goldfish crackers ©

That sounds good, but feminism, for both trans and cis people, is clearly about more than bodily autonomy. How do things like respect and recognition fit into that?

I don't think that's as big of a deal-breaker as you seem to think. You can unroll your favourite recurrent net into a feed-forward net which is equivalent up to a finite time horizon.

An exerpt from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: "Moore famously claimed that naturalists were guilty of what he called the “naturalistic fallacy.” In particular, Moore accused anyone who infers that X is good from any proposition about X’s natural properties of having committed the naturalistic fallacy. Assuming that being pleasant is a natural property, for example, someone who infers that drinking beer is good from the premise that drinking beer is pleasant is supposed to have committed the naturalistic fallacy. The intuitive idea is that evaluative conclusions require at least one evaluative premise—purely factual premises about the naturalistic features of things do not entail or even support evaluative conclusions. Moore himself focused on goodness, but if the argument works for goodness then it seems likely to generalize to other moral properties."

For the non-philosophy-nerds, the "naturalistic fallacy" is an idea in metaethics. It's got essentially nothing to do with the discussion about LLM cognitive capacities or mechanistic interpretability or whatever.

It's pretty weird to read this from someone who insists on using the phrase "naturalistic fallacy" despite clearly not knowing what it means.

Yeah, like even if they lack sentience, it's not for the naive reasons people on here seem to think. Even lack of neuroplasticity is a subtle issue imo. Not at all clear that a human with frozen synaptic weights couldn't be sentient. Conscioussness seems more related to the neural firing timescale.

Text from a Joseph Heath article called "What Libertarians and Pedophiles Have in Common" by Joseph Heath. Text: When it comes to the economy, libertarian arguments always have the same flavour. For example, some people don’t like public health insurance, they want the freedom to choose their own private insurance. And yet the kind of people who make this argument are always the kind of people who would actually go out and buy health insurance. And so on. Another joke to wrap things up: I’m not sure where I heard this one, probably a New Yorker cartoon. It involves a rich society woman in Manhattan complaining about the poor. “I don’t see why they are always complaining about having no money,” she says, “I often go days at a time without spending any money at all.” At this point her husband interjects and says “My dear, that’s because your driver pays for everything.” The moral of the story is that once you have a sufficient amount of money, it start to become invisible. You have so much of it that you lose the ability to see the world through the eyes of someone who lacks it. The same is true with respect to self-control. Members of the self-control aristocracy have so much of it that they take it for granted. As a result, they have great difficulty seeing the world through the eyes of someone who lacks it. And so they spend their days advocating political ideas that would, in many cases, only benefit members of their narrow social class, and yet this never even occurs to them.

From "What do libertarians and pedophiles have in common?" by Joseph Heath.

In this case, yeah.

Yeah, I'm pretty sympathetic to view that the left defaults to man-behind-the-curtain thinking too often, but it's hard for me to buy what WS is here saying given the Twitter/Musk stuff, the TikTok stuff, and the general way in which the right has harrased social media companies into deference.

The last 10 years has made me both really pessimistic about democracy (climate change, covid, immigration, etc.), and also more motivated than ever to fight for it. I square this in my head by favouring extremely "indirect" democracy. IMO we need a lot more epistemic/moral mediation, or we're fucked

"epistemic closure" is going to be the new "begging the question", isn't it?

Ok. I don't want anyone to tiptoe around the topic. I was just a bit confused by the distinction you were drawing, and confused more generally about what the norms are around blaming the collective misfortunes of a group on the actions of its members as individuals.

I don't really understand the difference between those two options, except that the latter rhetorically emphasizes blame.

Ok, fair enough. I don't agree that IR is inessential to communism, or that IR and domestic politics in communist countries are as unrelated as you seem to think, but that's a longer conversation. I realize now that you were making a narrower claim than I thought at first.

I mean, that's only true in the sense that you can argue that any system of government is good or bad on its own merits, ignoring the historical of record of attempts to implement it. I think communists sense that they should be embarassed by the history of the USSR, and they're right.

nominative compatibilism

What an insane program. I can't believe someone made this.

Totally. I feel the same way watching old Byran Magee shows. Incredible faith in the inclinations and attention of their audiences. There's comparable stuff these days, but the audiences are too efficiently selected for. These guys chose to broadcast this stuff to the general public.

do we actually know it didn't work? i'm not sure how we could tell either way.

Not sure if 2012 counts as recent but I never get tired of recommending Plato's Camera.

Whether or not you believe what Anthropic is saying, LLMs are pretty clearly going to have a huge impact on vulnerability discovery/exploitation.

www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/darpa-a...

Getting rid of the carbon tax was totally moronic and also our best possible option. The public has made it completely clear that we will only deal with climate change if we do so using a byzantine collection of inefficient interventions, because we're too stupid to do any beter.

imo it's related to the fact that the SV-backed Trump regime is destroying publically funded science while boosting techno-utopian fantasy. They think academia doesn't do anything, all the real science is in industry, etc., so the fact that Hinton et al. were funded with CIFAR money is awkward.

IMO the root of the problem is some kind of just deserts approach to ethics. We could look to Christian morality for inspiration, or we could just adopt the standard consequentialist agent/patient distinction and use that to insist that the interests of people who behave badly still matter.

Sorry, but I don't think this is really being fair to physicalism. A physicalist like David Papineau isn't an eliminativist or epiphenomenalist. They believe experience exists and plays a causal role, they just think that experience turns out to be a certain kind of physical structure.

There's probably some core material in this area that can and should be taught to HS students (not enough for a whole class though), but I'm skeptical of the project. I think our epistemic problems are due to faulty institutions (eg: the press, social media), not insufficiently educated individuals.

(2/2)

Instead of being taught how to reason correctly (eg: a logic or stats class), students are taught to avoid a big list of thought patterns, many of which are useful in important contexts. They become paralyzed skeptics, saying "correlation doesn't imply causation" to dismiss genuine causation.