Aside from values drift, there’s also acquiring new information. I know more about my immediate needs than I know about what my needs will be next year. Even if my values don’t change, I’m not a perfect predictor.
Karl Krueger
Karma: 1,449
Many popular languages today (notably the C family) ultimately descend from ALGOL, which is from 1958.
“Structured programming”, i.e. writing code as syntactically-delimited blocks, functions, and procedures rather than with numbered lines and GOTOs, was pioneered in ALGOL.
Popular languages today such as Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, and Rust may diverge pretty widely in features (and syntax), but all of these are ultimately ALGOL descendants; albeit with influences from other language families too.
(If your language has
forloops, it’s an ALGOL descendant.)Lisp and Fortran are also pre-1960.
Simula (and thus object-orientation) is from ’62, but influenced by ALGOL. Smalltalk is a Simula descendant. C++ is what you get if you try to build Simula ideas on top of a C compiler (and go a bit gaga for operator overloading).
There are some languages a little later than that, that look pretty different. For instance, APL is from ’68. Forth is from 1970. ML, which gave rise to Haskell, is from ’73.
True; although symbolic ambiguity (requiring a caption to explain) seems to be acceptable.
I thought at first that the current “bowels of Christ” tag meant “gut feeling”; that the “bowing out” top-hat meant “I tip my hat”; and I mistook Moloch as being Baphomet (!) and likely signifying “this is esoteric”.
LEDs strobe when they’re run at less than 100% duty cycle or on a half-wave rectifier. They should shine steadily when run at 100% on DC power.
Though I find the LED shimmer to be rather less unpleasant than fluorescent lamps (classic tubes or CF bulbs), which flicker in time with the AC power and have rather incomplete spectra that make pale-skinned people look greenish and often make an audible hum.
Elephants are also the subject of silly jokes that hinge on their bigness, and their possible presence or absence, e.g.:
Alice: “Why do elephants wear red nail polish?”
Bob: “I don’t know. Why?”
A: “To hide in strawberry patches. Did you ever see an elephant in a strawberry patch?”
B: “No...”
A: “That’s how you know it works!”
The humor of elephant jokes largely centers around the “big if true” nature of an unlikely claim about elephants.
“How many elephants can you fit in a Volkswagen? Five: two in the front seat, two in the back, and one in the glove compartment.”
An elephant. Elephants are famously big, and if your neighbor says they have one in their living room, that’s probably not true.
Perhaps related: I suspect there’s also a skill transfer from music to computer programming. Specifically, I’ve observed a few musicians to have a much easier time learning programming than I expected for an adult with no prior programming experience.
This might have something to do with —
Comfort with patterns, iteration, and structure. If this is the thing, I would expect knitters and fiber artists to have some of the same advantage; I don’t know if they do.
Comfort with deliberate practice itself. Many new programmers get frustrated with the amount of practice and heedfulness it actually requires to get good. Trained musicians are accustomed to acquiring skills and methods through deliberate practice.
A nexus between music, programming, and math. (One of the musicians I’m thinking of also was a math major.)
How about businessmen? Some sources claim that Henry Ford repented his antisemitism in 1942 and took legal action to end the publication of his own most well-known antisemitic work, The International Jew. A few years later Ford died of a stroke (not his first) after being shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps that his (former?) ideology had enabled.
European colonialism often involved clearing a place of its previous inhabitants and resettling it
That’s how the English often proceeded in North America (and Australia, for that matter), but it’s not nearly so accurate a description of how the Spanish did things. Conquistadors aimed more to make themselves lords over an enslaved/enserfed native population, not to wipe them out and replace them with Spanish immigrants.
And there was a lively debate within Catholic Spain about whether it was theologically and philosophically correct to conquer native populations. (Do Christians have an obligation to forcibly stop pagans from committing atrocities like human sacrifice upon one another? Are the pagans “natural slaves” incapable of developing morality on their own? Or must we respect that they have rational souls and can be converted and assimilated through cultural manipulation?)
Okay, good. That’s what I thought, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t making a not-knowing-what-the-conversation-was-really-about error. (“Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about. Got it.”)
Suppose you know that your friend is a brilliant doctor; and also that your friend’s parent brutally abused her throughout her childhood.
A good friend would not say, “The abuse was worth it, because she is a brilliant doctor.”
A good friend might say, instead, “I am glad that she survived the abuse; and that it did not prevent her from achieving greatness.”
It is clear to me that people around me are doing, in addition to a bunch of stuff that is clearly good and might give humanity a shot of navigating the next century successfully, a bunch of stuff that is really bad and is against the good and is not intrinsically tied to the good.
Um … are we talking about capabilities research, or something else?
I mean, if you were to know that a great AI-safety genius was going around committing serious crimes that harm people in the community, then yes, you should be taking steps to stop it and bring them to justice, even if that would impair their AI-safety work.
Your post argues that the evils of American history are exceeded by the good parts of American history; that the genocides and tortures and other evils were “worth it” to achieve freedom and prosperity and other good.
But the evils weren’t a price that was paid in exchange for the good.
The evils were a price that was paid to deny, delay, and weaken the good.
Slavery didn’t support American freedom; it opposed freedom — and it prevented the development of human capital in the slaveholding South. (Name one other place or time in history where it was illegal to teach literacy!) The Trail of Tears wasn’t “the dirty work” to accomplish American prosperity; it was a squandering of American honor for nothing; for the sake of hate and destruction. The Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism wasn’t a price we paid to accomplish some later good; it was a deadweight moral loss. The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII did not, in fact, make the country safer. It did, however, destroy freedom, safety, justice, and wealth for a whole bunch of Americans.
These were not trades; an evil accepted in order to accomplish a greater good. They were evil perpetuating evil; effort expended on behalf of evil and in opposition to the very goods that you praise.
The evils weren’t for a greater good; they were against it. They were not sacrifices paid to make the good possible; they were sacrifices offered to summon up more evil; to resist and oppose the good for as long as possible.
We can go to Washington DC and observe Congress and see whether it does meet in two houses, and whether people do reliably call those houses the Senate and the House of Representatives. If we see that’s actually what happens, then in what sense is the Constitutional provision not truth-apt? By learning what that provision says, we gain a correct prediction of what those people in DC actually do.
Occasionally, a law does become non-predictive. One example of this is selective enforcement, for instance the (real or purported) phenomenon of driving while black. The law says that anyone breaking the traffic laws gets a penalty. If the actual practice were that black drivers get penalties and white drivers don’t, then the law would not predict the practice. This is why the courts have the ability to rule that a law may be constitutional as written but unconstitutional as applied.
My understanding is that the way these words are used in sociology, anthropology, etc., cultural relativism is very much present in modernism. The thing you are calling “modernism” seems to be something else; something more connected to naïve realism, traditionalism, conservatism, reaction, etc.
The resulting goodness was secondary and structurally undermined by the conditions of its arising
One specific example of this is slavery. The founding of the United States involved a bargain between people who practiced slavery and those who did not. The ensuing deal was unstable and directly undermined the peace of the country. A few generations later it led to the Civil War, the most destructive conflict in the country’s history, from which America has not fully recovered 160+ years later.
The country’s ideological and institutional DNA always included both goodness and horrific wickedness. A patriotic view of its history discusses ways in which the goodness has come to defeat the wickedness; and a patriotic plan for its future requires efforts to continue to do so.
“Postmodernism” is a famously confusing term, but I am here using it to refer to the position of “you cannot compare goodness across different societal perspectives, you always have to evaluate a moral system from within that society and can’t make comparisons that aggregate across multiple moral perspectives”. This is of course only one of the 15 things that “postmodernism” means, but it’s the one I was referring to here.
The thing you are describing here is more typically called moral and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism in the social sciences largely originates with Franz Boas (pioneer of modern anthropology) in the 19th century; moral relativism in philosophy goes back to antiquity. It is in any event much older than the various movements in 20th-century anthropology, art, and other fields that attracted the “postmodernism” label.
“They said they want me to do thing!” said Alex with indignity. “I’m not going to do thing!”
“Why not?” asked Bob. “Is it because you think thing won’t actually work, or because you don’t want it to work?”
“Why would I not want it to work?”
“Well, you obviously right now want to not do thing, and if you do thing and it works, you’ll probably have to do it more often.”
Learning about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem really kicked my edgy teenager phase into full gear. The theorem establishes (with mathematical certainty!) that “social utility” is an incoherent concept.
At some point, edgy teens who have learned about Arrow’s impossibility theorem should additionally learn that it does not apply to approval voting.
Approval voting intuitively represents the idea that the winner should be the candidate most broadly acceptable to the voters, rather than the candidate most strongly preferred over others.
Approval voting can be seen as encoding the principle of “government by the consent of the governed” rather than attempting to achieve “government by the will of the people” (i.e. coherent social utility). Arrow shows that there is no will of the people, so instead we can settle for what the most people are willing to go along with.
(Additionally, approval voting correctly records a lot of sentiments that can’t be expressed in plurality voting. It allows voters to express ideas like “I’m fine with anyone except that guy”. It allows single-issue voters to express their true preferences: “Any candidate who’s pro-skub is okay with me.”)
Plurality voting should really be taken as finding not the will of the people but rather the will of the largest one-shot coalition. In contrast, instant-runoff voting finds the will of the largest iterated coalition. Whereas approval voting aims at finding the largest near-consensus, these systems aim at finding several mutually-exclusive coalitions and putting the largest one in charge.
They may also have been thinking of this as a commitment signal.
According to the criminal complaint, he explicitly said so.
“Also if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message.”
This is someone whose open interest in violence was explicitly rejected by at least two different activist groups (Stop AI and Pause AI) from what I’ve heard.
There are other sorts of “bad faith” arguments besides misrepresenting one’s own beliefs.
For instance, an arguer may attempt to provoke you to outrage to make you look foolish in front of an audience, without ever misrepresenting their own beliefs.
Or an arguer may record the argument, and use phrasing intended to get you to speak specific words, then later edit the recording to make you sound wrong, evil, or stupid. Their goal in arguing was something other than to arrive at the truth: it was to produce a recording that could be manipulated to tell a lie. Therefore, the argument itself was in bad faith because of their intentions, even if they never in the argument misrepresented their own beliefs.