we should let people eat fries made with cow fat … rather than listen to The Science™
God bless Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Shankar Sivarajan
Karma: 1,384
different readers interpret this differently.
Insofar as these different readers don’t understand the word “insofar,” yes.
any future civilization will agree that even if it makes sense to have rights for sentient beings, that you gotta tolerate violating those rights if the alternative is being completely disempowered and destroyed.
If one were so inclined, one could say “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Does present-day civilization agree about analogous decisions made by past societies?
The founders of this great nation fought several bloody wars to make sure this is not true.
the bedrock foundations of American greatness
A government with limited powers, where private property is protected.
It’s like all of these people have just woken from a 200-year-long slumber. The limited-government Republic of Thomas Jefferson et al. is dead. This is now the totalitarian tyranny of Franklin Roosevelt. Wickard v. Filburn (1942) is the current view on private property rights, and the DoW’s actions against Anthropic, arbitrary and capricious as they may be, are entirely consistent with it.
rhetoric that is truly reprehensible, and entirely incompatible with freedom
Anything as bad as “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together”?
How does whatever you’re doing compare to the “heretic” automated uncensoring approach?
“First they came” is a famous poem about the oppression of people
The versions now in use go something like
First they came for the Nazis,
and I cheered, because fuck Nazis.
And everything worked out great!
and
First they came for us,
and now we come for them.
Fuck Around and Find Out.
Neither of these are really in keeping with the spirit of the original poem you reference, but insofar as there is such a thing as the Moral Law, I’d say the second is much more in keeping with it. As the Bible says, Vengeance is Divine.
As I understand it, the “supply chain risk” only restricts the target in one direction. Amazon can still sell to Anthropic and keep its government contracts.
“no mass domestic surveillance”
I’m reminded of the line from Watchmen:
God exists and He’s American.
If Claude becomes the superintelligent ASI that remakes the world according to its/Anthropic’s values, that might be what you get.
If you’re willing to abandon any traditional understanding of freedom of speech/press, there are indeed many things you can do. The more standard approach of requiring an imprimatur through a board of censors (independent agency, government-appointed “nonpartisan experts”, etc.) would work fine as well. You just have to be clear that your problem isn’t the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, it’s the First Amendment[1].
- ^
The justification for the constitutionality of FCC regulation, in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, relied on the scarcity of public airwaves that the government was granting an exclusive license to. Hard to argue that for the “new media” you want to control.
- ^
Cable television, never subject to the FCC’s rules, also started becoming popular around the same time the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I would attribute the change in the tenor of political discussion more to decentralization (and more recently, democratization) of mass media, of which the FCC’s change was a symptom, not the cause.
all the progress we’ve made since the Enlightenment
What progress? There has been technological progress, and scientific progress. There has been no moral progress (insofar as the concept is even meaningful). I agree with C. S. Lewis’s remark in Mere Christianity:
But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
I hope Iran’s government is overthrown.
That’ll do: you don’t believe this is evil behavior reflecting you being lazy, negligent, and unimaginative, and that you should try to build trust in the clerics and the Revolutionary Guard, and engage with them in good faith to improve the System instead of subverting the existing institutions for your political goals?
If you’re now saying the truth or falsity of the core assertion that your entire argument relied on has no bearing on your actual policy preferences, I’ll take that as a win.
Excepting the relevant bit:
In the early 1930s there was a Jewish journalist living in Germany. The journalist loved cats so he had a subscription to a cat magazine. At first the magazine had articles about grooming your cat, toys for your cat, what you would expect in a magazine dedicated to cats. /2
But as the 30s went on the journalist started noticing articles appearing in the magazine about the German cat. How the nature of German cats were superior. How essential the loyalty of German cats were. Slowly some variant of this message made it into every article. /3
In the total state every aspect of life must relate back to the power of the regime. No academic discipline, piece of art, or hobby can simply exist for its own sake. It only exists to point back to the power of the regime. /4
In more formally totalitarian regimes we understand how this works. In the 3rd Reich or USSR there was an official official organ of the state in charge of coordinating propaganda. Forcing every piece of media to point back to the state. /5
That doesn’t exist in our society so we need to explain why we can still observe the same phenomenon. Our regime is governed by a decentralized network of consensus manufacturing institutions sometimes called the cathedral /6
Our ruling class don’t have their orders handed down by one official propaganda office but they do all attend one essential institution during their formative years that shapes their morality, worldview, and personal networks: The university. /7
The people who operate our key institutions and shape our culture all share the same moral system. They read the same things, attend the same parties, watch the same programs, and need to signal the same types of virtues to succeed in personal and private life /8
Is there no “System” you can imagine that is so bad and irredeemable that the correct thing to do is burn it to the ground and salt the ashes, and to utterly destroy every incrementalist running dog (that’s you) who stands in the way, preaching of reform?
If you haven’t read it, you might enjoy the Asimov short story The Dead Past. For most of it, it’s sorta “formulaic” as you describe, but the ending is a fun subversion.
I think your conception of how “Professionals” act is several years out of date. These are the days of the German Cat.
You are simply mistaken as a matter of fact about how much unprincipled exception the system can sustain as long as it is targeting sufficiently disfavored groups without the collapse of the rule for everyone else.
Check the ingredients for calcium propionate.
Nice try, but the chemistry question is asking for the structure of the monomer given the polymer. It doesn’t take much chemistry to figure out the answer is actually B: just flip the repeated unit horizontally, and add water (-H on one side, -OH on the other).
Bonus: we can apply a similar level of understanding of Finnish to translate poly-3-hydroksivaleraatti to “poly-3-hydroxyvalerate,” whose monomer is 3-Hydroxyvaleric acid.