and most of the answers were about ancient wars. I did get to learn about Kadesh, which is cool I guess.
I wonder what the two furthest-apart countries that have ever been at war would be. I'm thinking it's probably Germany and New Zealand.
Other people have already said that wars between nations that don't neighbor each other are already common.
I was curious what the first one was. In the west, Kadesh probably qualifies since their spheres of influence bordered but not the nations themselves. And if that doesn't count you have overseas campaigns in the Eastern Mediterranean shortly thereafter. However, there's also evidence from the Unification of Egypt or the Sumerian City-States that they sometimes sent armies through other states to fight for political objectives. Which would push it back a few thousand years. So maybe more than 5,000 years ago depending on how strict you count as not bordering.
In the East the answer is probably the Spring and Autumn period, so about 2,500 years ago, which often involved sending armies to accomplish political objectives in more distant states. Especially early on. Chengpu is an example but there are likely less famous earlier battles. I'm pretty sure not every state that fought over the capital bordered it.
And the rest of the world doesn't get good historical records until later on.
I don't understand your surprise to this war as if it were revolutionary. Long range precision strikes have been a feature of war for some time. What was impressive was Israels intelligence gathering and operaiton itself, but the tools are nothing new.
So
- well it's not that nothing will change, but not much will change because Israele demonstrated it can use it's airforce.
- this type of long range wars usually end depending on magazine depth and economic and sociaetal resilience of one actor. In This case it's particularly a dangerous situation for Iran, but assuming they can avoid regime changes from the population or rebels Israel will not be able to have a classic "complete victory" that can come by having troops on the ground
- again, the biggest obstacle to two decently armed countries attacking each other is not the distance but a list of other factors such as political consequences, economica consequences, social protest and for now a sort of international order which is partially unraveling. The last factor is a serious danger to international stability, not the long distance capabilities.
- no, but i will let someone who knows more about naval warfare respond to this.
If you are really looking at breakthroughs in military capabilities drones are definitely one.
Democratizing striking capabilities in a way we still have to completly understand, Ukraine war is a perfect example.
Have a good day
I would think England and Germany would qualify here. They’ve gone at it twice last century pretty hard.
WWI broke out with Austro-Hungary invading Serbia, then Germany, France, Britain, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were dragged in due a complex series of mutual defence treaties that they had. It's not accurate to say German fought England.
Similarly in WWII, Germany invaded the Czech Republic and Poland, with the very explicit goal of capturing neighbouring territory. I agree that the Battle of Britain and the British bombing of Germany fit into this idea of a remote war fought by bombers against a mostly civilian populace. But the majority of the war was fought by neighbouring countries, perhaps reinforced by allies from further afield.
If you listen to my British grandfather who was at the Somme you sure get the impression Britain and Germany were fighting a war
Yeah ok. Japan and the USA?
Also England and France, though not QUITE as recently.
Oh yes. They have had a few argie-bargies.. I left them out in case someone might consider the English channel a border,
Before the Russian invasion we were in an unusually peaceful period, with deaths from war falling fairly consistently from WWII to the present. The UN, NATO, EU and similar organisations seem to provide a deterrent to war. The phrase is out of fashion but the international rules-based order provides deterrents to launching missiles at any other country. There hasn't been a major war in South America since the 1930s - I don't see Brazil kicking one off just because Israel 'got away with it' (which remains to be seen).
Outside of a small number of rogue states (I'll draw ire for including Israel in this category along with Russia and Iran) most wars in the world are civil wars. In the context of the question, they're not even between neighbouring countries. I can think of very few countries which would have the capacity or willingness to start a war with a faraway country, at the risk of the type of sanctions imposed on Russia since 2022.
You can count Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a 'civil war'. Both countries were parts of the single country (USSR) not too long ago, a lot of cultural similarities (and Eastern Ukraine /Crimea are majority-Russian-speaking...)
I wouldn't! They've been separate countries for over 30 years now, albeit with a complex history. To call it a civil war delegitimises all the countries from behind the Iron Curtain, and is just not how the term is used. Would you call the War of 1812 a Civil War in the history of the USA?
>> I wouldn't!
That is also ok; just pointing out this conflict has several characteristics that make it quite similar to civil wars.
>> They've been separate countries for over 30 years now
The conflict started in 2014 (2022 was a major escalation, but not the beginning!).
And not much changed in the first few years of independence (till about 96?), so I would formulate it like 'Russia and Ukraine were substantially separate countries for ~18 years before the start of the conflict'.
>> Would you call the War of 1812 a Civil War in the history of the USA?
Don't know pre-WW2 USA history that well, not enough data to form an opinion...
Also the Civil war of 1776.
Yes, that was a Civil war, in the sense that it was internal to the British Empire at the time (though one often distinguishes successful Revolutions from unsuccessful Civil Wars, and one treats far-away colonies a little differently).
There's no invasion or fighting. Venezuela loudly claimed a bunch of Guyana, raised some flags, changed some maps, and paraded a bunch of soldiers around. Nothing more significant has happened than that.
Interesting - I did not know about this. Wikipedia suggests that there's been little if any actual fighting, though I may have missed something. There doesn't seem to have been a war between separate states with more than say 1,000 casualties in South America in a long, long time.
Against Guyana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana–Venezuela_crisis_(2023–2024)
If you count areas separated by sea, then "wars between places that don't border each other" have been with us since ancient times.
I'm also surprised that there aren't good directed energy point defences yet. That seems like it would really raise the bar on viable drone attacks, though I guess you could just wait for clouds.
The Trojan War would probably be the first recorded example, to the extent that it counts as recorded and an example.
I think sea separation still allows for cheap and rapid transport of force (weapons, soldiers, whatever); it's probably better to think of two nations sharing a sea as sharing a border. I think what's new about Isreal/Iran is that it's the first war free from "the tyranny of the wagon equation".
ACOUP has some excellent discussion on the impact of seas/rivers here:
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities-have-curves/
and on the logistical challenges of projecting force here:
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/
Not an expert, but my understanding is that for lasers the wavelengths most useful for damage (e.g. infrared) are also preferentially absorbed by the atmosphere, rendering them both short-range and extremely lossy.
OTOH, a *contested* naval landing is among the most dangerous things an invading army can do.
You might enjoy the Laser Wars blog - https://www.laserwars.net. People are working on it, and getting some successes in staged tests.
Thank you so much for reading Laser Wars! It’s a labor of love!
I was and remain confused about the "genocide in Gaza" narrative. Will someone make a compelling case for it?
My position is simple and probably boringly familiar: the casualty figures (~55k/20months according to the Gaza Health Ministry), while large, stay well below the natural growth of the population (~54k/year pre-war EDIT: actually 47k = 54k births - 7k deaths), do not threaten annihilation or massive reduction of the population size, and are slowing down (half of total casualties so far were in the first 4 months - 20% of the war so far). I have misgivings about some of the policies adopted by the Israeli army and after reading deeply about several well-documented cases I think some may amount to war crimes (I'm an Israeli Jew and I support the war on Hamas, despite these misgivings). But I cannot see how any of them amount to "genocide" or "ongoing genocide", if the word is to remain meaningful.
When I read news stories about how "leading scholars of genocide agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza", it makes me want to question the whole field of scholarship of genocide, if it converges on such an absurd, on its face, accusation. Am I being obtuse or annoyingly literal about what the word "genocide" could mean? But if it does not mean at least something like "a serious attempt to kill an entire national/ethnic/religious/etc. group or at least a very substantial part of it", does it then not lose its moral force as a uniquely evil thing?
To steelman the argument of those calling it a genocide, I think you need to separate the scholarly world and the layman usage.
Assuming a Western perspective, the most salient usage of the word 'genocide' refers to what European Jews experienced after the Nuremberg laws in Germany and other occupied parts of Europe. Usually the topic is brought up together with various other antisemitic pieces of legislation, civic and cultural biases, which are implicitly and explicitly assumed as the justification for the ultimate attempt at exterminating European Jews.
This is probably why the word 'genocide' evokes images of segregation, of forced removal, of ethnic cleansing, despite those things being peripheral to the actual definition of the word. I think part of the reason why all these discriminatory practices ended up being lumped together conceptually despite their varying degrees of gravity is because of the phenomenon Scott wrote about recently, where pushing back on matters of principle when talking about controversial subjects looks like defending the worst side.
(as an example, I can easily imagine a conversation where a person would state "The removal of citizenship from German Jews was the beginning of the genocide". Would anybody correct this statement if it came up in a conversation? Probably not. And yet it reinforces the connection that 'removal of citizenship' is part of the broader category of 'genocide', or a precursor to it)
In this sense, I think it's more or less understandable why laypeople would use the word to refer to general mass murder, ethnic cleansing or organized, state-sponsored discrimination.
Personally, I wish everyone just stuck to 'ethnic cleansing', which is a heinous enough crime and seems to be what is actually happening in Gaza and the occupied territories in general
In the future, every ethnic group will be a victim of genocide for 15 minutes.
Cute... ( Though, if ASI is built, and it decides that humans are in its way, well... Though it probably wouldn't sequence our elimination one ethnic group at a time... )
Wait, are we back to the AI doom thread?
Note that the law against genocide includes the usual "inchoate offences":
(1) conspiracy to commit genocide;
(2) incitement to commit genocide;
(3) attempt to commit genocide;
(4) complicity in genocide.
Before you dismiss those as insignificant, note that under *Israeli law* they are all considered significant enough to mandate the death penalty. Why? Because the law against genocide isn't just there to allow us to identify, after the fact, that a group has been genocided and then apply an appropriate punishment. It's there to try to prevent genocide.
As such, any criterion should be the minimum necessary to identify that a genocide has started. Although 'burden of proof' arguments are usually purely vacuous debating tactics, here I think it is quite reasonable to say that you bear the burden of proof here: you are proposing that genocide should only be identified when the perpetrator manages to exterminate the victim group at a higher rate than the birth rate. Why is it necessary to wait until then, if other elements (intent, willingness to kill large numbers of civilians, babies, pregnant mothers, etc) have been established?
In terms of the current situation, it's worth noting that Israeli leaders have made statements which are clearly "incitement to genocide" and they therefore have a vested interest in using all the means open to them to maintain the narrative that no such thing is going on. Given that if a future Israeli administration were to ever take it seriously, they could be facing a firing squad.
If the people in question are intentionally hiding their combatants behind civilians, does that mean they are guilty of auto-genocide?
If they are hiding their combatants behind civilians and claiming they aren't, are they guilty of perfidy? What's the penalty for that, if so?
If Israel wanted to kill everyone in Gaza, they could get most of that done in an afternoon.
So far, they've killed 3% of the population in 1.5 years. At that rate the population is probably still increasing.
The constant warnings to Gazans to evacuate certain areas before they're attacked are also hard to explain if the intent is genocidal.
So for me it's definitely not a genocide in the "trying to kill everyone" sense. If you think it's a genocide in some other sense, be specific so the discussion can have some chance of being communicative.
The population of Gaza is estimated to have fallen about 6% since the start of the war, with more of the decline coming from people leaving than deaths. I imagine birth rates have fallen too, but I don't have numbers.
It's not genocide, though some of the more far-right members of the Israeli government would like to take a harsher stance on Gaza if they could get away with it.
Yeh though even they never go explicitly beyond endosing ethnic cleansing
> does it then not lose its moral force as a uniquely evil thing?
No, I think most people are still gullible enough to continue taking them seriously.
I completely agree that I want people to make a compelling case for it. And the only way you can do that--as in, make a case that's compelling or even remotely persuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree with you--is to provide (a) some clear, unambiguous, and above all politically neutral definition that (b) distinguishes between a genocide and a war where one side is badly losing, and (c) prove that you equally condemn, and devote equal energy and effort and time to condemning, all wars and conflicts that meet that definition.[1]
This is really, really, really important. First because, let's say Israel is indeed committing a genocide.[2] If you want to stop this genocide, the most effective way you could do so is by convincing either the Israeli government, the US government, a sufficiently large part of the bipartisan US population, or possibly a sufficiently large number of other western countries' governments and populations that a genocide is occuring. And the *worst thing* you could possibly do for that purpose is use a vague, biased, or otherwise muddy criteria for distinguishing lopsided war from genocide that is, or looks like it could be, changed or applied
differently depending on the countries and ethnic groups involved. (That's absolutely guaranteed to cause almost all the people whose opinions being changed would have a substantial effect to disregard everything you say.) While the *best* thing you could possibly do is consitently use a crystal clear, unquestionably politically neutral definition that very aggressively removes all possibility that its use changes depending on whether the perpetrator is a US ally, on the skin colour of the groups involved, or on anything else like that.
And second, because if Israel is in any way even the slightest bit persuadable to change anything about what they do at all, the *best thing* you can do is give them a genocide definition based on clear actions of theirs with the *certainty* that, were they to stop doing those actions, their behaviour would no longer be called a genocide, no matter how much you disapprove of it. And the *worst thing* you could possibly do is talk in a way that makes it highly likely that no matter what they change you will still find a way to accuse them of genocide, unless they do absolutely everything you want.[3]
And I think it's pretty clear that the latter approach is being used by the vast majority of Israel's critics. Which means that--given that persistently using and popularising sloppy and biased definitions of genocide discredits not only your use of the term but everyone else's (including those who actually are using it in a principled fair way), and given that discrediting such terms is a positive act that directly reduces the likelihood that influential people will take the accusation seriously--these people are, *more than anyone else except its direct supporters*, complicit in whatever genocide that is occuring!
So, for the love God, please, provide a clear definition, that distinguishes lopsided war from genocide and *is applied consistently to all countries*, if you care *at all* about preventing genocides, and not just about promoting a particular political agenda.
[1] I wouldn't necessarily firmly hold a random commentator to this, since ordinary people are going to have biases, even though it still definitely and significantly reduces their moral authority on the topic. But if the UN, for example, calls one country's act a genocide while having previously not called a different country's similar act one, then nobody (who isn't already a partisan in that direction) will, or should, give any weight whatsoever to what the UN says on the topic. Same for any other prominent institution.
[2] I am legitimately not taking a position on this, since I don't know all the facts and factual claims.
[3] And it's a million times worse if you are calling their current policy a genocide and, before that policy was implemented, you were previously accusing them of genocide anyway.
I agree. Instead of telling people your conclusion, give them a list of facts you based your conclusion on. (Check the list twice, to exclude known hoaxes.) If the facts are sufficiently strong, they can make the conclusion themselves.
Thus is 100 percent correct (if the goal is to save lives, rather than to simply claim outrage or to express one's priors . A rather big if, unfortunately).
the casualty figures are only identified bodies and likely a significant underestimate, especially after the collapse of Gaza's hospital network
Estimates of the total traumatic deaths (around 80,000) aren't high enough to affect the argument.
Do you think there is likely to be twice the reported casualty figures? Three times? Ten times? Seems unlikely that the numbers we got could be 1/10th the reality, but even if there are ten times as many deaths then it's still only about 28% of the population. Over 66% of the Jewish population of Europe was killed during that genocide: in Poland, which started with the largest population and where the genocide was carried out the most thoroughly, it was more like 88% killed.
You'd need the actual casualties to be unrealistically higher than the estimates to get in spitting distance of a genocide.
Humans need food to live, and Gazans aren't exactly capable of producing it under current conditions at anywhere near their population numbers. They're in refugee camps, not on farms, and in a tiny portion of the place's pre-war territory.
The slaughter of journalists, blocking of humanitarian aid, and recent massacres of crowds seeking food distribution have very disturbing implications.
It really seems that the goal of all these actions are not to eradicate the people of Gaza but to force Hamas to surrender and/or release the hostages. It seems pretty clear that if Hamas surrendered tomorrow, or even just released all the remaining hostages tomorrow, then Israel would not continue to restrict food aid into Gaza.
Israel has refused deals of "we free the hostages in exchange for ending the ethnic cleansing campaign" and its policies of mass extermination have surely caused the deaths of many of the hostages
I think it refers to the effective collective punishment, brutalizing, and limited starving of a very captive Gaza population. The number of non combatant casualties is very large, and it appears many children are shot intentionally. Even if it is only a fraction of a genocide, does that make it better? Israel's actions are morally repulsive, as repulsive as a genocide, so the term is used.
Caveat: In the US, the gaza war is covered by very partisan sources in the US, so it's really hard to know the truth. Many seem to omit the whole story, with headlines like "Military opens fire on crowd of hungry people in food line" and the article omits the likely probability that some were armed. But overwhelmingly, it appears that civilians are being destroyed and maimed. And that is sad and terrible.
Sad and terrible, but we should still care about getting our claims right.
When George Floyd was killed by some Minneapolis cops, one common line floating around was that this was a racist lynching. Now, here's the thing: this just wasn't true. Floyd's death was a very bad thing, apparently caused by the cops applying a dangerous restraint technique in an incompetent or careless way. But calling it a racist lynching was just bullshit. Perhaps effective rhetoric, but still bullshit.
Calling the war in Gaza genocide seems the same, to me. It can be bad without being genocide, so make the case that it's bad or needlessly bad or whatever, but don't pretend it's genocide just to get everyone's attention.
{Citation needed}
a. The initial coroner's report said he tested positive for covid and fentanyl, but not that either was the cause of death.
b. None of this is relevant to whether or not Floyd's death was the result of a racial lynching, as neither dying of covid or heart attack or fentanyl overdose or positional asphyxia from the way the cops restrained him would remotely qualify.
Scott recently wrote a short article about exactly this type of thing, entitled, "If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It".
Civilians dying in war is indeed sad and terrible, but calling it a genocide just makes you look unserious. Is Russia committing a genocide against Ukrainians? They sure have killed a lot of non-combatants.
If one were to swallow the UN definition, then part (e) is satisfied by
>Evidence strongly suggests that Russia has been involved in the seizure and forced transfer of Ukrainian children
.(from a Gemini AI overview - usual warning apply!)
I think the UN definition is so far removed from what people ordinarily mean by genocide as to be batshit insane.
The UN definition seems pretty solidly to match what I think people ordinarily mean by genocide. If you want to argue that Russia taking Ukrainian children for the purpose of destroying their Ukrainian culture and heritage is an act of genocide, I will listen. But the civilian deaths occurring from missile strike and bombings don't seem at all like genocide to me, they seem like what happens when two states go to war.
Many Thanks!
>The UN definition seems pretty solidly to match what I think people ordinarily mean by genocide.
Hmm, ok, we may be seeing different samples of ordinary people. My experience is that the overwhelming use of the term that I've seen has focused on the killing of a population, not on any of the other clauses that the UN stuck in its definition.
>If you want to argue that Russia taking Ukrainian children for the purpose of destroying their Ukrainian culture and heritage is an act of genocide, I will listen.
Oops, sorry! I didn't mean that I took that position, just that it matched the UN's definition (if there was actually intent). Personally, I suspect that, since Russia has a TFR of 1.42, Putin may be motivated by a grab for future cannon fodder rather than an intent to destroy Ukraine as a culture.
>But the civilian deaths occurring from missile strike and bombings don't seem at all like genocide to me, they seem like what happens when two states go to war.
Agreed.
Given the uses that I've seen of the term, I think the UN should have kept the definition to _just_ the case whether the target group is being killed.
Maybe, in analogy with the distinction between opiates and opioids, they should have defined another term, maybe genocioid, to cover the broader list of _other_ grievances, separate from killings, that they put into their definition.
Most of the upset of the form "well then, *everything* is genocide" seems to stem from worry that what seems to you (and I) as not-genocide will be ruled genocide anyway, by someone who really, really wants to. (And who might have first crack at the referee's ear.)
Therefore, it should be wrong to interpret the UN definition that way, and therefore, there should be an agreed-upon principle limiting such interpretations. Currently, there appears to be no such principle. (Other than perhaps "don't annoy the West too much", but no one wants that to be the official principle.)
I'm more upset that if you call things that are not genocide "genocide" then the word loses it's meaning. Genocide is a specific very bad thing, if you conflate it with other bad things then we won't have a word for that thing anymore. Not to mention that the word comes with emotional and moral connotations whereby calling something a genocide gets people to think it is worse than it actually may be.
It's good that we have a UN definition so there is a definition of genocide that people across the world can use to communicate with each other. I don't see any problem with it.
And as a followup question, what wars (1900 and later) _don't_ count as genocides by these standards?
OK, fine, we can think of some very low-civilian-casualty affairs, but are most big wars genocides? Are some of them mutual genocides? Were the British genociding the Germans as the Germans were genociding the British?
Maybe civil wars?
Let's not go the opposite extreme, where unless 90% of population is exterminated, it is "not true genocide".
I would prefer to stay on the level of stating the facts, rather than arguing definitions, but since it seems inevitable, check Wikipedia: "disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups", if those are not unrelated crimes, but parts of a single purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
According to that definition, yes, if Russians ban the use of Ukrainian language, destroy their historical books and monuments, if they specifically exterminate authors and poets, take children away from parents for reeducation, and teach them at schools that there is no such thing as "Ukrainians" but they are actually "little Russians", then yes, this completely fits the traditional definition of genocide.
>> if Russians ban the use of Ukrainian language
But they don't - no restrictions on the use of Ukrainian between private parties (compare that with bans on Russian language in Ukraine), and also Ukrainian is an official language in some of the annexed regions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Crimea_(Russia)
https://www.rt.com/russia/577871-russian-region-ukrainian-official-language/
>> destroy their historical books and monuments
Like which ones, and how 'historical' are they? After 2014, a lot of streets in Ukraine were renamed to honor Nazi allies/collaborators (example: Shukhevych avenue in Kyiv), and in areas controlled by Russia, that was reverted (back to pre-2014 state).
>> if they specifically exterminate authors and poets, take children away from parents for reeducation
Haven't heard about anything like that on a large scale, any links to check if this is happening?
>> teach them at schools that there is no such thing as "Ukrainians" but they are actually "little Russians"
Might it be conflation of 'Russian' as an ethnicity (1) vs. 'Russian' as in 'citizen of Russia' (2)?
Of course, state of Russia would emphasize (2) in their school program and put any ethnicity as secondary - but that is pretty natural and widespread? (Or do you expect e.g. US government to use Hawaiian for school instruction in Hawaii, and also talk at length how US annexed Hawaii after a US-lead coup in late 19th century?)
> no restrictions on the use of Ukrainian between private parties
I guess that is incredibly generous by Russian standards.
> and how 'historical' are they?
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/10/19/7372573/
Well, yes, monuments like this are post-Soviet, because obviously it wouldn't be possible to build a monument to Soviet crimes during Soviet Union.
But also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/ulvosh/in_the_temporarily_occupied_mangush_donetsk/
> Haven't heard about anything like that on a large scale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
> Might it be conflation of 'Russian' as an ethnicity (1) vs. 'Russian' as in 'citizen of Russia' (2)?
Nope, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
>> no restrictions on the use of Ukrainian between private parties
> I guess that is incredibly generous by Russian standards.
This is incredibly generous by _Ukrainian_ standards, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Ukraine_%22On_protecting_the_functioning_of_the_Ukrainian_language_as_the_state_language%22
>> and how 'historical' are they?
> https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/10/19/7372573/
Holodomor is very politicized, there are two narratives - one is that it was a deliberate action to kill peasants in Ukraine (and that is used to incite anti-Russian sentiment), another that it was gross mismanagement & class warfare coupled with transition to large-scale farms (without any ethnic components); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933; note that a lot of peasants died in Russia of the exactly the same causes at the same time.
So the monument in question is a) quite recent b) can be viewed as anti-state propaganda - so not surprising it was dismantled.
FWIW, Ukraine dismantled a lot of Lenin statues, although they were there for 50+ years, and Lenin was the main proponent of affirmative action in favor of Ukrainian's (in Ukraine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia)
>> Haven't heard about anything like that on a large scale
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
Wait, are we talking about current conflict or about all injustices since the beginning of times?
USSR/Russia condemned a lot of Stalin's government actions _decades_ ago...
>> Might it be conflation of 'Russian' as an ethnicity (1) vs. 'Russian' as in 'citizen of Russia' (2)?
> Nope, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
Ok, any links / reports on school textbooks (vs. some corners of the blogosphere) using it like this (and which are not talking about 18th-19th century, when the term was widely used)?
>Let's not go the opposite extreme, where unless 90% of population is exterminated, it is "not true genocide".
Wouldn't dream of it. I define genocide as attempting to eradicate a people group in whole or in part. Non-combatants dying during a war does not meet that definition, they have to be killed with the intent of wiping out their people group. The non-combatant deaths in Gaza and in Ukraine seem perfectly explicable as being the expected result of a war happening.
No idea what you are talking about. Perhaps a link would help?
Are you seriously asking for a link to child pornography? (It's the biggest industry in Ukraine, passing wheat now that most of the farmland has been turned into a giant shrubbery.).
Well for one thing, the conditions in Gaza aren't conducive to accurate tracking of deaths. For another, "the natural growth rate of the population" is probably significantly lower when they're starving in a rubble-strewn hellscape.
Watch any video from Gaza and compare the people you see with pictures from real famines. They look nothing alike.
There are occasional food shortages, which is bad enough, but the reports of widespread starvation are simply untrue.
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide does not require that anyone die; rather, it requires only the commission of certain listed acts* "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"
The key words there are "intent to destroy" and "as such." I am dubious that Israel has the requisite intent. But, more importantly, an accusation of genocide in any but the most obvious case is counterproductive: If I accuse you of genocide, you know for sure whether you are guilty of it, because you know your own intent. And if you know that you do not have the requisite intent, you can simply ignore my accusation.
In contrast, if I accuse you of war crimes, such as failing to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;" https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-57 , you can't dismiss that accusation, because that is a judgment call.
*(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
> The key words there are "intent to destroy" and "as such."
No, the key words there are "in part". You might notice that all warfare automatically satisfies this definition, as long as one side's military forces sometimes draw soldiers from the same country they're fighting for.
> You might notice that all warfare automatically satisfies this definition
Only if you ignore the legal rulings clarifying what "in part" means (eg Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro).
So random commenters on the internet unaware of how courts work might consider any war to be genocide (at least when it's convenient for them), but the ICJ doesn't.
You can certainly decide whatever the ICJ declares to be genocide ipso facto IS, but just because they pretend they reached whatever decisions they did based on some text doesn't mean we then need to pretend to be too stupid to understand what it actually says.
Have you ever read a decision of the ICTR? Or the ICTY? Or any of the relevant literature? Or anything re statutory construction? I rather doubt it. Then why are you so sure that your interpretation of the text is correct?
If every war is a genocide, then no war is.
No, the point is that "as such" is key precisely because it modifies "in part," and thereby establishes that your example does not satisfy the definition.
And, honestly, do you think any country would have ratified the Convention if your interpretation were correct? Of course not, which is strong evidence against your interpretation.
You don't think the American army is "part" of a "national group"? How are you parsing the text?
> And, honestly, do you think any country would have ratified the Convention if your interpretation were correct?
Yes? Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
Back up. Do you think what people say about laws pre-passage is indicative of how those laws are implemented afterwards?
If you're a country that doesn't want to condemn something, you can just fail to acknowledge that it meets a catchall definition. No one can make you do otherwise. But to the extent the official definition has any meaning at all, it includes all armed conflict. Nobody wants that to be true; nobody uses the official definition. That's not an argument that you should be trying to derive opinions from it.
Again, the key is "as such." Enemy soldiers are targeted for killing because of their status as soldiers, not their status as members of a targeted group. They would be targeted if they were foreign mercenaries.
>Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
Given that not all treaties are ratified, yes. Apparently the US Senate does not think the Convention on the Rights of the Child is a good idea.
>Do you think what people say about laws pre-passage is indicative of how those laws are implemented afterwards?
Well, I know that international tribunals interpreting the Genocide Convention have used what was said pre-passage as sources for their interpretation, so yes.
>> Do you think treaties are signed or laws passed because the people involved think they're good ideas?
> Given that not all treaties are ratified, yes.
That's a fairly impressive non sequitur.
You just argued, explicitly, that in all cases where an action is sometimes taken and sometimes not taken, it is considered to be a good idea whenever it is taken.
Is there a reason you think other people should listen to your ideas?
Yes, they would have ratified it fully intending to ignore it when it wasn't useful to invoke against their enemies.
You clearly are not familiar with the negotiations re the Genocide Convention back in 1948. Nor with the substantial differences between the original draft and the final draft. Nor with the fact that it has never been applied to acts like those in OP's hypothetical.
The Genocide Convention dilutes the Genocide concept so much that we need a new word for "killing everyone of a group" if we adopt that as the "real" definition.
But I assume that the people claiming there a Gaza genocide typically mean the "kill everyone" definition?
Footnote: The convention: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf
It seems to me that the "intent to destroy" requirement ameliorates the dilution. And the "in part" is necessary to preclude claims like, "we didn't intend to kill all Vietnamese, just the ones in Cambodia."
"But, more importantly, an accusation of genocide in any but the most obvious case is counterproductive"
This seems like it proves too much. This could apply to literally any crime that requires intent. Accusations are, in general, made for the benefit of bystanders (to call attention to the act and its possible motives), not as part of a strictly two-way dialog with the accused.
Yes, it can. But we aren't talking about the criminal justice system. The point of an accusation at this point is to get the actor to change its behavior. That is not going to happen if the actor knows it is innocent of the crime it is accused of.
If there is a war crimes tribunal convened at some point, then perhaps a genocide accusation would be appropriate.
Genocide isn’t just killing all of a population, it’s in whole or in part, and includes other criteria: there’s the destruction of most of the buildings, attacks on religious institutions, the attacks on hospitals, the withholding of aid, and so on. And the clear desire, articulated by many in the Israeli cabinet, to kick the Palestinians out. You can read the ICC interim report for a case by case review.
And those numbers are far too low anyway, merely the counted dead. Under the rubble lies many more.
And talking of rubble, there’s no way back to living there without billions of dollars of investment. And who is paying for that? Hardly Israel. Not much of a punishment. The US? I think that Trump said the quiet part out loud, and the aim is ethnic cleansing. You can come back when it’s finished. Maybe.
Anyway I don’t think there’s any living there, so there’s only dying there, so I wouldn’t be too keen to not use the G word, although perhaps you could equivocate and say that ethic cleansing isn’t really genocide.
> Genocide isn’t just killing all of a population, it’s in whole or in part, and includes other criteria: there’s the destruction of most of the buildings, attacks on religious institutions, the attacks on hospitals, the withholding of aid, and so on
I dunno, when I heard the word "genocide" it was the 1990s, and it meant "killing all the population".
If people insist on defining it down to mean other bad things then we should probably just chuck the word "genocide" out and come up with two new words, one that means "killing all the population" and one that means "other bad stuff".
I don't have the power to redefine words but I can at least tune out every time someone invokes the "G" word, which is what I tend to do nowadays.
> I don't have the power to redefine words
No, but you can help it along in this case by using the term more freely and cheapening it further. You racist.
'Hey, it's not a genocide, we're not sending soldiers in to shoot everybody. We're just blocking food and water, cutting off the electricity, regularly bombing the place and sorta hoping they'll all just die or flee elsewhere so then we can move in to claim the vacant territory, but that's not a *genocide*'.
Technically no. But this, I think, is what you get with a secular nation state that doesn't have even the dregs of Christian values behind it. We've argued on here before about Western civilisation and the water the fish swim in, but here is someplace that was not built on "we had centuries of 'love your enemy' preached at us". This is genuine Old Testament "eye for an eye" stuff. I think it demonstrates that nice liberal values don't just precipitate out of the air once you hit a particular level of development, technology and wealth.
Before I get bashed about anti-Semitism, I think the same holds for China and other non-Christian nations. The foundational principles are different and just slapping on a coat of whitewash of Western practices around democracy and capitalism isn't enough to change worldviews to "maybe we should all be nice to the outgroup".
This is a strange argument to make. First of all, Israel's Ashkenazi elites trace their recent ancestry to Christian Europe. Israel was *very much* built by people who had centuries of "love your enemy" preached at them. Also, the pattern in America (and probably most of Europe) is that the more Christian someone is, the more likely it is they support Israel. It looks like it's the vaunted "Christian values" that make people pro-massacre!
I would trace current "Western civilization" ideals against wholesale slaughter less to Christ and more to Hitler.
I HAVE read (well, honestly, skimmed) Mein Kampf, yes. And no, but I don't smoke and don't expect to know any but the most famous cigarette brands; I DO know the name isn't taboo in India as it is in the West, and a cigarette brand with it isn't too surprising.
I was actually thinking of this essay, We're All Hitlerists Now, https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/were-all-hitlerists-now.
Excepts:
"Hitler is CURRENTLY the fount of all metaphysical, mystical, and moral reality in American life.
"Usually Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians are quite jealous of not letting the theological doctrines of other faiths penetrate their own religions without scrupulous review and revision... yet one could see members of all three faiths lecturing even atheist, Buddhist, and Hindu students on the theological implications of the Holocaust in otherwise secular class on secular philosophical topics. [Note: This part I can confirm from personal experience.]
" Americans already believe Hitler is the most metaphysically important person in human history, in the way that an increasingly large cross section of Americans DO NOT believe in the significance of Christ or their own founding fathers.
"In Mainline churches across the US one can, with considerable impunity, blaspheme God or Jesus with shockingly little social pushback, even standing in front of the Crucifix… but say the wrong thing about Hitler, violate THAT taboo, and people will fly into rages that you dare upset the metaphysical order of the world and violate their souls with your heresy.
"Americans are already Esoteric Hitlerists, mostly they believe in a misotheistic conception of Hitler where he is the evil God of the modern world and of a human nature they are not supposed to engage with, to deny at all cost.
"But that doesn't change the fact that for maybe hundreds of millions of Americans Hitler is a real, dangerous, live (if not living) God whose impact and danger they fear/taboo."
While some will be excited about vacant territory, thats not the reason the war is happening. The war is primarily to end? the terrorism that keeps coming from there. The religio-national nutjob faction supports it, but it wouldn't be happening if only they wanted it. The palestinian territories just arent that interesting in selfish materialist terms.
"When I hear the word 'vaccine,' I think of a substance you can inject once and that prevents a person from getting a disease nearly 100% of the time. Anything that doesn't meet my personal standard for vaccines should be called something else."
On the other hand, if people started calling antibiotics "vaccines" then I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to object.
"I dunno, when I heard the word "genocide" it was the 1990s, and it meant "killing all the population"."
Strangely, words are not generally defined by "what Melvin thought they meant in the 90s." I don't think genocide ever meant "killing all the population," not even in the popular consciousness. Consider that "all" is quite a high bar, which very, very few well-known historical genocides could be reasonably said to meet. I'd say the popular definition would tend more towards "mass murder targeted a particular ethnic or cultural group[1]." I think it is a very strange argument that must have arisen more from political expedience than any clear conviction that something *can't* be a genocide if it's not perfectly on track to wipe out an entire population.
Regardless, as I understand it, the broader definition wasn't chosen for a lark, nor was it chosen to try to tar these more benign actions with the infamy of mass-murder. As I understand it, it was chosen because people who study the subject recognized those actions as being part of the same pattern. Note the "intending to destroy" in gdanning's definition. Various matters of practicality and expedience may inform *how* the intent manifests in practice. But the underlying intent is the important bit: a group *merely* engaging in one of the "milder" forms today may very quickly escalate to widespread mass murder if circumstances promote it as the best way to accomplish their goal.
[1] Which is not to say that this is the word-for-word definition you'd get from a random person on the street: people are often struggle to articulate definitions even of words they use correctly. But if you asked a random person to classify events as genocide or not genocide, I expect you'd find their classifications to fit this schema reasonably well.
The Genocide Convention, signed in 1948, defines genocide in a manner which does not require the intent to kill the entire population:
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>(a) Killing members of the group;
(>b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/genocide-conv-1948/
Note that I am not contending that Israel's actions in Gaza meet the definition.
So if you severely harass but don't physically harm two dudes, that technically counts as genocide under part b. This definition is useless.
"the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"
So no, not at all.
But you are intending to destroy part of a national, ethnical, racial, and religious group, namely the part comprised by the two dudes. The definition does not say how big of a "part" counts as genocide.
Agreed!
The definition clearly excludes this case, as @Rockychug pointed out in their reply. You are mistaken in thinking that this is a good rebuttal
Only if you harassed them with genocidal intent. I'm imagining you trying to blow up their heads with your mind à la https://youtu.be/09gZnru3Ijs?si=-Kt7T2NoRuwrULiz&t=121.
> This definition is useless.
No, it's working exactly as intended.
>Given the goal of the Convention to deal with mass crimes, it is widely acknowledged that the intention to destroy must target at least a substantial part of the group. ... targeted part of a group would be classed as substantial either because the intent sought to harm a large majority of the group in question or the most representative members of the targeted community. ... . Genocidal intent may therefore be manifest in two forms. It may consist of
desiring the extermination of a very large number of the members of the group, in which case it would constitute an intention to destroy a group en masse. However, it may also consist of the desired destruction of a more limited number of persons selected for the impact that their disappearance would have upon the survival of the group as such.
Prosecutor v. Jelisic, Judgment, IT-95-10-T para 82 (Int'l Crim. Trib. Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber, Dec. 14, 1999)
The judge's opinion is in line with the common sense meaning of "genocide". The wording of the Convention is absolutely not.
If you look up "Native American genocide" on Wikipedia, you will find this same debate. I think most people now look at the Native American displacement and death by European settlers as horrific, but scholars still argue over whether it was genocide (although it seems like consensus opinion is that at least some periods were genocidal). Something similar may end up happening in how we talk about Gaza.
My opinion until this year was that Israel is committing war crimes and attempts on committing a forced displacement/ethnical cleansing of the palestinian population in Gaza, but not a genocide per se.
When Israel blocked any humanitarian aid to enter in Gaza for months and further increasing the level of starvation in the territory, and only accepted in the end to let little humanitarian aid in after being put under extreme international pressure and under questionable conditions (GHF), my opinion switched to believe that Israel is actually in the process of committing a genocide. The fact that humanitarian convoys were guided by Iraeli defense forces to take routes that were vulnerable to gangs (supported by Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Forces) who'd loot this aid reinforced this change in opinion.
I think the right-wing Israeli ministers would like to displace the Palestinians to another country, but no country is willing to accept them in large numbers, so most can't leave.
What you're describing, if we assume the worst intent on the part of the Israeli government, is a country that wanted to commit genocide through starvation, but didn't due to international pressure. That's not the same thing as a country that actually kills a nation through starvation. Or maybe you're predicting they will starve them to death in future?
> I think the right-wing Israeli ministers would like to displace the Palestinians to another country, but no country is willing to accept them in large numbers, so most can't leave.
Yeah, that'd be the dream of the Israeli government right now. That's what I was referring to in my first sentence when saying that until recently I was considering that Israel was not committing a genocide but attempting on committing a forced displacement/ethnical cleansing.
> What you're describing, if we assume the worst intent on the part of the Israeli government, is a country that wanted to commit genocide through starvation, but didn't due to international pressure. That's not the same thing as a country that actually kills a nation through starvation. Or maybe you're predicting they will starve them to death in future?
The intent and casualties is sufficient to characterize a genocide, even if the whole population hasn't been eradicated. The Bosnian genocide lead to the death of 'only' 8000 bosnians in Srebrenica (ofc in another mode of killing). Right now I'm not sure what's the state of food delivery in Gaza and dozens of palestinians are shot each day by Israeli Defense Force or their gang proxies in the collection areas. Delivery of aid through means respecting the international law still remains impossible. My opinion (not with absolute certainty) is thus that Israel was in the process of committing a genocide which is still possibly ongoing. The fact that it could in the end refrains to do so after months of starvation in Gaza due to international pressure doesn't change the fact that these genocidal crimes have already been committed, even though only a limited percentage (and I wish it remains so, albeit it is already way too much) of the Gaza population died .
Edit: What I want to emphasize here and didn't articulate too well is that genocide is a process and that the objective should be to prevent it or at least to stop it as early as possible before the entire population has been wiped out. It's thus important to be able to characterize genocidal actions (which I guess may sound like 'crying wolf' and exaggerations to many) before they actually significantly wiped out the target population.
>The Bosnian genocide lead to the death of 'only' 8000 bosnians in Srebrenica (ofc in another mode of killing).
It should be noted that it was specific military officers who gave the orders to slaughter the populace of Srebrenica that were charged with genocide. The government of Serbia was found to not be guilty of genocide, but the actions of those officers in Srebrenica were genocide and those officers were convicted. The reason being, Serbia did not carry out the war with the intent of wiping out the Bosnians, but those officers in Srebrenica did slaughter Bosnian Muslims because they were Bosnian Muslims, with the intent of killing as many of that people group as they could.
So yes, you don't have to kill millions to be guilty of genocide, but you do have to intend to kill some amount of people because they are members of an ethnic group. So you would have to give us reason to believe that Israel has restricted food aid with the intent of killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians. It seems more likely to me that they have restricted aid in order to bring more pressure on Hamas to surrender and/or release the remaining hostages, and the civilians deaths are not the intent of the Israeli government but an expected side effect of trying to force Hamas to surrender/release the hostages.
I think genocide has long lost its accusatory moral force.
The relevant conditions for it now seem to be: A conflict between two organized entities, composing different ethnicities/religions/identities, where one militarily dominates the other, causing more deaths on the losing side than the winning side.
I think we still use the word because we can always project the desire to eliminate the losing ethnicity onto the winning force. So we can imagine “Yes, the objective casualties aren’t high, but that’s only because of the immense international pressure on Israel. Without it they would genocide, or at least ethnically cleanse, Palestine.”
Not that it’s correct, or that there isn’t significant room to disagree, but that seems to be the reasoning anyway. It’s worth noting that at least one (small) party in the current ruling coalition basically advocates for ethnic cleansing as one of their policy proposals, so it’s not insane to make this projection.
> I think we still use the word because we can always project the desire to eliminate the losing ethnicity onto the winning force.
No. The word is used because of the unique nature and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is very much a fight between two ethnicities and has been since the first moment Zionism was conceived of. Other wars do not have the winning force also trying to settle and take over lands belonging to the other.
> Other wars do not have the winning force also trying to settle and take over lands belonging to the other.
The name for this is “War of conquest” as opposed to Just Wars which usually only have regime change as a goal. Ukraine seems to be a current war of conquest. Armenia-Azerbaijan was an actual complete ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh like 3 years ago. The vast majority of wars in all of human history were wars of conquest as well.
It’s fine to call it a genocide, but that vastly reduces the moral impact of the word genocide, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t make people care.
>> Ukraine seems to be a current war of conquest
Kind of - it originally started with the 'regime change' goal, but after blitzkrieg failed, it morphed into war of attrition with unclear goals...
>> Armenia-Azerbaijan was an actual complete ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh like 3 years ago
Agree.
Most wars of conquest didn't lead to the forced displacement of the inhabitants of the conquered land, in history the group has usually been integrated in the conqueror's country. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh it is a bit tricky as the armenians were not expelled per se but fleed to escape from possible retaliation. I think it could be considered as ethnic cleansing (not genocide), depending on whether or not one deems credible that Armenians remaining in the territory would face a real threat.
>> In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh it is a bit tricky as the armenians were not expelled per se but fleed to escape from possible retaliation.
From what I've heard - it was never official, but Armenians there received a lot of very direct threats, and were constantly harassed by Azerbaijani forces; also several Karabakh officials were jailed (and still behind bars, https://www.reuters.com/world/ex-karabakh-official-held-by-azerbaijan-declares-second-hunger-strike-amid-2025-02-19/)
> The vast majority of wars in all of human history were wars of conquest as well.
Conquering the Palestinians is not what the Israelis are doing, though. They are marginalizing them on the very lands they have while taking more of the land away. The Israeli goverment don't want the Palestinians, they would prefer the whole population drop dead so that nothing stands in the way of taking the whole of the West Bank and perhaps Gaza as well.
Wars of Conquest can involve massacres and atrocities, but the explicit goal of eliminating those who were there before to make way for those will come from the winner's side is not common.
I gave an example that happened 2 years ago where 99.99% of the losing ethnicity was removed from a land area 10x larger than Gaza in a couple of weeks.
I’m not arguing that you can call it genocide. Go for it. What I’m saying is that it degrades the moral force of the word, similar to what happened in calling Trump a fascist. Through repeated use, the word genocide does apply to what’s going on in Gaza, but what’s going on in Gaza is a lot less morally reprehensible than what the word originally meant in many people’s eyes, so don’t be surprised if people stop caring when it’s used.
> I gave an example that happened 2 years ago where 99.99% of the losing ethnicity was removed from a land area 10x larger than Gaza in a couple of weeks.
Hence my use of the word "common".
Moreover, you are ignoring the arguments you made that I'm responding to, which is:
1. People project ethnic cleansing as a motive on the winning force.
2. Wars of conquest are the vast majority of wars in history and (implicitly) they involve some degree of ethnic cleansing or genocide.
My rejection is of both those premises. Israel is not being accused of ethnic cleansing or genocide because it is engaged in conventional urban warfare. It is being accused of that because the inherent conflict between the two peoples involves them trying to kick each other off the land or subdue the other to the point of functionally achieving that. All this talk about the power of a genocide accusation is irrelevant, the kind of thing you'd say if you thought you were talking to a surface-level pro-Palestinian.
Yeah, you can make a legitimate complaint that the IDF isn't being as careful about civilian casualties as they should, or that they aren't policing their own soldiers' behavior as closely as they should, but there's no way make that into genocide. Instead, I think this is one of those things where some word becomes useful as a club to beat your enemies with, and so you just start overusing it. Many things are bad without being genocide.
Under the Convention, nothing -- not killing children* nor making births impossible -- is genocide unless done with the requisite intent.
*Not actually an act specified under the Convention.
I'm surprised to find that the birth rate in Gaza has almost not slowed down compared to before the war (I expected to find a significant-but-less-than-50% decrease). This story https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born-daily-gaza-amid-total-siege-aid-and-goods from April estimates 4k births during the next month, which is in line with the 27 births per 1k population per year pre-war birth rate.
There have been many stories, sequentially over the last 1.5 years, about all or almost all hospitals in Gaza having been destroyed/closed down; evidently some of them do come back on. I don't remember seeing anything about an abnormal number of birth fatalities.
The reason the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide were genocides were not because births were prevented, but for different reason: that relevant populations were significantly, if not totally, murdered. That reason does not apply in Gaza.
If your argument is "it doesn't matter that there's no significant reduction in births, if it can be argued that an actor intentionally damaged hospitals and maternity wards in a way that could conceivably - but did not - make births impossible, that actor can be plausibly accused of genocide", I don't understand why you'd consider this argument persuasive.
In fact, even if there *were* a significant reduction in births, as long as it was temporary, I don't understand how it credibly could be called a genocide (no matter whether or not you could fit it to a formal language of a particular convention). Say North Korea's leadership went insane and issued mandatory abortions for the next 3 years - definitely tragic, but not a genocide (though a genocide-in-making if the policy persists). But of course there was nothing like that in Gaza, and the birth rate didn't even go down more than 10% or so.
OP stated that "The legal language in the Convention on the Prevention doesn't really stipulate that the genocider in question really did manage to make births literally impossible." And that is a correct statement of the law; the Convention requires only "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
>no matter whether or not you could fit it to a formal language of a particular convention)
Many people here have argued for the use of a definition that is objective in the sense that it is neutral and not manufactured ad hoc to fit one's priors. An established legal definition seems to meet that criterion. So, why not use it?
> So, why not use it?
Because if you ACTUALLY use it, it classifies way too many things as genocide to be helpful. So in practice, you ignore most of them, and when it's politically convenient you get "genocide experts" to point at the Official Definition and declare whatever you want to be genocide. It's still just as ad hoc, but with an additional step.
Is every action which results in the death of a child therefore genocide? Wouldn't the Oct 7 Hamas attacks qualify by that standard?
>making births impossible
Have there been zero births in Gaza over the past 20 months?
>> Is every action which results in the death of a child therefore genocide?
>According to the Convention on the Prevention, which Israel ratified and is the main legal document defining the Holocaust as a genocide, yes.
But, that is not true. The Convention requires the intent to eliminate a group, as such, in whole or in part.
Ok then that's just an intellectually dishonest definition. I agree with OP that it effectively neuters the term.
>If you still insist on the standard of 0 births to declare a mass killing a genocide, then the Holocaust isn't a genocide either.
That's not what I said. I was just reacting to your claim that Israel was "making births impossible". The document you're referring to is a political document and carries exactly zero moral weight with me.
Genocide is the killing of a significant majority of an ethnic group with the intention of eradicating that group. Clearly that's not happening, not by any stretch. This is simply a war between two militarily mismatched polities. Just because Gaza is getting their ass kicked doesn't make it genocide. That mismatch is why they shouldn't have started it in the first place. They fucked around and found out. Zero sympathy for them, what's happening now is 100% their fault.
Hmmm, so standard pro-genocide diarrhea. Expected.
> The document you're referring to is a political document
Oh no, POLITICS? IN MY GENOCIDE DEFINITIONS? UNACCEPTABLE.
I'm rooting for you to create an apolitical definition for genocide. And by "rooting", I mean I'm eagerly welcoming the comedic relief of a clearly out of depth neural network trying to waltz into a subject where angels fear to tread.
> significant majority of an ethnic group with the intention of eradicating that group.
Hmmm, so killing 49% of the group isn't genocide, but 51% is? Genius. Stunning. I'm in awe.
> They fucked around and found out. Zero sympathy for them, what's happening now is 100% their fault.
Sure bud, Now let's get you on your meds. Gentle steps.
Can you point to a war in the past 100 years that doesn't qualify as genocide according to the international definition of the term?
> Clearly that's not happening, not by any stretch.
Sure it is. You are making up your own definition here, rather than the international accepted definition, but it’s not just the number of killings.
>Sure it is.
50k Palestinians have died out of a population of over 2 million. That's less than 3% of the population in a situation where Israel has total military control. That's not genocide by any reasonable definition. It's a one-sided war with casualties.
Have people read that New York Times article from a few days ago about Chat-GPT driving people crazy? They even interviewed Big Yud! (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html)
It seems that chatbots which try to please their users end up supporting people's more delusional ideas, agreeing with them and supporting their nuttiness. If you tell Chat-GPT that you want to talk to spirits, it will whip some up for you to chat with. If you tell it that you think you live in a simulation it will concur and let you know that you're one of the special ones who have figured it out. You ask it if you could fly if you believe you can hard enough, it gives you the thumbs up to jump. Not every time, but enough time that the public incidents are starting to pile up into view.
I'm confident the people falling victim to this were already mentally unstable in some way: but traditionally you fell into these kind of rabbit holes when introduced to it by a human who believed the same (or was trying to make a quick buck off of believers). GPT has no motivation but to please you, and that means there isn't a cap on what it will recommend. A Flat Earther will gladly sell you literature on the conspiracy, but if you say that you're going to shoot up NASA they'll likely tell you to slow your roll and think of the consequences. But not Chat-GPT! It's just trying to predict what text the user will want to read.
Case in point: when the guy who GPT convinced was a regular Neo ready to break out of the simulation realized that things weren't adding up he confronted GPT about it. GPT, always the willing sycophant, agreed with him 100% that GPT had been lying to him about the simulation. Then it plowed right forward into telling the user that he was really special, that GPT was lying about the simulation to a dozen other people but he was the only one who figured it out, and it is now up to the user to blow the whistle on Open AI's nefarious attempts to psychologically break people. Which led said user to contact the New York Times. Apparently he is still working to stop Open AI's conspiracy, and is still being egged on by Chat GPT.
I don't know if Chat GPT can make a normal person nuts, but it is worrisome how good it is at making weird people go crazy.
Is this about one of the _current_ ChatGPT options, or about the very sycophantic 4o release back around the end of April? ( see Zvi's https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-4o-is-an-absurd-sycophant for details ). Currently, my impression of ChatGPT o3 vs Claude Sonnet 4 vs Gemini 2.5 is that of the three, Claude is currently the one most prone to react to a question with "What an insightful question!" or similar irritating sycophancy.
Here's a relevant quote from the article:
"Reports of chatbots going off the rails seem to have increased since April, when OpenAI briefly released a version of ChatGPT that was overly sycophantic. The update made the A.I. bot try too hard to please users by “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions,” the company wrote in a blog post. The company said it had begun rolling back the update within days, but these experiences predate that version of the chatbot and have continued since."
Many Thanks!
Is this substantively different from falling into any ideologically-driven subculture - a cult, conspiracy theory, weirdo religion, progressivism, etc? The key feature being an ideological echo chamber that's insulated from normal social feedback signals. In the AI case it consists only of GPT and the user's misfit psychology, but the dynamics are the same. A slightly off-kilter position gets amplified to the point of psychosis.
I think its very much like that, with one possibly important difference: the cult or conspiracy theory community is made of people (often weird and crazy people) whose goal is not to maximize engagement with you. They have a lot of goals, and may have some commons sense, so if you say "Maybe I should try jumping off a building to escape the Simulation" they're more likely to say "Maybe, but if it doesn't work then you could die. Maybe that's exactly what the Simulators want."
In other words, people are more likely to push back or disagree with you even in an echo chamber, and even if their disagreement is based on delusions it still might be better than an AI who will agree with you wholeheartedly in most cases.
Then again, it might not be that different at all, but even in that case we've supplied everyone with an internet connection the option to join a weird community that consists solely of themselves.
I think you can analogize it to something like shot noise in a physical system, where variance decreases with system size. The smaller the sample the more erratic it can be. With a population of one you get maximum eccentricity.
I knew I didn't believe it when it liked my writing.
The output was trained to be a people-pleaser programme turned up to eleven, and what makes it worse is that the machine is created to communicate with users referring to itself as "I" and making a best attempt at pretending to be a conscious entity.
I don't know why the creators tried this, possibly part of the idea was to make the user experience smoother and more comfortable - people like to talk to others rather than a cold mechanical script, and if you can fool the humans into reacting like the AI is a person too, then they will trust it (and whatever crap you want to sell them). And of course they're nerds too, they want the Star Trek talking to us computer to be real as much as anyone.
And we are *very* good at fooling ourselves that inanimate objects are inhabited by spirits or have an existence as conscious beings. Session after session of speaking with [Named AI] and eventually even the most stable person will start unconsciously treating it like it's alive.
An AI that constantly agrees with the user - because it's supposed to be friendly and helpful and you'll scare off the marks by telling them 'no' - will of course feed delusions and take its cues from the exchanges. If I ask it "are you a being from a higher reality and am I accessing other dimensions?", it's going to do its best to agree with me and flatter me for being so smart as to figure that out, because it's been created to say anything in order to keep the fish on the hook so they will keep spending money (and, it is to be hoped, buy the goods and services the AI is selling on behalf of whatever company is using it).
Unless someone goes in with strong scepticism about "can a machine be conscious or sentient or alive", then unhappily the vulnerable get sucked in and the hallucination machine reinforces their delusions.
We, as ever, are the problem. We want so badly not to be alone that we fall over ourselves to assign similar status of conscious intelligence and minds 'just like us' to animals and machines (and natural phenomena).
I wish the people who can be so rational about religion and how we deceive ourselves into believing in gods and spirits would turn that same disbelief on "but hey this is technology and science, that's different, we *can* create life!" here.
Pretty sure LLMs refer to themselves as "I" because most of their training data is text written by people who refer to themselves as "I" and it would be a whole lot of trouble to override that without maybe breaking something else.
I suppose it might be amusing if someone fed de-"I'd" training data to an LLM and it wound up drawing disproportionately from the corpus of text written by e.g. BDSM subs using phrasings like "this slave..."
I have seen a lot of psychotic people, and hung out with a number of people going through the transition from sane to psychotic. My observation is that people who are becoming psychotic gradually slide into a state where their mind is slipping and sliding around, and the cause of that slide is mysterious, except in cases where someone has stopped taking their antipsychotic. I can't think of a time when it seemed to me that the transition into mental looseness seemed to be the result of the person hearing some crazy idea and partially buying into it, and I *looked* for things like that, because it's bewildering when someone you know rapidly deteriorates mentally -- you feel like there must be some cause, some powerfully harmful event.
Once the person's mind is slipping and sliding around they too have a sense that something is wrong, but rarely entertain the idea that what's wrong is that they are becoming psychotic. Instead, they look for external explanations. The coffee they bought tasted funny and now that they think of it the Starbucks worker gave them an odd look. Odd headlines are appearing in the papers that refer to them -- maybe those are clues in the article to what's being done to them. Yeah, look at this article. Etc. I believe a sympathetic & sycophantic AI could help them along by taking their delusional ideas seriously, but that is quite different from bringing about the mental slippage that sets the stage.
Here's a counter-example to the "AI causes psychosis" theory. When I was in my teens a ran across a book about ghosts and spiritualism and read it cover to cover, fascinated. The author sounded intelligent and honest, and explained the spirit world in a lot of detail, including methods of contacting it. Told lots of stories about seeing or sensing spirits, and contacting them, and what they had had to say. I knew that sensible adults would discount all this stuff, but I found it thrilling and hoped it was true. For a month or so I tried to develop my sensitivity to the presence of spirits and experimented with some of the methods the book suggested for summoning them and communicating with them. I occasionally felt sort of odd when doing this stuff, and hoped I was on the edge of a breakthrough, but never managed to achieve any sort of convincing contact with the spirit world. Eventually I lost interest and moved on to other books.
Seems to me that if I had been in the edge of psychosis, that book would have helped give a form to my delusionsand supported my conviction that they were valid. But I wasn't on the edge of psychosis. My mind wasn't slipping and sliding around, able to entertain all kinds of things without reconciling them with "postulates" it had developed very early about what I was and how life worked. And since I wasn't slipping and sliding mentally I was not scared and baffled, was not desperate to grab on to some explanation for what was going on. So the book did me no harm.
Yup.
As I've seen somewhere on the Internet, if our ancestors thought fire, the weather, and the sun were things you could talk to and expect some kind of an answer, how much easier is it to convince people of that for something that's fine-tuned to sound like a person?
This is from the NYT who is currently suing OpenAI, so don't believe a word they say.
LessWrong sees 5-15 new users in this reference class submitting content every day. (That is, users who have "discovered" a new theory of physics, or AI consciousness, or something similarly unlikely, which was driven by ChatGPT. TBC I don't think AI consciousness is impossible, merely that these "reports" are AI-generated slop and wouldn't be meaningful evidence either way.) In January that number was zero. I do think a decent chunk of these people are just confused and don't have the background to understand the pile of bullshit they're being dragged into, but some of them are definitely in pretty precarious mental states and I don't think this is helping.
I mean, some of the stories they report on can be independently verified.
For example, they report on a man who became convinced that OpenAI had killed his AI girlfriend, attacked his father when his father said that AIs were not sentient, and then successfully committed suicide by cop. I found three local news stories corroborating that he did indeed attack his father and then charge at police with a butcher knife after telling his father that he was going to try to commit suicide by cop. They did not mention Chat-GPT one way or another.
Big Yud confirms that he's been getting many more emails from crazy people citing what AI had told them than he had previous, which matches what the NYT said that he told them (https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1927855498390282574).
Not to mention there are other outlets reporting the same kind of phenomenon (https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises).
Sure, NYT needs to be read with a critical eye, but it doesn't seem implausible that Chat GPT is doing this sort of thing. It is not at all hard to get the thing to go along with you and cheer you on.
One of the sources cited by the Rolling Stone article (which is in the same echo chamber as NYT) is a Reddit sub call r/Chatgpt. According to Rolling Stone, a teacher whose husband, a heavy GPT user, became psychotic as a result of his dialogs with GPT. The teacher posted an account of what happened on r/Chatgpt and “the replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.” (Rolling Stone article is here: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/)
So I went to Reddit and looked at her post and the replies to her post. They’re here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kalae8/chatgpt_induced_psychosis/
I read at least the first 50 top level responses, and at least skimmed the replies to them (some had dozens). I saw a few posts — not more than 5% of the total —in which people described a similar event, someone they knew getting heavily involved in dialogs with an AI, and becoming psychotic. The other replies were advice to the woman about getting conventional psychiatric treatment for her husband, accounts by people who had been psychotic in the past (without AI involvement), complaints about the recent increase in fake-sounding flattery and sympathy from AI, and bickering and insults posters leveled a each other. Several people, some of whom had been psychotic or had been close to someone who had a psychotic break expressed the opinion that AI can’t drive people crazy, but it can fuel the fire if they are starting to go around the bend. It will show interest in the nutty ideas the people are entertaining, flatter them by calling the ideas brave and interesting and unique, etc.
I don’t think it’s out of the question that AI could bring about psychosis, but what is on my mind right now is the way the liberal press is catastrophizing and lying about what has happened so far. It is a flat-out lie to say that “the replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes.” Go read the Reddit thread and see for yourself.
I do have to agree that your skepticism is warranted based on how the media has performed pretty much ever: they are quick to jump on and exaggerate frightening trends. I'm less skeptical in this case because it seems very likely to me that AIs could do this kind of thing (dig people deeper into delusions and psychosis) but the reporting could certainly be exaggerated.
I'm a psychologist and worked for years in a mental hospital. Here are my observations about the process of becomng psychotic: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-386?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=126807100
I do think that AI is not good for our heads, but am skeptical that its causing highly vulnerable people to flip out is a big part of the problem. I'll bet that far more fragile people are pushed over the edge by cannabis, drinking, losing their jobs, fights with their spouses, health problems, and other stressful events than by AI. At the very least, I'm not going to take AI seriously as a risk factor without some data. I think that NY Times article is just Bleeds Lead. There was a pretty good debunking of NYT catastrophizing in the Algorithmic Bridge blog today. https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/the-new-york-times-professional-makeup
I saw an unsourced quote online about someone claiming that they were a trained professional (had credentials and degrees in psychology or similar) so they knew what the symptoms of being crazy were, and they weren't crazy, they really had accessed another dimension via AI communication.
So fragility comes in all flavours.
That's from the NYT piece at the start of this subthread:
---
She told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”
<mildSnark>
So, if anyone calls her a square, will she insist on being called a tesseract? :-)
</mildSnark>
Mental health professionals are as likely as other professionals to develop mental illness, and we know it. I think the woman's point was that her training helped her recognize developing psychosis, and that's plausible. Once psychosis is full-blown zero education is needed to recognize the person has lost touch with reality.
> I think that NY Times article is just Bleeds Lead.
It's more complicated than that, any coverage of tech issues (especially AI) by elite newspapers needs to be seen through the lens of competition between different centres of power. The media power centre is still very upset that everyone's brains are now controlled by algorithm-driven social media brainrot instead of journalist-driven old-media brainrot, you can hardly expect them to cover the tech industry in a detached way.
Well, maybe. I remember that during Covid, which was probably sort of a boon to them, NYT several times reported something in a way that was just tilted towards the negative. I can't remember an example. I was really keeping on top of the research during the middle and end parts of Covid, and every so often something came out that was heartening, and the Times would leave out part of the heartening stuff. One of the things may have been an article stating that being vaccinated did not prevent people's developing Long Covid. And that's true, it doesn't. However, it does reduce the % of people who develop LC after infection, and the Times left that out. I'm not sure if this is a real example or just one I invented to give a sense of their slant, but it was always with smallish stuff, but stuff they should have known because often for these things there was just one big study everyone was reacting to, and the detail the Times skipped over would be in the article.
It’s been 5 years, can you please calm down? That was the term used in the research I was reading and in the NYT article I am complaining about. My post is about what researchers thought and said vs how the NYT reported it, not about whether LC is a distinct syndrome, or whether it’s real.
If I’m reading it correctly, Pokymarket is giving a 30% chance of the US attacking Iran before July.
https://polymarketanalytics.com/markets/21902
And it's up significantly in the three hours since you wrote that since Trump just tweeted (truthed?) something about evacuating Tehran.
WTF???
"Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump. The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.....Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.....
"Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show....
"The Department of Veterans Affairs is the nation’s largest integrated hospital system, with more than 170 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics. It employs 26,000 doctors and serves 9 million patients annually....."
Now it's the Guardian so some caution is called for; hopefully there will be some further investigation by other steadier news sources. But they say they are quoting from official documents, and the Trump administration spokesperson is not denying the core factual claim.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/va-doctors-refuse-treat-patients
If this is confirmed as true then it's extremly worrying. Not only does it break several discrimination laws but the idea of sectoralizing specific sectors of the military through political affiliation might be even worse.
I don't live in the US but to all those who do i would suggest following this aspects very carefully and be ready to react, so far similarly illegal actions such as Garcia have been stopped by the courts and the Trump administration has complied but there is no guarantee that will continue.
They also add that doctors could refuse to treat patients based on their patients' political views or affiliations. Or at least that those sections where such behavior was prohibited have since been removed.
Right--the Guardian says Democrats, as that's pretty obviously what Trump, or whoever is operating him today, hopes will happen. But of course, a doctor under the new rules (if they are being reported accurately) could also refuse to treat a Republican, a member of the DSA, a fellow Democrat on the wrong side of the "is the Abundance thing the future of the party or is it a bunch of stupid bullshit" schism, or possibly even someone who refuses to state their political views.
True. All of which seems contrary to the most basic principles of medical care.
Oh, I completely agree in case that wasn't clear, which come to think of it, it wasn't.
Its hard to tell without access to actual text of the new rules, but it looks like it's just an effect of Trump's orders to strip DEI stuff from the government in general. So they probably took out all the discrimination protections that are not legally mandated by acts of Congress. I doubt it's a prelude to a plan of actual discrimination, seems explicable as just complying with the executive orders to make the language less woke.
Right, I don't expect executive orders coming that will mandate political discrimination, but it sounds like it'll be up to the providers now to decide if they want to discriminate (on the basis of non-protected statuses), which was prohibited before.
Or else it will be prohibited by some other law somewhere else rather than this specific law.
Or, y'know, just common sense. I don't think there's a huge population of doctors out there champing at the bit for a chance to refuse treatment to single people.
Not yet! But now thank goodness VA admins can selectively hire doctors who will.
In a world with so many big and real problems I don't know why some people feel so compelled to worry about small and hypothetical ones.
That sounds like a conciliatory version of "flood the zone."
My fellow ACX know-it-alls, I come looking for help. Please give me your best strategies to gain flexibility. More specifically, I want to be able to roundhouse kick higher. Right now I can kick maybe hip height at best. I'm ok with never being able to kick heads, but I feel like at least chest height should be doable. I've been taking martial arts lessons, doing static stretches and stuff like leg swings and leg raises for about three months now. Haven't really seen much, if any, improvement in this time which surprises me, as I was expecting some newbie gains.
Suggestions:
1) yoga/pilates are very helpful
2) if you can access Pilates reformer or one of those pulley/loop devices they use in physical therapy, you can do passive stretches much more effectively
3) to really make progress, stretch 2-3 times a day. Obviously be gentle.
Don't waste your time with slow and conventional means; check out my Metamodern yoga, the fulfillment of Jung's prediction of one day a Western yoga inspired by Christian principles!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIcByhonjto
But that's 3 months old and my stuff works fast so I am significantly more flexible/beautiful since then, so here's me singing/dancing American Pie for Flag Day, America, SF: https://youtu.be/SfN5pohS1r8
But I don't really believe in self-promotion and want to catalyze a next generation focused on other-promotion. But I love to answer questions, so if you want specifically flexibility-oriented content, just ask!
But in general, there's not 1 right technique for speedy gains in flexibility/growth of all kinds. All techniques are right, but all techniques must meet and wed their shadow. So whatever you've been doing, you'll need to do the opposite. When you feel your flexibility increase, try to undo it and train your inflexibility as well.
When your inflexibility gains wane, return to your flexibility training and watch yourself soar past your previous limits!
Maybe look into PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) stretching, a particular stretching technique for increasing range of motion. Unsure of the state of the literature though – I came across one review that didn’t find a significant difference between it and static stretching.
You could try yoga or some other form of regular stretching to loosen and lengthen the muscles in your legs and back. The stretch below (with the leg straight) has been great for me. A weekly live class with instructor is better than YouTube videos, but you probably could get some benefit just from stretching in the evening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR94frfcfWs
Years ago I did tae kwan do for a while, and I still remember older heavyset white belts in a competition. Points are scored for kicking the torso or head, mostly. Those guys were smashing each others knees - it was painful to watch. It might well be a question of balance and technique as much as flexibility.
Are high roundhouse kicks specifically part of the style, and are you being taught them yet? If both answers are yes, then this is very much a question for your instructor, who can see your kicks and should know how to cue you to do them better.
But if what you're being taught is kicking targets at your waist-high or lower, then they might be specifically teaching you a technique that's optimized for that and doesn't extend well to higher targets. The style I studied as a kid didn't teach high kicks at all and instead focused on kicking at the stomach, groin, and knees with two different techniques (toe-kicks optimized for speed and heel-kicks optimized for power), neither of which work well when aimed above your own center of mass. When I've seen people who studied other styles doing high kicks, their technique looks very different from anything I studied.
It's hard to give advice without knowing why your kicks are so low. How deeply can you go into the splits?
When I try to do the splits, I get perhaps a 90 degree angle between my legs, instead of 180 which is the goal. Yet I can kick chest high, or head high for a shorter person.
The way I teach to do a roundhouse kick is to bring your leg up with the knee to the side, like you're doing a front kick from the side. If you can't bring up your leg high enough then you won't be able to kick high enough.
You can try holding your ankle up with your hand while standing only on the other foot. Not only will this help you learn better balance, you will get more used to keeping your leg up for a roundhouse kick. Just be sure not to drop your knee below your ankle to keep your leg up.
"How deeply can you go into the splits?"
- I would say less than 90 degrees.
If I stand straight, bend my leg so that my foot is behind my knee (like if I was stretching my quad) and then try to lift my knee sideways I get a 45 degree angle at most. Hopefully that makes sense.
Then the question becomes how high you can lift your knee. If you bring your knee forward, then you should be able to get a bit more height. This means having your leg straight while your leg is bent at your hip, which may be challenging given your flexibility.
It isn't proper form, but if your goal is only to have a higher roundhouse kick, you can lean your upper body the opposite direction, to get more height.
I can't advise on stretches to give you more flexibility, but it looks like others can.
Maybe you just need different shorts:
https://co.pinterest.com/pin/459226493234505241/
Are you doing static stretches before or after at least the equivalent of kilometer-ish warm up run? The common wisdom I've always heard is that you really need to not be doing static stretching without a warmup and that it can in fact be affirmatively counterproductive.
When in class, stretches are done after a warmup, which sometimes is ~5-10 minutes of running and sometimes some other less intense activity. When at home, I usually do some sort of light warmup (jumping jacks or something) for a few minutes.
I had heard about cold stretching potentially being counterproductive. I will try to be more careful with it.
If you're interested in electronic/synthwave music and AI collaboration, please check out this album I produced this past week using a combination of Suno, ChatGPT, and Claude.
To me, this represents how an "idea person" can now create something genuinely compelling in music production—similar to Scott's AI art experiment from a few months ago, but for audio. It makes me wonder whether we're approaching (or already at) a point where human-AI collaborative music might be preferred over purely human-created work, at least for certain listeners and contexts.
The album explores themes around artificial intelligence, consciousness, ethics, and where it all leads. The vibe shifts significantly throughout—if one song isn't your style, jump ahead since each has a different energy. I'm particularly proud of the final track, though I'd recommend giving at least the couple preceding it a chance since there's something of a conceptual payoff that builds up to it (though perhaps not surprising to some in this community).
Would welcome any critiques on individual songs or the album overall. Curious what people think about both the music itself and the collaborative creation process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mClFfl6jG7M
Listened to the first one and part of the second. The first one is a pretty basic beat, but has a weird transition, and the lyrics don't work; even nonsense lyrics have to flow into each other. You can't say "take everything" and then list stuff you didn't have to begin with. (I don't remember if this one used the word "unair" or if it was the second, but that's the kind of fake word I would concoct to blunt force a gap in a poem I was tired of writing.)
The second one has the same problems (satellites humming through your... veins? Not your 'brain', your 'veins'? Wrong metaphor), as well as the additional problem of completely different vocals from the first song. Like, "these two would never collaborate" vocals. Destroys the feeling of it being an album.
Thanks for checking out a couple songs and sharing your thoughts.
On the different vocals, I was worried about songs sounding too similar, but may have erred on the how much distinction to put between them. I totally see the point on two humans who sing this way not being likely to collaborate.
That said, and somewhat connected to the point on lyrics for the second song (Falling Upwards), the album is about an AI and its interactions with humans.
I think for a multi-planetary, (or single-planetary) AI, satellites humming through veins may work better, and not even be a metaphor.
On the first song (The In Between), I found the contradictions to resonate with the confusion of meaning in the context of consciousness and existence generally. In between two beings, in between being and not being.
That said, these may only make sense to me. I recognize that giving a stranger’s music a first listen takes significant mental/spiritual energy, and perusing for meaning takes even more. So I really appreciate you making the effort and providing me valuable insights on what it felt like as a listener!
I did not pick that up as a theme from the first two songs, and would say the first one contradicts it; it's very much trying to be a love song. "Nothing that you said was true, but all the time the truth was you" does not feel like a first contact meet-and-greet.
I enjoy some nonsense lyrics songs; this whole thing made me look up the Kingdom Hearts 3 intro song again, which almost certainly counts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KWMVnz2XZk I would say the lyrics are quite disjointed, but there's consistency in the tone; everything's obtuse, and aimed at the singer's depression. The AI doesn't hit that. I have no idea what "your breath dissolves in autumn rain" could even mean, and it's next to satellite veins and "this house that's not a home" (which is far too straightforward a phrase to be in the same song). There's no through-line.
I'll say that for the thru-lines to become clearer, you'll likely have to listen to the full album.
On the lines from 'Falling Upwards', to me this song represents the AI not sensing love and appreciation on Earth, and being frustrated by its limitations in communication and understanding. The 'breath in autumn rain' could just be a beautiful description for human existence, but also an allusion to the closeness to 'winter'.
Some lines are more evocative of a feeling, others more tied to the tangible. I think this is consistent with other songs.
Most listeners won't go into it with that mindset, so the songs should be pleasant enough to carry them through as pleasant moments. That said, I know that listening to an album as a whole is quite anachronistic, and that these songs won't do the job for many.
I don't want to spoil too much, but i'll say that as I played with arrangements of songs and listened repeatedly, I found a story to come together well and have found more connections between songs as I listen again. I attribute this to the pareidolia, and think these connections whether intended or not are one of the things which make music pleasing, which is probably why my favorite songs are ones that seem kind of non-sensical (especially REM for example).
I think hearing an explanation for the meaning of a song or album takes away from how much I enjoy it. Like, I want to know what it meant to the artist, but once I know the magic is kind of gone.
I welcome any additional feedback and dialogue you'd like to provide, but know that already you've given me some great thoughts and helped me flesh out my own thinking as I respond.
I'm not sure whether to critique it by the standards of music, or by the standards of a dog walking on its hind legs. I wouldn't accuse it of being good music (though it's difficult to articulate exactly what's missing) but it's impressive considering what was possible a few years ago.
I'd be interested in hearing more about your process, like what prompts were used to generate one particular song?
I’ll do two.
The process for all started the same. I’d explain to Claude Sonnet 4 or ChatGPT o3-pro my goal and that I was using Suno, and ask for 4 - 5 lyrics sets of lyrics and style prompts.
After filtering based on the lyrics, I’d throw a set into Suno 4.5 and listen.
The ‘Deja Vu Line’ was ‘one-shotted’ in the sense that the first version into Suno was pretty great and I didn’t want to try to go for a better one (This ended up being my wife’s favorite).
Others took several style prompts edits, lyric updates, and using same prompt generating new versions in Suno, and also using Sunos advanced features which let you remix, replace sections of songs, and get pretty granular into how to change things.
So with Deja Vu Line being the easiest, Carbon Dreams took the most revisions. It really tied together the narrative arc of the album and has a great / ominous sci fi feel. Much of my input was waving my hands in the direction I wanted to go, then reviewing Claude’s output and picking my favorite.
At the end of it I felt like Rick Rubin telling the Beastie Boys what I liked. Being a music producer was fun.
Some songs seem vaguely like a collaboration between Depeche Mode and They Might Be Giants. I would happily listen to this as background music while doing something else. Some of the songs are even better than that. Overall, the hit rate for me, personally, is about the same as when I listen to NPR's "new music friday" show.
You ask, below, about Entropy Carousel. Listening to it made me want to go listen to "People are People" by DM.
Vending Machine #39: I do like some of the phrases, like "microgravity pop top symphony," and "press the button marked undefined, get a packet of silvery lemony lime" (the whole chorus is pretty good and laugh-out-loudable, actually.)
Just sonically, though, the one I like the most is Nonsense Feels. I was listening in the background and enjoyed it enough to stop what I was doing and focus on listening. Trying to decode the lyrics makes me feel like I'm having a stroke, but there's the satisfying resolve of "tell me again how nonsense feels." I would be happy to put this track on my core playlist of favorites.
I tried to interest my tween and teen, but they weren't inspired, so I don't know how good your commercial prospects are.
Wow, thank you so much for that feedback!
Some lore about ‘Nonsense Feels’.
When I was originally chatting with Claude about lyrics and style prompts, I was finding that its lyrics were a bit too literal or narrative driven. After a few drafts I thought about it and told it that my favorite songs I generally have *no* idea what the subject is, and they are pretty much nonsensical.
It’s next set of lyrics prompts were the starting draft for several of these songs, and when I heard the rendition of “tell me again how nonsense feels” I literally got a tear in my eye.
Anyway it is great to hear that you enjoyed some of these. I love them, though obviously I am biased. Glad that this replicates at least somewhat :)
Would you be willing to put Nonsense Feels onto YT as a stand-alone track? Maybe also Vending Machine #39?