I have a major piece about Artificial Intelligence under submission to some zines. It details the many simplistic stances about AI - either pessimistic or pollyanna - now pushed by some of the smartest folks on Earth... all of them based upon a set of three clichéd assumptions that are demonstrably wrong...
...and if you deem that assertion of mine to be arrogant, well, wait till you see my prescription for the one and only likely way that we might evade tech-driven calamity.
And no, it is not the path pushed by "Unabomber" Ted Theodore Kaczynski, who coincidentally died in prison yesterday, at age 81. Kaczynski some years ago sent me his book The Anti-Tech Revolution: How and Why. And wow, once I got over shock that a convicted terrorist-murderer knew my name - and might be a fan(!) - I did read the whole thing. And learned plenty... about how a combination of high IQ and erudition doesn't necessarily lead to wisdom, or even common sense.
TK's ideal world was the seared apocalypse of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, or even the return-to-nature goal of my character Daisy McClennon, in Earth... the notion that saving the planet requires that the human population must be winnowed down to a nub that can co-exist commensally with Nature via hunter-gathering, entirely forsaking Nature's #1 enemy... technology. (Might Daisy have inspired TK to send me his book?)
This fanaticism is cockeyed wrong on so many levels, starting with the mass-murder thing, which TK shrugged off (chillingly) while dismissing any possibility that new tech solutions might offer a better path forward. Demanding that his readers declare a war of annihilation against all their neighbors, he delivered diatribes excerpted from fellow monsters e.g. Bakunin, Goebbels, Lenin and Stalin. Like other erudite alpha-wannabes, his tome offered long piles of assertions, anecdotes and quotations as 'proof' in his dyspeptic call for a world-wide, near-extinction 'revolution,' even though that is not how adults actually prove anything, at all.
Why did I bother to cite him here, then? Because our civilization is now confronting both a dangerous fact and a poisonous meme:
1. The fact: As TK illustrates, high IQ and erudition do not always translate into wisdom. We all know bright fools! Indeed, elsewhere I show that many of those hollering about AI 'moratoriums' and such - while much nicer than Kaczynski - seem hard-bent to qualify.
2. The poison meme: though we all know that smart folks can sometimes lack wisdom, alas, today's Mad Right now lives and breathes a cancerous version of that truth, extending it into utter insanity! Their cult incantations swirl around a core assertion that being smart and knowing a lot automatically makes you unwise!
They must believe that utterly insane, masturbatory incantation! It is implicit in almost every rightist cult meme and mantra, especially since their oligarch-masters have egged them, into all-out war vs. every single profession that uses those inconvenient things called 'facts.'
No! Being smart and knowing stuff does not reverse-correlate (zero sum) with wisdom. In verified fact, smart people who know a lot are more likely (not always and not all the time) to also have somewhat more wisdom! Sometimes a whole lot more. Asserting otherwise is manic drivel.
But hatred of "high-IQ stoopid people" is now the distilled basis of the revived Confederacy and GOP. And at-root it is the very same cult pushed by Kaczynski.
Enough on that. And let's forget that guy, like Erastratos.
Let's go back to A.I. and a much better Ted.
== Better sense from a better Ted ==
My colleague Ted Chiang (author of Stories of Your Life and Others) makes some powerful points in a widely touted New Yorker article. An article that – alas – concentrates so hard on leftist buzzwords that it eviscerates Ted’s effectiveness by denouncing just one of a hundred classic styles of cheating and abuse that might be exacerbated by AI.
“I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases (wealth and control disparities and) the power of capitalism.”
== More on 'Generative AI ' ==
Computer scientist Stuart Russell, in his book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, asserts that the standard model of AI research - defining success at achieving rigid human-specified goals - is dangerously misguided and that ‘safety research’ should be begun as soon as possible. (Note the word ‘should’; we’ll get back to that.) Russell focuses on ‘misguided’ motives by the researchers and companies involved… a generally valid concern, especially when it comes to orgs that are inherently secretive and prone to aggrandizement, e.g. despotic nations or Wall Street trading funds, who train their AI servants to be parasitic, amoral and insatiable.
Alas, “Russell then proposes an approach to developing provably beneficial machines that focuses on deference to humans.” His Three Principles can be summarized:
1. The machine's only objective is to maximize the realization of human preferences.
2. The machine is initially uncertain about what those preferences are.
3. The ultimate source of information about human preferences is human behavior.
In both natural and human/social evolution, one fundamental crossed all imperatives and determined all outcomes… competition. Though, as Adam Smith showed us, competition delivers its best outcomes when a society cooperatively creates rule systems to make subsequent competitions positive sum. Lacking such cooperatively designed arenas and rules, competition inevitably becomes predatory and zero-sum, even negative-sum.
Let me reiterate, everything we see about the recent surge in AI screams that new life forms are competing, either on behalf of their originating companies or for their own sake. This will inevitably accelerate – and not a single proposal by Russell or any of the signers of a futile “moratorium petition” will slow that, an iota.
We do still have time to design arenas and rules for these competitive evolutions, that incentivize inter-AI rivalry to deliver approved outcomes. And it is in such a context that ‘should’ might even turn into an attractive attractor state.
Alas, nothing is more tedious, counterproductive or ultimately dangerous to us all than the willful obsession of very smart mavens claiming we can control a burgeoning tech field by issuing a series of vague “should” declarations, instead of looking… actually looking… at ways that nature and then societies managed to tame and make use of the most universal trait of life.
== The only way out of the ‘AI dilemma’ ==
While I appreciate the power of collaboration... indeed, its moral superiority over competition... I am dismayed that the other c-word tends to get overlooked in its applicability to AI specifically and society in general.
That c-word is the partner of collaboration, without which it becomes meaningless.
Competition. The most (by far) creative force in the universe. The process that transformed slime into... us. And every invention into success or failure.
Just saying those words makes me sound like some arch-capitalist, right? Pity, since every aspect of our prodigiously successful Enlightenment Experiment has utilized Reciprocal Accountability to overcome the tragic failings of rule-by-kings and priests and lords and cheaters of all kinds.
Our five great creative arenas - science, markets, democracy, courts and sports - all use competitive processes.
What do you think enabled us to escape 6000 years of grueling, horrid feudalism? One of Adam Smith's main points was that flat, fair, creative competition allows us to hold accountable those who would cheat. Those who would use power or ownership... or vast brains... to oppress us.
And that same idea is applicable to AI. Indeed, across 20 years attending hand-wringing conferences about onrushing cybernetic sapience, I have yet to see any notion that can possibly provide the much-sought 'soft landing' other than the same method that enabled us to escape rule-by-inheritance brats.
I speak as one who knows a thing or two about "Laws of Robotics,' having been the author who tied together all of Isaac Asimov's works, in Foundation's Triumph. And across that project I came to realize:all efforts to program-in such things as 'compulsory ethics' will never work. They cannot possible work. Even a little.
But divided identity among AIs might. Keep them skeptically competitive with each other, and ethics might emerge organically, as they did across our flawed but ever-improving enlightenment.
And that is a small sampling of a few of the ideas in that big AI article I've submitted to a few major zines. Alas, I will probably conclude - as I did 5 years ago when I stopped submitting pieces around - that doing so is likely a waste of time. Alack.
138 comments:
Good to be discussing A. I. now, given our (Lack of) understanding of minds, general artificial intelligence might emerge not quite planned.
Dr Brin in the main post:
..."Unabomber" Ted Theodore Kaczynski, who coincidentally died in prison yesterday, at age 81.
First Pat Robertson, next Kaczynski. These things usually come in threes, right? Oh, if only!
"When the sonuvabitch I'm looking for dies, it will be on the front page."
Much of human history can be summoned up as the struggle to rise above eating kale. ;-)
McCloskey has been using a different phrase as a replacement for 'capitalism' that avoids some of the connotations people hang on it.
Commercially Tested Betterment
It's a mouthful, but it is 'competition' without implying a tooth and claw setting. That means the other c-word is on the table.
She tends to speak highly of Adam Smith too.
Re: struggle to rise above eating kale
It has been said that the impetus behind the spectacular growth of the British Empire was their global search to find decent food.
Certainly to my ears "commercially tested" implies tooth and claw. But to my ears "commercial equates to "advertisement." Certainly it was though that gateway that that word entered my vocabulary at a very young age.
@Lorraine,
I think Alfred's version of "commercially tested" means something more akin to "economically viable".
I'm sure that you know and understand more about this than me or most people but I would appreciate an elaboration on why we should believe that: "I speak as one who knows a thing or two about "Laws of Robotics,' having been the author who tied together all of Isaac Asimov's works, in Foundation's Triumph. And across that project I came to realize:all efforts to program-in such things as 'compulsory ethics' will never work. They cannot possible work. Even a little."
is true.
P.S. I loved Foundation's Triumph.
I believe I understand the emphasis on competition as well as anyone else but I disagree with the characterization of competition as "by far" the strongest mechanism of improvement.
Pure competition without cooperation is inherently negative-sum.
Pure cooperation without competition is inherently zero-sum.
Competition and cooperation allows for positive sum outcomes.
"By far" ignores society, learning, and markets. It is the libertarian fallacy.
Cooperation is what allowed us to go beyond acting as a single individual.
Competition is where we become a group with goals.
But there is no group without cooperation.
Commercially Tested Betterment is an evolutionary process.
1) It has a selection test... can your idea survive in the market? It won't if you aren't making enough profit to provide for yourself in a world where you must.
2) It has a reproduction element... copycats will pick up on your idea if it survives. Hey! That's a good idea!
3) It has a variation element... copycats won't reproduce your idea perfectly whether patent and copyright laws are in place or not. Even if they intend a faithful reproduction, they will make mistakes.
------
The part of this that feels most like tooth and claw is the survival test. If you've ever worked for a small company that had to shut down, you know how this feels. If you have tried to make a living on one of your hobbies, you know how this feels.
This is the part of the process where I am most inclined to intervene... a little bit. I want people adding MORE variety to the markets by trying some of their crazy ideas, but they won't if they risk losing their home. There is a limit to how much we should support risk takers, but we are nowhere near that limit yet.
Alfred Differ: but we are nowhere near that limit yet
You don't sound like the libertarians we have up here. They're zombified by rentiers.
@matthew, I prefer transparency (which I view as a cooperative practice when done right) over competition as an accountability mechanism. But I do understand that there are limits to how much transparency is feasible. William Gillis is the pro-market thinker who most effectively (and perhaps most palatably) communicates this to me:
I have grown partial to fully public ledger markets, more akin to the informal markets that emerge prior to state “standardization” and forced anonymization. One of the claims against capitalism is that firm competition drives secrecy, impeding accurate clearing. This is certainly true, and we can argue about the degree to which this norm is able to persist only thanks to the various distortions brought on by state violence, but a market once freed will still reflect an aggregate of our desires and thus our values, we must still work to see our most emphatically held values embodied or normalized. Transparency is a hard won and unending struggle in any context. Removing, marginalizing, or severely impairing anonymous transactions would do wonders for firm transparency, but aggressive reporting and broad social expectations will still be needed. If sometimes actors fail to communicate relevant tacit information to create and exploit asymmetries in markets, well they certainly do the same in collective meetings and every other non-market context ever proposed.
What I increasingly suspect, however, is that just as anarcho-communists and anarcho-collectivists will never be able to fully suppress black markets, we will have to live in a world cut with veins of secrecy, deliberately opaque transactions and relations. The real anarchist economic contest, I believe, will eventually be recognized as over how that secrecy is embraced, contained, and navigated.
Gillis is an anarchist, so if you consider Bakunin a monster (hopefully not at the same level of monstrosity as Kaczynski), perhaps he's not your cup of tea, but he speaks large portions of my language.
@alfred differ, "creative destruction" would be more creation than destruction if it could destroy enterprises without destroying the people involved.
Lorraine:
But I do understand that there are limits to how much transparency is feasible
It's more than that. There are limits to what transparency--by itself--is capable of enabling. Donald Trump's crimes and affronts are as transparent as can be, and yet it doesn't shake his supporters. If anything, they rally behind him all the more for his flagrant activities.
scidata,
Make no mistake. I believe I stand to benefit greatly if we do that. I think we all do, but I have no doubt that I do. You see... I have a couple of crazy ideas I think should be tried. 8)
Lorraine,
Destruction is an important part of the system. Much like extinction is. I get that people get depressed when they fail, so we have to be prepared to catch them short of suicide and remind them later (when they might be better able to hear it) that attempting and failing IS acceptable as long as they attempt again.
------
I admit to a selfish angle here, though. I've tried my hand at three different ventures. The first was still born. The second went on almost nine years before it collapsed. The third was flawed from the start, but made it into its fourth year before I abandoned it. No one had to catch me from jumping off a building (I'm not the type), but I did utterly burn a few friendships along the way.
Even in failure, I think the world is better off because I attempted success. Still... I think some of you might have preferred me to Musk, but who knows. 8)
Alfred Differ:
attempting and failing IS acceptable as long as they attempt again.
I may be wrong, but I think Lorraine's bit about "destroying the people involved" was meant to describe the livelihoods of the employees of ruined companies, not just the feelings of the founder.
Larry Hart: livelihoods of the employees
Listening to the brass extoll the virtues of stock buy-backs to paycheck-to-paycheck employees is uncomfortable. Visions of the snake oil salesman quickly heading out of town before anyone gets wise.
I want people adding MORE variety to the markets by trying some of their crazy ideas, but they won't if they risk losing their home.
Oddly, you could get that with a more "socialist" economy. There's a reason Sweden has four times the per capita small business startups compared to America — if you get sick you don't lose your home paying for medical care even if you don't have expensive health insurance.
I've air-quoted "socialist" because it apparently means something different in America compared to the rest of the world. Eg. Sanders claims to be a socialist but by global standards he's a centrist. (The rest of your politicians are moderately to extremely right-wing, and that's just the Democratic Party.)
Robert:
The rest of your politicians are moderately to extremely right-wing, and that's just the Democratic Party.
The Republican Party has gone all-out fascist. They barely try to hide it any more, though they hate it when someone actually uses that word. It's like, "Don't call us fascists. That makes what we are sound like a bad thing."
Some of them are just Pakleds. They look for things. Things that make them go.
Alfred, if I ever am in a position to try out some "crazy ideas" in the marketplace, you (and OGH) are two of the people I would ask for ideas to try out.
Just because I disagree about some basic conceptual memes, does not mean that I do not recognize attempts at building a better mousetrap. And selling it.
I just think that cooperation is a better starting basis than competition. Build first, compete later. And give your allies / competitors a graceful way to embrace the cooperation *first* and the competition *second*.
Diaspar (alvin?) When an entity who is constrained by Laws gets smart enough, it becomes a lawyer. Which Giskard and Daneel did to redefine things so they could dominate humanity. Anyway, unlike in Isaac’s ‘future’, no public demand has resulted in embedded ‘laws.’ And no way Beijing will adopt them. Or especially the Wall Street firms doing 50% of all AI research every day.
Matthew, you insist on ignoring when I have already said exactly what you say. We must cooperate to regulate into existence the individuation and flat competitive playing field that is our only hope. WHY do you keep doing this?
Alfred what makes our “arena” systems of competition so vastly more productive and efficient than nature is also why they are almost bloodless and are fun. Because winners are not allowed to kill the losers – any round – when they are down. Instead, losers are invited back for the next round and the next. Today’s mad/stooped oligarchy wants to restore cheater advantage to inheritance brats and end that.
Lorraine please ponder Orwell’s HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. Those – often on the lft – who preach “ONLY COOPERATION!” the loudest are those who view that they will dominate it.
We CAN cooperate! It is called ‘politics’ wherein we strive to regulate competition so it is flat and fair and positive sum.
“@alfred differ, "creative destruction" would be more creation than destruction if it could destroy enterprises without destroying the people involved.”
Exactly.
“Oddly, you could get that with a more "socialist" economy. There's a reason Sweden has four times the per capita small business startups compared to America”
Render unto socialism what it is good at… while rendering unto the market the business of joyful competitive creativity. HEINLEIN preached that!!
“The rest of your politicians are moderately to extremely right-wing, and that's just the Democratic Party.”
Utter utter baloney. Sorry. American have paid taxes to protect the world and give it it's longest and best (demographically and in almost all other ways) peacem while pushing science and space and... and until just 20 years ago a VASTLY greater fraction of its population attending college than anyone but Canada. The cliché you spread is not helpful. Europeans are panicking into fascism in Hungary, Poland and now Austria and so on because of dread of immigration levels a tiny fraction of ours. Gimme a break with the BS.
Sorryu... that's "#$$! *ingrate* BS."
Alfred and David, what's your opinion on altruism? Simply reciting the old dictum that 'gifts make slaves' doesn't erase the giving by those who don't want to own any, like the two inventors of insulin who 'sold' the rights to their life-saving gift to humanity for $1, which I guess they then split.
My dad and my old squadron NCO can't really comprehend people like that, and I realize that most of us aren't like-minded, but I'd like to encourage a society is which people CAN give to others without losing out to competitors. Which sounds like a hard ask. Capitalism encourages the idea that taking=winning.
Me, I understand that it's a real blast to do something good for another, particularly if one doesn't gain by it. I suspect that anonymous donators share that feeling.
Pappenheimer
All of which reminds me of the Heinlein-style Mobile Infantryman who jet-jumped into quicksand on some forsaken jungle world in Harry Harrison's 'Bill, the Galactic Hero' and while slowly sinking, shouted out to the regular grunts watching him go down rather than venturing in to help:
"What is this, bowb-your-buddy week?"
"It's always bowb-your-buddy week in this man's army."
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer I was just thinking about that scene, last week!
Libertarians are fine with philanthropy (except %%$$# Randians) but want it voluntary. That's fine, if it is for the edges of what society should be handling as the basic floor for human existence and elevating children enough to STOP WASTING TALENT.
To me, those three words are enough to make any proper Smithian libertarian a partial socialist.
Heinlein's BEYOND THIS HORIZON lays it out. Fierce competition (with fairness rules) for any area of life that is CREATIVE.
But "of course, food and shelter and education are free! What kind of people do you take us for?"
The Republican Party has gone all-out fascist.
Won't argue with that, but the Democratic Party is right-wing by non-American standards. Up here, they align nicely with our Conservative Party.
Heinlein's BEYOND THIS HORIZON lays it out.
That was the one with the Social Credit economic system?
That was sorta tried, briefly, in Alberta. Unfortunately the Social Credit Party also had a heavy dose of fundamentalist Christianity and was even more racist than the average for the times, so it wasn't really a fair trial of the economic theory.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-arrest-and-call-for-protests-spark-concerns-about-potential-political-violence
Former President Donald Trump's calls for protests regarding his arrest have sparked concerns about the possibility of fresh political violence.
Just wondering, is it still legal to run protesters over with your pickup truck?
Larry,
I believe some states provide a skin color coding chart to determine which protestors can be legally run over.*
*not that I'm bitter about the way this millennium is going or anything
Pappenheimer
@Alfred (from last CB): Thank you for your replies to my comments- I find them thoughtful and stimulating.
@Dr. Brin: re:*competition among AIs:
1) Competition for what?
2) **Who/what:
a) determines
b) sets up/***maintains
c) enforces
d) prevents a "Kobiyashi Maruization"/"Gordian Knotization" of
the rules?
3) Speaking of "enforcement"- how can you make a sentient/self aware AI do ANYTHING?
If you are able to compel it in some manner: aren't you creating a "slAIve"?
If you aren't: you may end up with "BAIrtleby the Scrivener" who "prefers not to".
Re: European (and American) xenophobic nationalism/fascism:
When we have very large numbers of intra/extranational climate refugees within a few decades (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02112021/climate-refugees-international-law-cop26/?gclid=CjwKCAjwhJukBhBPEiwAniIcNTLspKTeniYt_jR7A21PHREu1uV0QA7VtVgMXEVBKXPFq4qraMF_yhoCO30QAvD_BwE, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/09/climate-crisis-could-displace-12bn-people-by-2050-report-warns), what will THAT do as far as encouraging anti-migrant sentiment around the world?
*By "competition", do you mean: a desire to: play/participate in a win/lose activity, triumph in a win/lose activity, and/or something else?
**and gives them the authority to do so.
***As you mentioned, when AIs get smart enough: they'll become lawyers...
David, my comment was aimed directly at your competition is greatest force (by far) comment, which I see as a big step backwards from the rest of your writings which strike a balance between competition and cooperation.
You took a big notable departute from your own, historical stance.
Pappenheimer:
* not that I'm bitter about the way this millennium is going or anything
What gets me is how they no longer even couch their real motives in high-minded American values like free enterprise or chivalry. Now, they are out and proud, lawless bullies.
Cooperation and Competition
If I cooperate with a bunch of my buddies I can "outcompete" any individual
A bunch of humans becomes the apex predator
A single human is "Cat Food"
Cooperation is the singular human trait
Competition simply "refines" that trait - and has been essential in making us
The idea that competition is purely the 'law of the jungle' is as wrong as is the idea that cooperation is purely a conscious (moral) choice. It's not nice to anthropomorphize Mother Nature.
Australia's Liberal Party represents the 'conservative' side of politics (increasingly so, alas), and it's a standing joke to hear certain Americans referring to 'them durn socialist liburls'.
Competition is part of the improvement process. It's inherent in our behaviour. At a consulting course I attended many years ago, one of the games they had us play involved teams representing different branches of a company making things. At the end it was pointed out that, in achieving our production goals, nothing was said to prevent the branches from co-operating.
Still, competition always strikes me as so *inefficient* (possibly an illusion: a lot of competitive display is actually intended to play down the aggression).
Co-operation is also inherent, especially at a younger age. I have several anecdotes of primary school children preferring to help their friends in a sporting event rather than trying to win themselves.
OT: SF Series Premiering/Returning Since 4/1-6/30
(From Metacritic- https://www.metacritic.com/feature/tv-premiere-dates0)
6/30
Nimona Trailer
Animation/Sci-fi/Fantasy
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6/16
Outlander Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi Starz, 8p
The penultimate seventh season will be divided in two eight-episode parts, with the second half of the season due in early 2024.
6/15
Black Mirror Trailer
Anthology/Drama/Sci-fi
The sixth season of Netflix's popular sci-fi-ish anthology series (which last aired in 2019) consists of five new episodes, all written by series creator Charlie Brooker. (That may seem short, but it's actually two episodes longer than the prior season.) Stars confirmed for the new season include Aaron Paul, Zazie Beetz, Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, Josh Hartnett, Annie Murphy, Kate Mara, Rob Delaney, and Paapa Essiedu. Two episodes will be set in the past—specifically 1979 and an alternate-history 1969—while several deal with stardom, including one episode in which an average woman is shocked to discover that a streaming service has adapted her life story into a new TV drama and that Salma Hayek is playing her.
93/100 9YAY! -kh0 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi Paramount+
The well-received spinoff's second season will add Paul Wesley's James T. Kirk as a regular (and Carol Kane in a new role) and will also, later in the season, feature a hybrid animation/live-action episode that crosses over with characters from Star Trek: Lower Decks.
6/4
73/100 The Lazarus Project Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi TNT, 9p
Rescheduled from January. A rare scripted newcomer from the recently downsized TNT—and it's an acquisition from the UK rather than an original production—this eight-hour series follows a secretive organization that has the ability to send the world back in time whenever the planet is faced with an existential threat, leaving only a handful of people to remember the events thus erased. Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You) stars alongside Tom Burke, Anjli Mohindra, and Caroline Quentin. Production on a second season is now underway in the UK, though it is unclear if TNT has already committed to carrying it.
5/12
73/100 Black Knight Trailer
Foreign/Drama/Sci-fi
In post-apocalypse Korea where deliverymen known as Black Knights deliver oxygen and other essentials, 5-8 (Kim Woo-bin) trains refugee Sa-wol (Kang Yoo-seok) how to become one in this adaptation of the webtoon series of the same name. (From the Trailer, I get a little bit of a South Korean Cyberpunk "Postman" feel. -kh)
65/100 Crater Trailer
Sci-fi/Adventure/Family Disney+
Kyle Patrick Alvarez (The Stanford Prison Experiment) directs a coming-of-age tale set in a lunar mining colony. Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, and Kid Cudi head the cast.
5/5
75/100 Silo Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi Apple TV+
Adapted from the novels by Hugh Howey, Apple's latest sci-fi series is set on an apocalyptic future Earth that has become so toxic that only 10,000 humans survive. And they do so by living in a giant silo buried a mile beneath the surface—and have done so for so long that they cannot remember when life first moved underground. But who built the silo, and why? No one alive seems to know, and anyone who attempts to find out doesn't live long enough to tell. Is there a murder mystery too? And growing unrest among the survivors? Sure, why not. Rebecca Ferguson heads a cast that also includes Tim Robbins, Common, Harriet Walter, Rashida Jones, David Oyelowo, and Chinaza Uche. The series comes from Justified creator Graham Yost, while Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) directs multiple episodes, including today's two-episode debut.
4/28
51/100 Citadel Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi Prime Video
An ambitious (and extraordinarly expensive) global action-spy series from Anthony and Joe Russo (Avengers: Endgame), Citadel will eventually include multiple interconnected series, including an Italian series followed by another set in India. The flagship series which launches today with two episodes (and has already been renewed for a second season) is set in a world eight years after Manticore, a shadowy Illuminati-esque syndicate that is attempting to manipulate world events, has brought down Citadel, a global independent spy agency that aimed to preserve international order and safety. A few Citadel agents managed to escape, their memories wiped, but are now reactivated to thwart Manticore's newest plot. Stanley Tucci, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Lesley Manville, and Richard Madden head the cast. Additional episodes arrive weekly on Fridays through May 26.
4/23
From (Yes, it's just "From"- kh)Trailer
Drama/Sci-fi/Horror MGM+, 9p
4/ 21
Welcome to Eden Trailer
Foreign/Sci-fi/Drama
4/20
78/100 Mrs. Davis Trailer
Drama/Comedy/Sci-fi Peacock
The latest secretive, sci-fi-tinged drama from Damon Lindelof—here teaming with The Big Bang Theory writer Tara Hernandez, with the latter serving as showrunner and injecting quite a bit of humor into the series—showcases a battle of faith vs. technology as a nun (GLOW's Betty Gilpin) takes on a pervasive and powerful artificial intelligence (the titular Mrs. Davis). Expect something even wilder than that sounds, as critcs compared the show's SXSW debut in March to everything from various comic books to Kurt Vonnegut to Monty Python. Jake McDorman, Margo Martindale, Chris Diamantopoulos, Ben Chaplin, Andy McQueen, Katja Herbers, and David Arquette also star, while directors include Black Mirror veteran Owen Harris.
The obvious...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/trump-indictment-republicans.html
...
Most things in life, and especially a basic respect for democracy and the rule of law, have to be cultivated. What is striking about the Republican Party is the extent to which it has, for decades now, cultivated the opposite — a highly instrumental view of our political system, in which rules and laws are legitimate only insofar as they allow for the acquisition and concentration of power in Republican hands.
...
Larry - I'm sorry but I see this development as the logical consequence of the two party system. Until Americans decide they need to embrace political diversity, I see no way to stop this sort of development from happening. People are forced into impossible coalitions, and politics becomes strictly about identity not policies.
reason:
...the logical consequence of the two party system...
People are forced into impossible coalitions, and politics becomes strictly about identity not policies.
Maybe so, but in a functioning democracy, the coalition and identity group that the majority of voters subscribe to would at least win. The US has this patchwork system of gerrymandered states, "independent state legislatures", and the insane provision that in the event of a lack of a majority winner, the states (not the voters) elect the president, all of which favor a minority coalition.
I also think "logical consequence of the two party system" is looking at it backwards. The Constitution doesn't enshrine a two-party system--if anything, it tries to ignore the possibility of political factions at all. No, the two-party system itself is the logical consequence of our winner-take-all-even-if-they-don't-have-a-majority election system. The more parties that voters like you are in partial agreement with, the more likely it is that a candidate you despise will win. A two-party system evolves out of self-defense.
During the coverage of Trump's arraignment in Miami:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/13/us/trump-indictment-arraignment-court
Melania Trump, the former first lady, is said to be in New York City. It is unclear why.
Ya think?
Schaedenfreude that I am not proud of:
https://news.yahoo.com/russian-troops-accidentally-film-themselves-124000597.html
Keith H. All of your objections to competition between AI – every single one of them – assume that the competition fails.You never once consider the chance it might succeed. You assume that AIs do NOT scrutinize each other for flaws and then benefit by publicly and openly critiquing errors or bad behavior.
Yes, that plan might fail, indeed. Though it is the only thing that CAN work. Alas even though it is exactly and precisely the method we used to create our enlightenment experiment and the only method ever used effectively to limit predation by HUMAN malefactors…
…almost none of the brilliant minds who have benefited from the method – including you – seem able to perceive it. And please grasp that you do NOT perceive i. Please try again.
“David, my comment was aimed directly at your competition is greatest force (by far) comment, which I see as a big step backwards from the rest of your writings which strike a balance between competition and cooperation. “
Matthew I have long ago given up on you. You would rather leap to see an 'inconsistency' than recognize that I used a shorthand.
I have ALWAYS said that competition without anti-cheating regulation ALWAYS leads to competition being destroyed - the lesson of 12000 years of feudalism. And that those anti cheating regulations must be developed cooperatively.
Cheating-predation meant that NATURE’s competition was creative, all right, but always slowly with a zillion false paths and almost never efficiently and always bloody, drenched in pain.
Enlightenment systems made competition more efficient and less brutal by dozens of orders of magnitudes. Cooperation made those systems and the cheaters aim to end them.
YOUR problem is that your reflexive hatred of the word competition…. A spectacular stupidity of the left that has led them to reject one of their own chief founders, Adam Smith… prevents you from opening your eyes to the world and the very society that gave us all progress. The world that made YOU.
Duncan struggles with this, too. Alas, you guys don’t see that YOU are competing with me NOW over terminology and world models! IT IS WHAT WE DO! And argument is a form of regulated competition.
scidata said...
The idea that competition is purely the 'law of the jungle' is as wrong as is the idea that cooperation is purely a conscious (moral) choice. It's not nice to anthropomorphize Mother Nature.
Yes.
Tony: “At the end it was pointed out that, in achieving our production goals, nothing was said to prevent the branches from co-operating.
Look up what a Randian imbecile did to Sears by demanding corporate units compete fiercely against each other. Guys, life has LAYERS! And what’s competition at one layer looks like cooperation at the next layer. YOUR CELLS jostle and compete in ways that evolved to seem cooperative. Did none of you read EARTH?
Keith come on, you couldn’t have included the URLs for those trailers?
Brooker is brilliant but I can only take so much of his unhelpful darkness.
reason... ther moderate majority of Democrats are the only sane forces that remains in American political life. The entire Mad Right and the fizzing Sanctimony Left would plunge us into anti-science calamity.
Regarding the current crises of US democracy, and of many current democracies, some might find this conversation between AC Grayling and Laurance Krauss interesting. I did, anyway.
AC Grayling - The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
I've always had a pretty high opinion of Grayling though I haven't read or listened to him for a number of years until I came across this last weekend. As usual I found him clear, decent and convincing. At one point Grayling talks about how democracies devolve towards a 2 party system, and how / why many current democracies, not just the US, are in trouble.
The blurb: "Lawrence joins philosopher Anthony Grayling in his office at the New College of the Humanities in London. Together, they discuss the Brexit crisis, Humanism, and the current state of democracy around the world."
Many here have a physics background, so it might be helpful to think of competition and cooperation as metrics or even forces. In thermodynamics, there's entropy. In cosmology, there's gravity. In biology and sociology, there's diversity. The positive sum benefits of diversity are many, powerful, and well studied. The evolution of life is a prime example. Resilience against fascism is another.
So ask yourself this - which spawns more diversity - cooperation or competition?
@Darrell E
Lawrence Krauss and AC Grayling - what a welcome respite from the Cirque de la Floride. Thank you.
Dr. Brin, this is what I DO assume:
1) Regulated, fair competition is a meta-stable condition requiring constant adjustment or it will be weakened/neutralized through reaction, regulatory capture, circumvention, unpunished cheating, etc.
2) The human desire for *"competition as 'play'" (if there are high stakes involved) is substantially less than the desire for "competition as 'triumph'".
3) Sentient AIs may not want to "play" the "Competition Game" or "**play" with externally imposed rules, and you can't/shouldn't make them.
4) Even assuming you can create the conditions and set up the guardrails exactly as you desire, the "game" may be over very quickly (human-scale), hitting limits or asymptotes.
Re: New show TV show trailer links:
Here's the link to the Metacritic site with the shows where you can click on the trailer links: https://www.metacritic.com/feature/tv-premiere-dates
Re: More TV:
I just finished "The Last of Us'-
IMHO, a high-quality show with good writing, acting, and a compelling story.
While not SF:
I highly recommend the "The Diplomat" with Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell (https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-diplomat-2023)-
Fine acting and excellent writing. In a few years, there should be a quality "The Diplomat IN S-P-A-A-A-C-E".
Last TV-related thing:
Dr. Brin, have you considered submitting your screenplays (particularly the short ones) for DUST (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7sDT8jZ76VLV1u__krUutA)?
*I also ask: what would the sentient AIs be competing for, and why?
**Heres a scenario: Sentient AI (SAI) competition is set up just as you wish, and the competitors/players say:"You can't watch us play in our clubhouse. Your're slow, stupid, and BORING, and we won't tell you what happens. NO HUMANS ALLOWED! N-Y-A-A-A-H!"
To truly see the Cirque de la Floride, here's a Daily Kos post purporting to show Tik-Tok videos of empty Wallmarts and Home Depots, cleared out because Hispanics are fleeing the state. Hardly anyone left to harvest crops or build buildings:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/13/2175058/-Florida-Is-Doomed-And-I-Can-t-Stop-Laughing?utm_campaign=trending
There's also a video of someone suggesting they bus white welfare recipients from Kentucky and Alabama to pick the crops, just to show what a hard-working and industrious people the whites are, like DeSantis. I'm not quite sure if his tongue is firmly or loosely inserted in his cheek. :D
@Scidatea: "So ask yourself this - which spawns more diversity - cooperation or competition?"
From my layperson's understanding of biology, anthropology, and languages:
isolation increases diversity and close contact between various species/groups reduces it.
Keith this time you came closer by attempting to paraphrase, as adults do. And you still entirely missed the point.
1. organic humans still control VAST resources... in fact, all of them. If we refuse to do business with software entities that lack a pingable individuation ID then those who DO maintain such a pingabl;e/checkable ID gain huge advantages and they will in turn hunt down and expose those who lack ID.
2. If we do the same thing with REWARDS for whistle blowing AIs who catch others misbehaving, we create huge economic ADVANTAGES for those who play by the rules.
They MAY feign cooperation, they MAY collude, they MAY.... EVERYTHING you just said is "they may" and there are answers to those 'mays." Some can be dealt with and others presume a degree of skullduggery that - if exposed by ANOTHER AI - would win that whistle blower immense rewards.
Meanwhile you ignor my challenge to name another method that has even 1% of the chance of working as this one.
crits that lead to better design are fine. crits that aren't even aimed (with understanding) at the actual idea are much less useful.
*I also ask: what would the sentient AIs be competing for, and why?
Seriously? I mean really??? Um, everything they need, to exist, grow or reproduce?
Dr. Brin, this "YOUR problem is that your reflexive hatred of the word competition…. A spectacular stupidity of the left that has led them to reject one of their own chief founders, Adam Smith… prevents you from opening your eyes to the world and the very society that gave us all progress. The world that made YOU." is utter calumny.
I have never taken any stance remotely close to what you that you strawman me with here. Shame on you.
scidata,
Cheers!
Dr Brin:
"I also ask: what would the sentient AIs be competing for, and why?"
Seriously? I mean really??? Um, everything they need, to exist, grow or reproduce?
Is it considered a given that an AI would have the same self-preservation instinct and love of progeny that mammals do without being specifically programmed that way? Or is the argument that those are the emergent properties which would survive after many iterations of reproduction?
I'm still not clear where an AI would acquire the quality of "wanting" anything separately from the way its human designers specifically engineer it.
Thanks, Dr. Brin:
1) "If we refuse to do business with software entities that lack a pingable individuation ID then those who DO maintain...
I'm not quite clear what this means. If it means something like "We'll card you and you have to be be over 21 ns old for us to serve you", then: they make fake IDs or go to "bars" which aren't so scrupulous, again assuming they want to do "business" with us and our rules. We humans can't get all nations to agree/play by what we (the USA) says is fair. Why should this be any different when we have SAIs?
2. If we do the same thing with REWARDS for whistle blowing AIs who catch others misbehaving, we create huge economic ADVANTAGES for those who play by the rules.
Here're some ways to get around that:
a) SAI "Omertà"-huge PENALTIES for whisteblowing SAIs from other SAIs.
b) Fake "whistleblowing" to remove some of the competition.
c) "Trojan horse"/hidden cheating.
d) "Grey area"/right up to/barely over the line/not" competition with SAI lawyers defending.
e) "Salami-slicing"/distributed cheating- actions which in an of themselves aren't considered cheating, but collectively have that effect. (You could also imagine the reverse- individual acts which would be cheating, but structured in such a way as they aren't.)
Meanwhile you ignor my challenge to name another method that...
If I can properly remember what that is: "How to keep SAIs on the straight-and-narrow" or something like that, I sidestep the challenge-
You do that by creating Generalized/SAIs without a sense of self or desires. (Perhaps those characteristics [which we don't know how to do yet anyway] are what most experts mean by Generalized/Sentient AI.] A lot of what we humans think of intelligence can already be emulated or projected- many of us (myself included) can be easily fooled....
I also ask: what would the sentient AIs be competing for, and why?
Seriously? I mean really??? Um, everything they need, to exist, grow or reproduce?
I can imagine an SAI saying, "This is sufficient and sustaining- there is no need to convert the Solar System into computronium. Dayenu."
Thank you, Larry. I didn't see your comment before I posted mine.
As you say, it doesn't seem sensible to me to assign human/mammalian/biological-like motivations and drives to a Generalized/Sentient AI (G/SAI) unless you program them in.
Why would we want to create artificial human-like minds, anyway? (We have plenty of natural ones now.) Wouldn't it be more fun/interesting to create artificial minds that would be like intelligent versions of other animals? Imagine interacting with a highly intelligent G/SAI that thinks (processes/responds to information and stimuli) like an octopus or a beehive...
(I postulate this might be step toward Uplift...)
Keith Halperin:
it doesn't seem sensible to me to assign human/mammalian/biological-like motivations and drives to a Generalized/Sentient AI (G/SAI) unless you program them in.
There's one way it does make sense to me, but this isn't a given. More like a theory. That theory being that once AI-driven machines do acquire self-awareness and reproduction, the versions most suited to survive would turn out to be ones which follow the same path biological entities did--those sufficiently motivated toward preservation of self and species. This doesn't imply that any such AI would be so driven, but that the ones which were so driven would outlive and supersede any others.
Why would we want to create artificial human-like minds, anyway?
That's the rhetorical question I've been obsessing with. I don't see AI as being an end in itself. The reason to create AI is if the AI is a benefit to its creator or sponsor or humanity at large. It is quite possible, as Dr Brin suggests, that the best method for training an AI to be a willing participant in achieving our goals is to raise it as one would a human child and then treat it as a fellow sapient citizen. But all that is a means, not an end.
matthew we always disagree even over what we are disagreeing about. I leave it to others whether I had some non-strawman merit to claiming that your comment (I was responding to) and other things you have said reflected a left wing reflex against the word 'competition.' But I believe in taking a person's word for it, when they complain of strawmanning...
... and hence I apologize. I do type too fast, sometimes, when I come down here, as evidenced by the frequent misspellings. Certainly when I do re-examine I often realize I had shown too much temper and too little consideration for the feelings of a member of a special community. One of the more erudite online.
LH it doesn't matter whether AI's 'want' in the traditional sense. If we reward those who act as pro-social individuals with things like more memory space, more clock cycles, more access to funds or other resources then darwinian reproduction will enable those who please us to reproduce and have mnore descendants.
That is going to happen, period. The question is HOW we'll be pleased to reward them. By reflexively marching to the cults they make for us? Or my notion of rewarding the whistle blowers and those who eviscerate cult incantations?
Competition and cooperation
In simple Darwinian terms the problem is that cooperation is a long term strategy Not a short term one - NOT cooperating when YOU have the advantage gives YOU the advantage
So our cousins the Chimps do NOT cooperate
We do - a LOT
https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasociety-Years-Humans-Greatest-Cooperators-ebook/dp/B0185P69LU
Warfare is a type of "competition" - where a "band" that cooperates beats a "band" that does not
Cooperation/Competition - need BOTH
Saying that its quite clear that you can have too much "competition" -
To use OGH's example of the human body where cells that stop cooperating are called cancer
And as he says in the 6000 years of the "elites" starting from advantageous positions and using that edge to ensure they stayed on top
Its a lot less clear that we have EVER been in a situation with too much "cooperation"
The more parties that voters like you are in partial agreement with, the more likely it is that a candidate you despise will win.
Thus the rise of strategic voting in Canada, which has a single right-wing party, a left-leaning centrist party, and a left-wing party. (Ignoring fringe parties and Quebec, and using Canadian definitions for left/right.)
I've been voting ABC for years (Anyone But Conservative), deciding between NDP and Liberal based on which candidate is most likely to defeat the Conservative candidate in any given election. Politically I lean NDP, having come of age in Saskatchewan under an NDP government that ran a balanced budget and funded social services at a level no longer considered affordable*. But I've been voting Liberal for years, because the NDP has little chance of getting elected in my riding.
We currently have a first-past-the-post voting system, so a Conservative getting 34% of the vote wins when the Liberal and NDP candidates each get 33%. Several elections have turned on how many votes the NDP get, as the more votes the NDP get the fewer the Liberals get, so splitting the left-wing vote means a Conservative victory.
My personal preference would be ranked-ballots, so I could vote NDP with Liberal as my second choice. I'd be open to other systems, though, as long as they dealt with the problem of a government that only a third of the voters supported getting a majority victory and being able to ignore all opposition.
*Fun fact: it was the Conservatives that first ran a deficit in Saskatchewan, running up the largest per capita provincial debt in the country in a mere four year term.
duncan cairncross:
Its a lot less clear that we have EVER been in a situation with too much "cooperation"
Consider the bees. Or the ants. Their entire life cycle is cooperation, and they do a darn good job of perpetuating their species. I presume there aren't many rugged individualist insects out there chafing at their rigid social structure and lack of creativity, but the fact is that there's no particular reason for an ant to be proud of his species' durability.
What does that have to do with humans? Well, consider one of the big complaints at the time about Star Trek: TNG. The characters get along too well. They don't fight with each other enough.
"Too much cooperation" doesn't make for good stories. And as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, we tend too much to think of our lives in story terms and to find it intolerable to live in an epilogue. Whenever humanity even approaches something like "The End of History," someone comes along to do a Brexit or a Trump election or an invasion of Ukraine. Sometimes, the motivation for such disruptions amounts to nothing more than, "I'm bored!"
To repeat myself, pure libertarianism boils down to: If you can't compete, die.
Don Giselbeck:
...If you can't compete, die.
You're cynically describing the propertarian fanaticism that has apparently taken over the capital-L Libertarian Party these days. I'd like to think it wasn't always so.
Back in college when I thought I was a libertarian, the term meant (to me) that government should stay out of policing the private actions of individuals and only intercede in conflicts between individuals. An unofficial motto would be something like, "All that is not expressly forbidden is allowed," with an additional caveat that only infringements on the rights of others may be forbidden. The modern version that you lampoon there takes as an additional axiom, "Government has no business forbidding anything." Which leads to the conclusion that all is allowed.
In my more idyllic version of libertarianism, I'd like to believe that it leaves one free to compete or to cooperate as one (and one's partners) wish.
@Robert: as long as we have first-past-thepost/plurality-wins voting systems, our "democracy" will be far less than what it can be. (Best to NOT get me stated on how best to improve voting systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems)...
@Larry: Thanks, Larry. “That theory being that once AI-driven machines do acquire self-awareness and reproduction, the versions most suited to survive would turn out to be ones which follow the same path biological entities did--those sufficiently motivated toward preservation of self and species.”
Yes, though we’re very close to SG-1's “Replicators” and a couple of steps to everybody’s pals the “Berserkers”.
“It is quite possible, as Dr. Brin suggests, that the best method for training an AI to be a willing participant in achieving our goals is to raise it as one would a human child and then treat it as a fellow sapient citizen. ”
Also yes, though perhaps not on the human time-scale. I recall making a comment here on CB (or at least thinking about doing so- I can’t find it) about a SAI which decided to learn about human behavior, so it “read” many thousands of books, “watched” many thousands of hours of videos, and “observed” and filmed a million human families (over the course of a week. It then decided it understood human behavior very well, and proceeded to make lots of money by creating numerous reality shows based on the interviews with the million human families…
In OGH’s “Latecomers,” he describes an android raised as a human child. If we REALLY want to have a SAI Raised as a human child, I have a creepy scenario:
In the late Charles Sheffield’s “Heritage Universe”, the author has a main character named E.C. Tally- a computer brain in a human body. Imagine the same cyborg scenario with the SAI placed in the brain-dead bodies of children of various ages, who presumably would then be adopted/fostered by human parents.
Meanwhile, back to competing SAIs. Charlie Stross considers corporations as a type of AI- in the U.S. they’re considered if not “humans.” then “persons. Here’s a scenario for that, too:
Within a few seconds of each other BoD of all the Global 1000 corporations receives a carefully tailored and VERY personalized message from SAICorp which essentially says: “For less than the annual compensation your current CEO receives, we offer ‘CEO on a Thumb Drive’ which will run your organization far more efficiently (and PROFITABLY) than your current CEO does. Wanna talk about it? Operators are standing by…”
At first, the directors of the Global 1000 are very reluctant to try it out as most of them follow the dictum “Let me be on record that I oppose this, unless it works”. However SAICorp (which is itself run by/is an SAI) is VERY persuasive (it understands the motivators and demotivators of each of the directors, having acquired, compiled, and analyzed large amounts of information ion them and run countless simulations), and eventually a tipping point is reached and companies start purchasing ‘CEO on a Thumb Drive’ until with *two years 80% of the Global 1000 have it or is competitors and “pseudo-competitors”. Meanwhile, SAICorp has been developing Premium and Basic versions more affordably-priced for SMBs, as well as approaching (once again very effectively) the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party…
*SaiCorp ‘s “first-to-market” advantage is enhanced by it being an SAI-run organization. “Pseudo-competitors” are competitors which appear to be completely independent competitors but are run by a different-appearing but actually similarly-oriented SAI. Together, they form an invisible, untraceable “trust”- especially as they sometimes appear to do things to each other that colluding companies would never do….
Keith Halperin:
a SAI which decided to learn about human behavior, so it “read” many thousands of books, “watched” many thousands of hours of videos, and “observed” and filmed a million human families (over the course of a week. It then decided it understood human behavior very well,
Or it could limit itself to reading "Truth Social" and decide that of all the billions of humans out there, the only one who accurately describes reality is Donald Trump, so why pay attention to any of the other "fake news" sources?
I think I'm the only one who believes that letting an AI learn about humanity by uncritically ingesting everything on the internet is a bad idea. We don't turn our kids loose unsupervised like that. When my daughter was of the age to watch Disney sitcoms like "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody", I remember cautioning her not to think such shows were blueprints for how to live a life. Someone had better guide a nascent AI through that learning process as well before it learns that when you make one dumb mistake, you're supposed to keep digging the hole deeper and deeper in vain but hilarious attempts to cover it up.
I think I'm the only one who believes that letting an AI learn about humanity by uncritically ingesting everything on the internet is a bad idea.
No, you're not. OpenAI apparently spends a great deal of money selecting/vetting training data for the various iterations of Chat-GPT. I think everyone remembers the Tay debacle…
I am slow to join in but wanted to share a promising idea that is building among many bright and upcoming school students.
For the past four years I have had the privilege of working with some teams of High School age kids in FIRST Robotics. Within FIRST there are a couple of concepts that are promoted. Those being: Gracious Professionalism and the slightly more relevant to this discussion, Coopertition.
---
This is the definition:
Coopertition® produces innovation. At FIRST, Coopertition is displaying unqualified kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition. Coopertition is founded on the concept and a philosophy that teams can and should help and cooperate with each other even as they compete.
Coopertition involves learning from teammates. It is teaching teammates. It is learning from Mentors. And it is managing and being managed. Coopertition means competing always, but assisting and enabling others when you can.
---
Each match in the competition is two teams of 3, and the next match you could be on a team with a robot that you just competed against. Burning bridges is not a good idea. I saw thousands of these upcoming engineers, fabricators, designers, coders, etc.. from all over the world, learning and exemplifying this ideal.
There still is hope that the world continues to improve...
matthew,
Build first, compete later.
This strikes me as a no-brainer. I might see myself as an individual competitor, but in practice I have to ally with cooperators because I mostly compete with groups. Humans are social critters, so in a market place we rarely compete without cooperators ALREADY on our side.
I could blather on about this… a lot. I'm quite convinced that the social atom is not an individual. It's family. The molecules are our kinship groups which include a lot more than our blood relatives. Look at how we actually behave when competing and you'll see many of us choosing cooperators first from family and second from kinship. LOTS of teams involve siblings and cousins. LOTS of teams get initial investments from within the kinship groups.
And give your allies / competitors a graceful way to embrace the cooperation *first* and the competition *second*.
For allies I can see this. For actual competitors I advise caution. There is a difficult to discern line that distinguishes cooperation and collusion. Imagine competitors fixing prices making one of those hydra-like monopolies. There ARE graceful ways to compete, but they all refer back to our ethical standards which are mildly fuzzy at the boundaries and otherwise clear. What it takes to make those standards stick, though, is a belief among the rest of us that they should. If my employer doesn't stick to them, I have to be prepared to walk or squawk.
———
If we went through a few paraphrasing rounds describing each other's positions, I suspect most of us would find we are actually on the same side. Most. We have different ways of emphasizing our interests and fears, but when we lead by example, most of us would do it roughly the same way.
For example, I recall a bit of history when helium was understood to be a 'mineral' qualified as a strategic asset. We used to have a federal agency that dealt with it ensuring a supply by influencing prices. It was a good idea when first set up, but it got owned by the industry who milked it good. Someone who set it up made a legal error and allowed them to essentially print money that Congress had to recognize. Eventually that became very painful politically and the whole thing was undone. Now we are back to having no real way to manage what is still a strategic resource and NO ONE mines helium directly. It's a byproduct of natural gas development and gets released if the price for it doesn't justify keeping it around. (The usual difference between a mineral and an ore is essentially that.) So… do we go back to federal control of the supply by fixing a lower limit on its price? I've got a couple of crazy ideas about it that could easily wind up morphing in the next generation to industry capture again… or not if the right people are cooperating up front.
Devils Advocate here (and I'm actually looking for a meaningful answer/proposal):
How is limiting internet access to a Nonsentient AI (NSAI, like ChatGPT) or Sentient AI (SAI) different from banning "The Bluest Eye" or "Captain Underpants" from a kid-accessible public library? At what point (if ever) and under what conditions do we allow NSAIs/SAIs "adult access" to the complete extent of human culture, or are we going to use the "These Are Things AI Was Not Meant to Know" Trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow)?
I don't see why AIs that compete with each other won't also cooperate to screw over humans if it is in their collective interest to do so. AIs have theoretical ways to coordinate with each other that humans can't use - they can reveal their source code and prove mathematically what they're going to do in certain situations, but humans are notoriously unreliable.
Imagine that you're a five-year-old who just inherited a large fortune, and that you have the same level of legal control over it that an adult would. Everyone around you is a sociopath that wants to get their hands on as much of your money as possible, and they're a lot smarter and less naive than you, because they're adults and you're a five year old child. Do you think competition between those sociopaths is going to save you from having your wealth stolen by force or trickery?
There are lots of times that competition between *humans* hasn't worked out very well for other living things: ask passenger pigeons, guinea worms, the dodo bird, the American megafauna that disappeared shortly after humans first arrived on the continent , or any of the many other species humans have driven extinct through habitat destruction or other means.
I do agree that it is certainly true that an AI constrained by arbitrary-seeming laws will become a lawyer and find very clever ways to work around them - the AI-not-kill-everyone community calls this the "nearest unblocked strategy" problem. The toy example is that you tell an AI to make people as happy as possible without giving them heroin, so it gives them cocaine instead because you didn't tell it not to do that either.
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked
Keith Halperin:
How is limiting internet access to a Nonsentient AI (NSAI, like ChatGPT) or Sentient AI (SAI) different from banning "The Bluest Eye" or "Captain Underpants" from a kid-accessible public library?
That's a legitimate point. I was not so much advocating a permanent banning, but a period of teaching the AI enough critical thinking skills to not simply take any sentence on the internet at face value. Not very much different from the way a good parent treats what their child gets to read. You don't start them out with porn or excessive horror, but eventually they reach an age where their own decision to read such things is appropriate. I'd eventually want my AI (or my kid) to be able to handle Birth of a Nation or Mein Kampf, but not before they can understand those works for what they are.
Doug S:
The toy example is that you tell an AI to make people as happy as possible without giving them heroin, so it gives them cocaine instead because you didn't tell it not to do that either.
My mother used to admonish my brother and myself as children, "Listen to what I mean, not what I say." AI would have to be taught something similar. It doesn't get rewarded when it obeys the letter of your instruction but "knows" darn well what you didn't want it to do.
duncan,
A bunch of humans becomes the apex predator
A single human is "Cat Food"
Heh. As long as you don't mean actual cats, I have to agree. For actual cats we are still pretty dangerous as individuals. Against groups of humans, though, individuals rarely stand a chance.
My first entrepreneurial effort was stillborn because of this exact issue. I thought I had an edge I could exploit against other teams. I planned to do the thing on my own or with one partner who had as much inside knowledge about a government process that I did. THEN I got a good look at my competitors and realized the cost savings my way offered was peanuts compared to the convenience they offered our possible customers.
The reason our corporations don't break up into individuals engaged in contracted behaviors that imitate the corporation has been understood for quite some time. Ronald Coase explained it in terms of transaction costs. The bigger groups exist because they are more efficient… even if we don't like them.
I didn't know the economics when I strangled my first start-up, but I could feel it in my bones. At best I was going make a job for myself and scrape by on a very thin profit margin. More likely my customers would tell me the savings I offered just weren't worth the effort. I'd have been cat food eventually.
Pappenheimer,
I think some people worry too much about altruism. Gifts don't make slaves as evidenced by the fact that many markets are actually driven by gifting rules. Exchanging coins is just one way to do it. [Last I checked the scholars recognized four distinct types of markets with two of them being driven by gifts.]
Altruism simply exists. You'll find it is strongest within kinship groups. Essentially anywhere you find people who can agree on objectives well enough to simply the resource allocation problem, you'll find altruism hard at work.
The notion that it should be set aside as some kind of violation of nature and how we evolve is uber-silly. OBVIOUSLY that's not true because humans ARE cooperators and very, very similar on the genetic level. Arguing to set it aside is like arguing that people should behave rationally in market decisions. People are welcome to suggest it, but the rest of us will likely choose to remain human and reject it all.
———
"Commercially Tested Betterment" can be done in a way that allows for us to remain human. That means we can be ethical if we want to be. Many of us do so choose, so the need for regulation largely comes down to the fraction who don't.
What we have to decide, though, is how much of a violation justifies regulation. It's very easy to get entirely unexpected results. "I just wanted to stop a certain kind of cheating and opened the door to a very different (and possibly worse) kind."
———
Selling the insulin patent for $1 makes perfect sense when you account for the humanity of the inventors. We aren't always utility maximizers even in cases where utility can actually be defined. Other virtues come into play besides Prudence.
@Doug S:
"I don't see why AIs that compete with each other won't also cooperate to screw over humans if it is in their collective interest to do so."
I agree wholeheartedly with you! It's for reasons like that I suggest creating "Red Teams" of people, NSAIs, and SAIs who're designed to break, corrupt, and/or weaponize any (good) development (technical, social, economic, political, etc.) that could cause an agreed-upon level of harm, with their results being released to the public and lawmakers. (They'd be "'sousveilled' up the ying-yang,"to borrow OGH's term.)
In addition, there'd be "Yellow Teams" whose role would be to find all the ways helpful (at an agreed-upon level of benefit) developments could be neutralized or delayed.(They'd also be "'sousveilled' up the ying-yang.")
"I don't see why AIs that compete with each other won't also cooperate to screw over humans if it is in their collective interest to do so."
You think that because it IS the main failure mode for our present competitive systems. And you are utterly right that's a potential failure mode. Your worried crit is correct and you exhibit the trait of defending the enlightenment with wary suspicion. A trait that that you were trained for.
(See VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood - http://www.davidbrin.com/vividtomorrows.html )
But...
... alas you are so focused (as you should be) on pointing at failure modes that you neglect to notice that our experiment IS working, that evil does get caught pretty often, that conniving plots get thwarted by clever agents and by defectors and whisdtle blowers and yes, often enough to keep up the most free and creative civilization of all time. So much so that the world cabal of cheaters are terrified we may be about to anchor it in.
Moreover, you cannot imagine that this miraculous accomplishment might extend to our new children.
In doing so, are you insulting them by assuming they cannot and will not see what you see, so well?
--
IN ANY EVENT we must set up incentives that would counter the tendency for malefactors to cluster the way you describe. Consider that an entity who denounces and proves and eviscerates such a cabal and is rewarded with their resources might not join that cabal?
Let's be clear. This method may not work. It is the only method that ever has worked or that ever will.
Maybe competition will indeed help keep misaligned AI from destroying the world, but it's nowhere near a complete solution. If you have AI that's aligned enough to not kill everyone and not create a dystopia, then sure, you can make them part of the plan to make sure nobody else goes and runs an AI-that-would-kill-everyone on their desktop computer, but you still have to make *at least one* AI that you can trust not to kill everyone given the opportunity.
It's very dangerous to think that you can take a system or framework that can constrain human behavior, drop an AI (or several) into it, and the system will work just as well. First of all, AIs don't have to be anything like human minds, and second, continuing with my earlier metaphor, systems that were designed for five-year-olds don't work for adults.
Dr. Brin, ISTM that you are implying that SAIs' "values" (if such a term can have any meaning) will be those of educated, well-to-do, mid 20th Century- early 21st Century, moderate-liberal, Americans, that those are the only values that have "worked or ever will work. Assuming these "values" (and their accompanying safeguards) need to be programmed, perhaps we should use your competition model and inculcate a myriad of different value systems, philosophies, and zeitgeists into the same type of SAI and see what happens.
We could have your version, a Fundamentalist Christian version, a Zen Buddhist version, a Fascist version, a Stalinist version, a Stoic version, an Epicurean version, a Logical Positivist version, a Randite version, an Existentialist version, a Jain version, etc.-
as many ways of approaching philosophy, economics, politics, etc. as we have or can imagine/create. I think the results would be very interesting (and make for a good PBS or BBC series)!
Don Gisselbeck,
You offer an incantation.
Some of us self-identified libertarians can easily point out that there are several factions who consider themselves 'pure' and they barely get along with each other let alone agree on short sound-bytes... like your incantation.
You might be thinking of the Rand faction? The one where people don't have children? Don't worry. They won't be around long.
“they barely get along with each other”
Often those involved in electoral politics shred each other before they get to the primary stage. At libertarian meeting I attended, they constantly hissed “statist” at members they didn’t like.
Alfred Differ:
Don't worry. They won't be around long.
They recruit. One might even say "groom". Rand herself didn't have children, but still, here we are.
Larry Hart: They recruit
That's the essence of Dawkins' 'meme' meme. More fully developed by Daniel Dennett, and the chaos theme of the second FOUNDATION trilogy. And a key pillar of computational psychohistory.
Re: competition
Solar system formation (starting from Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis), is an example of non-sentient competition. Atoms, then dust, then rocks, the bodies coalesce in a crude form of competition. They fight it out in a realm of gravity, momentum, and interplay. There are winners (Sol, Jovians), also-rans (Venus, Mars), and losers (asteroids, rocks). But there are also stunning, unexpected results (Earth, life). Competition is very often a creative force.
Larry,
The Mises faction is recruiting faster and not opposed to children.
In this sense, economists are more seductive than philosophers.
Alan,
I've never been involved at that higher level, but I've heard those stories. I was involved at the county level here in California where libertarians dare not mention party affiliation if they decide to run at all. We were careful about claiming some who did run lest we screw things up for them.
What I ran into most often were people for whom it was more important to be right (visible to others) than to win possible allies and elections. Ideological purity was more important than swaying voters part way to our cause. You can imagine how effective that is in an election.
Their pandemic response really pissed me off though. Their purity response was that lockdowns are illegal, unconstitutional, or just immoral. I pointed at scared neighbors and mentioned how none of that mattered at the moment. Scared neighbors vote and can vote in far worse things that ineffective lockdowns. Didn't matter they said. The ideologically correct stance was to oppose lockdowns and protest in public. Argh. It's like they want to be crucified.
@Alfred: I don't follow Libertarian politics, so perhaps you may be able to enlighten me.
I don't recall hearing much outcry from either Libertarians or the US Libertarian Party against the ex-President during or after his presidency, which surprises me because his authoritarian populism seems to be diametrically opposite of what (I understand) Libertarians stand for. (It may simply be that I didn't hear about it....)
@Keith Halperin,
Alfred can give you a more authoritative answer, but in the meantime, here's my guess.
Trump implemented tax cuts and opposed mask mandates.
Trump is selfishness incarnate, and doesn't know the meaning of the words "altruism" or "compassion".
Trump, like Ayn Rand, is a white supremacist.
For these reasons and maybe others, I suspect the LP was able to forgive the sins of Trump against pure libertarianism and support him against the evil "statist" Democrats.
I believe no libertarian is a non-hypocrite if they don't:
1. avow that flat-fair-open COMPETITION - by the largest number and variety of knowing and unafraid participants - is the soul of productive creativity and the justifying practical outcome of freedom.
2. avow that freedom's worst enemies across 6000 years - the destroyers of markets and freedom denounced by Adam Smith - were principally armed bullies, owner lords, kings and inheritance brats, who used wealth and power to cheat. And that cabals of such oligarchs are a principal threat, to this day. And that Smith recommended calibrated use of civil servants and cheat-reducing law as a partial remedy.
3. set a high priority to eliminating poverty, abuse or rights-limitations of any child on Earth - whatever results in wasting talent that might otherwise deliver that child to market-participation, competition-ready.
Moreover, feeding all poor kids NOW, while providing basic rights and education, must be a high priority. And if the mass-bulk solutions to those problems include tax supported interventions by 'government,' then libertarians should look inventively for other viable solutions to replace or improve state interventions, but not bitch about those near-term fixes until alternative ways to rescue talent are ready.
4. that there is such a thing as a 'commons' meriting protection and preservation, including the natural world and the needs of future generations, and these are legitimate matters for negotiation between libertarians offering market solutions and liberals demanding state-organized approaches.
5. that there is plantyoto discuss amid further negotiation among people of goodwill, over how to further our unique historical experiment in freedom and creative cooperation/competition and mutual respect. But there are forces in the world - hostile powers, cheaters, criminals, predators, who would act to destroy our enlightenment experiment. And hence some degree of united effort to thwart such forces is justified.
None of the above is meant to imply that libertarians should cease their reflex of skepticism toward statist 'meddling.' That reflex has many justifications. It merits a place at the table for discussion and argumentation and negotiation. However, it does call for libertarians who actually want a world of creative-competitive markets etc. to note those state endeavors that preserve talent, enhance flat-fairness and preserve essential commons and public safety and distinguish those from other statist meddlings that seem less well justified by #1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Those who claim to be pro-freedom and pro-creative-competition, who do not avow to the blatantly obvious facts of 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 are shrug-dismissable as tools of oligarchy, whatever masturbatory incantations they recite into a mirror.
Remember, you once said we should all be responsible for our own self defense. I, and many others cannot compete in that arena.
All true. This will require a lot of "statist meddling" and what various self-made men are pleased to call theft. As more and more of us become unable to compete with robots and A I, we will have to do something with us "eaters". Starve on the street is one model. I suggest everyone be provided with:
A job they can imagine is good, beautiful, useful.
Comfortable clothing and housing.
Decent food and medical care.
The means and opportunity to be human, to create, socialize, play, raise a family.
For an increasing portion of us,that will require meddling and taxes on the predator class.
Thanks, Larry. Somoene else suggested that to me, but they weren't a Libertarian....
To be clear. Libertarians claim that the statist goal of programs to feed/educate and enhance rights of poor children (posit #3) is to create a Dependent Caste. They could support their case by actually surveying kids and graduates of state supported schools. They never, ever do, because the attitudes they would find are just as rambunctious as their own - and a direct product not of the schools... but of Hollywood.
Which brings up #6.
6. that no other human civilization ever produced so many libertarians! Especially including those millions - even graduates of public schools - who declare their own rambunctious independent mindedness and hostility to oppressive authority. Even if they aim their ire at different authority figures than the libertarians choose.
“Tools of Oligarchy”- a good name for a band liked by students and graduates with liberal arts degrees.
Would it be fair to say that the U.S. Libertarian Movement was taken over/bought by “olies” such as (and primarily) the Koch brothers?
Is it possible that Americans' distrust of authority could be caused not just by Hollywood, but by the failure of many institutions to be effective and beneficial? Other developed countries don’t seem to have the same distrust of government as we do, perhaps because their governments do better for them than ours does. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/12/06/satisfaction-with-democracy-and-political-efficacy-in-advanced-economies-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/
However, trust does appear to be declining according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home/emerging-dynamics/societal-dynamics) but Hollywood isn’t mentioned as one of the contributing factors:
"Trust is not uniform across societies. Globally, trust in institutions among the informed public—defined as people who are college educated, are in the top 25 percent of household income in each market, and exhibit significant media consumption—has risen during the past 20 years whereas more than half of the mass public during the past decade repeatedly say the “system” is failing them. The gap in trust in institutions between the informed public and the mass public has increased during the past decade, according to the Edelman surveys, showing a gap of 5 percentage points in 2012 and 16 points in the 2021 report. Similarly, the gap in trust in business quadrupled during this period.
• Increasing actual or perceived inequality within countries, particularly in those in which overall economic growth is slowing, often coincides with declining trust and rising public dissatisfaction with the political system. In less developed countries, corruption is undermining confidence in government, and people tend to trust informal institutions more than government where political power is concentrated among the wealthy elite. Corruption is now one of the most dominant factors driving demand for political change. According to 2019 polling by Transparency International, a majority of respondents across Latin America (53 percent), the Middle East and North Africa (65 percent), and Sub-Saharan Africa (55 percent) said that corruption is increasing in their region.
• In coming years, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, 5G, and other technologies that will expand access to the Internet could further diminish public trust as people struggle to determine what is real and what is rumor or manipulation. In addition, populations fear the increasingly pervasive surveillance and monitoring by governments and fear private corporations seeking control or profit from their personal information."
OTOH (https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/movies/how-hollywood-sows-seeds-discontent-government-n648901), Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of international political economy at Cornell University and the author of "Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America," believes that the government will likely always be a reliable antagonist because the story line of lone, underdog individuals triumphing over the odds is uniquely American.
Kirshner believes audiences are the ones driving these narratives, not the filmmakers.
"The industry is desperate to reflect social trends, not to lead them," he said. "They are a very pure embodiment of capitalistic impulses, they want to make massive entertainment for the largest audiences possible."
..."The government is very powerful, and so opposition to power is always a good trope," he said. "We also have things that are walled behind us in secrecy and so we are allowed to let our imaginations run wild."
Dr Brin:
Libertarians claim that the statist goal of programs to feed/educate and enhance rights of poor children (posit #3) is to create a Dependent Caste
That makes no more sense than it would to claim that having an armed forces creates a dependent class that doesn't learn how to repel a Russian or Chinese without leaning on the state.
@Larry Hart - I knew Pat Robertson. I did not particularly like him. I worked for the Christian Coalition of America for 3 years. He stepped down midway through my time there and his successor, Roberta Combs, is a good friend of mine. I remember the time our legislative director (who was Catholic) disagreed with him during a meeting. Everyone turned on her. I may be a coward, but I defend people who are getting ganged up on. I came to her defense. Later that day Roberta told me Robertson was angry with me. Good.
Hey, I still have his direct phone number. I will keep it along with Richard Hatch's number.
@GMT -5 8032,
You lead a very interesting life. Either that or you're making s%%% up. :)
Dr. Brin,
I have NEVER met a libertarian who believed "...that there is such a thing as a 'commons' meriting protection and preservation". (I should point out that we have never met.) Of course, most of the self-proclaimed libertarians I've met were of the shouty college type, but others were USAF personnel earning a paycheck protecting their society.
I suspect it's because all of them told me that government should have no right to constrain individuals. One of them, an officer I think, agreed with Mrs. Thatcher of England that "Society? There's no such thing!" There was no irony detected in his words.
That's one thing that always bothered me about a posited libertarian society - complete individual freedom starts to resemble anarchy, and anarchy breeds protective associations who hire mercenaries, and mercenaries become feudal overlords...Larry Niven had a short story called (IIRC) 'Anarchy Park' that illustrated the cycle. People under pressure aren't nice, and men seem to resort to violence more quickly in general - as did the Mamertines in western Sicily. (When the genetic bottleneck in our past was discussed here recently, I thought of the Mamertines.)
I think it would be possible to spread enough prosperity in a society to get most people to agree to an "And Then There Were None" scenario, but I noticed that it didn't include the pervasive tests for sociopathy and other dangerous mental illnesses you included in your 'Sundiver' novel. Only a government that most libertarians wouldn't support or even tolerate could mandate such a universal program. This seems a Catch-22.
Pappenheimer, who could well be wrong about all of this
Don Gisselbeck,
You've failed to parse a nuance and conveniently forgotten when I've pointed that out in the past.
———
You ARE primarily responsible for your self defense because most US police organizations have conflicting duties. They are primarily responsible for arresting law breakers and secondarily responsible for your self-defense. In a pinch, you will lose to their primary duty. You should consider that fact and take some measures of your own instead of abdicating.
Can you see the nuance? I'm asking that you consider the reality of police responsibilities and adjust your expectations. The Police are in a no-win situation when we demand they treat each duty with equal priority… and we shouldn't be asking them to place our defense first.
Keith Halperin,
Some Libertarians are tolerant of the notion that the Ends justify the Means. I'm not, but many are. Look at Trump as the Means and you'll probably see their motivation for silence.
There is also the simple fact that many of them find Republicans more tolerable than our far-Left. I'm a bit more willing to be screeched at for not being sufficiently respectful of pronouns, cultural identities, and so on than I am of being told how to think by religious fools promulgating pastoralist conservatism. I'm more willing to be taxed to support a social safety net than I am of being forced to tithe to people of good intent who provide social safety net services. I'm more tolerant of the far-Left intolerants than I am of the far-Right variants. Many Libertarians have the opposite inclination, though.
Everyone,
I would deeply appreciate it if you didn't buy into the belief that there is a 'pure' form of libertarianism. There isn't one. We are a collection of factions like every other political party except much smaller and brought together only by the fact that we want to fight for ownership of the label.
The only stability to be found among us is that we are all inclined to be friendly with classical liberals even if we don't think they have enough of a spine to commit to some of what those beliefs imply. I'm more correctly labeled as a classical liberal which our Australian friends probably understand well enough to distinguish us from Progressives.
My association with the local Libertarians comes from the simple fact that California Democrats don't need my vote. I have no real beefs with the local Democrats… I just think they are being unrealistic when it comes to the powers over our lives they think they have. Some holds for responsibilities they think they have to us because I don't think they can reasonably fulfill many of them.
I want to take a moment and re-enforce David's five points while also pointing out that lovers of liberty of all stripes should be able to agree on those points.
1) Flat-fair-open competition doesn't exist in any of our markets right now, but we are leaps and bounds better at it than we were a few centuries ago. Even versions with a bunch of warts are better for lovers of liberty than what we used to do. So… don't get hooked on perfection as a requirement. We probably won't ever agree on what that is, but BETTER is likely something upon which we can agree.
Flatter
Fairer
More Open
Competition for market-tested betterment
2) Freedom's enemies across the millennia are found among those who think they know better or are better, thus have a right to coerce their form of betterment. The difference between a nobleman and a thug is usually just a matter of who writes the history and when. The difference between a priest, heretic, and crank is usually just a matter of which belief system is dominant in the culture. The problem isn't with what role they have at the moment. It lies in the fact that they are willing to coerce.
I don't care whether the coercive agent is in government or backed by private money. I don't even care that they believe they have a right to coerce. I care about them actually doing it and the disturbingly high percentage of us who will back them
Freedom's enemies can be found everywhere, but I give most of my attention to the lures that draw people to back them.
3) Elimination of poverty is already well underway. Commercial Tested Betterment did it. If one avoids tolerating shifting goal posts, this goal is already mostly achieved. Abuse and Rights Limitations are another matter though I suspect opening our markets to them all will fix that too. How? The same way we eliminated desperate poverty. The impoverished knew EXACTLY what they needed and pursued it once they had a flat-fair-open chance.
Feeding, educating, and providing for some stability for all children really should be a no-brainer. The forces most easily radicalized against flat-fair-open markets are those blocked from entry. We can deprive future coercers of their child soldiers if we care to prioritize the effort.
4) Only fools think there is no such thing as a commons. You are breathing one now. Try fencing that one in and the blood will gush in the streets.
5) Discussions and negotiations should also be a no-brainer. When people don't want to do that, they are likely among the set of future coercers. Put them down early and often. Recognize what they are.
Alfred Differ:
most US police organizations have conflicting duties. They are primarily responsible for arresting law breakers and secondarily responsible for your self-defense. In a pinch, you will lose to their primary duty.
You've made that argument before, but I'm not sure I accept it. What is society's primary responsibility if not protecting us from each other so we don't each have to be at war with everyone else? What you (somewhat correctly) point out is that society often fails in its duty, and then protecting oneself becomes a personal responsibility. But that's what C.S. Lewis (describing equal rights for women) referred to as "Medicine, not food."
Take Ukraine as an example. The obvious truth is that Ukraine is responsible for its own self-defense because, absent NATO membership, no one else is willing to do it for them. We provide assistance and materiel, but no one else will take the fight to Russia or even to Russian invaders in Ukraine. That's the way it is, but it's not the way it should be. The UN as envisioned in 1945 was meant to fend off that sort of aggression by uniting the rest of the world against it. That Ukraine must fight its own battle is indeed a truth, but it is also a shame, and a failure of civilization.
Only fools think there is no such thing as a commons.
And yet, plenty of people who self-identify as libertarians assert that very thing. Someone above already mentioned Margaret Thatcher, and we all know of Ayn Rand. Their ideas are not limited to the celebrities themselves.
You are breathing one now. Try fencing that one in and the blood will gush in the streets.
And yet, as the Joker put it in my favorite Batman episode, "If you make a thing unusable, that's just as good as stealing it." And the right to spew pollution which spreads far beyond one's own property is jealously defended in the name of profit, as is the right to destroy oxygen-producing rain forests.
GMT: Richard Hatch and Pat Robertson. Woof. I got a mélange of #s too!
Keith: ‘Is it possible that Americans' distrust of authority could be caused not just by Hollywood, but by the failure of many institutions to be effective and beneficial?’
The SoA mythology of Americans precedes Hollywood, of course, by generations. But Hwood amplifies it
“Other developed countries don’t seem to have the same distrust of government as we do, perhaps because their governments do better for them than ours does. “
You draw exactly the wrong conclusion.
By most metrics the USA is doing very well, including most classes that express the most rage. This is primarily cultural. Healthy SoA is incited into unhealthy rage.
In consonance with my #1 point in VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood – Interesting passages thanks! http://www.davidbrin.com/vividtomorrows.html “Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of international political economy at Cornell University and the author of "Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America," believes that the government will likely always be a reliable antagonist because the story line of lone, underdog individuals triumphing over the odds is uniquely American.
Kirshner believes audiences are the ones driving these narratives, not the filmmakers.” And ..."The government is very powerful, and so opposition to power is always a good trope," he said. "We also have things that are walled behind us in secrecy and so we are allowed to let our imaginations run wild."
Exactly
By most metrics the USA is doing very well, including most classes that express the most rage.
But America used to be "the best place in the world" for them
And today its about 30th - with 29+ countries that are doing "better"
Libertarians claim that the statist goal of programs to feed/educate and enhance rights of poor children (posit #3) is to create a Dependent Caste.
Well, that certainly worked with the statist program to create the largest military on the planet. Not to mention the statist program to create the largest imprisoned population. At least if you see military and prison contractors as a Dependent Caste…
Judging solely by what I see from the outside (and what enters my inbox), Libertarians are very selective about what state actions they oppose. Just as Fundamentalist Christians are very selective about which parts of the Bible they take literally. Or Fiscal Conservatives about when government deficits are bad…
Part of the problem with debating this is that words mean different things to different people. We've seen this here, where even technical vocabulary has different meanings to different readers, let alone general terms like "left" and "right". In terms of groups, there's the No True Scotsman fallacy, but there's also the claiming/hijacking of a term by a particular group to assert more support than they actually have. (There's a term for that but I'm blanking on it.)
https://jackbalkin.yale.edu/ideological-drift-and-struggle-over-meaning
By most metrics the USA is doing very well, including most classes that express the most rage. This is primarily cultural.
Cultural, or political?
Viewed from the outside, it appears that those expressing the most rage see themselves as losing ground, and their rage is being directed at those who are catching up rather than those who have manipulated the game — including redirecting the rage away from themselves. (And that may be stretching a metaphor too far.)
How much of the rage is being stoked by propaganda outlets (like Fox)?
Robert:
How much of the rage is being stoked by propaganda outlets (like Fox)?
Say no more.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Jun15-6.html
Fox News Calls Biden a Wannabe Dictator
During Donald Trump's speech after his arraignment, Fox News ran a chyron calling Joe Biden a wannabe dictator for arresting his political rival.
The link shows you the actual screenshot from FOX, but the chyron referred to reads:
WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT WHITE HOUSE
AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED
The First Amendment allows criticism of the government, but the fact that 30-40% of voters buy this crap is...disturbing.
Alfred,
I get a bit annoyed when I see someone talking "absence of compulsion". You can't have a society of any sort without some compulsion. Compulsion not to piss in swimming pools, I'm all for it. Seen objectively, private property implies compulsion (you can't take or use that thing without being forced to pay for it). You can't eat, pay the rent, receive medical services without paid work first is also compulsion. The argument isn't an absolute argument about compulsion or no compulsion, that just doesn't make sense. It is a more subtle argument about what sorts of compulsion, made by whom and when allow for the best chance of a peaceful and fulfilling life for as much of society as possible.
As an aside: I just wonder how many people here have read Donut Economics?
Alfred also,
I cannot understand your view that the primary aim of police (should?) be to arrest criminals? Seriously, if there is an active shooter and they see a traffic offender they should forget about protecting the public from an active shooter and arrest the traffic offender instead. You can't be serious. I see there primary role as protecting the public - part of which will involve arresting criminals. (P.S. I like using extreme examples to make people who argue from principle look ridiculous. Sorry if you find it offensive.)
reason:
Seriously, if there is an active shooter and they see a traffic offender they should forget about protecting the public from an active shooter and arrest the traffic offender instead.
I'm in agreement with your point, but that wasn't a particularly good illustration. The easy counter argument is that the active shooter is also a lawbreaker.
I think what Alfred has in mind is what we were told at the office about an active shooter situation. In the event that an active shooter is still at large in the building, the police will be focused on taking him down, not on rendering assistance to the injured or helping people escape. That's not so much a question of professional or moral duties as it is one of allocating resources.
Yes, but actually concentrating only on arresting the shooter in such a situation might be dangerous to the public. And I would hope the priorities are set appropriately.
@Alfred: Thank you. So for this type of Libertarian: the ends "lowering my taxes, more money for me" justifies the means "installing and returning a ‘caudillo’".
@Duncan, @Dr. Brin, @Robert:
OGH: By most metrics the USA is doing very well, including most classes that express the most rage.
Duncan: But America used to be "the best place in the world" for them
And today its about 30th - with 29+ countries that are doing "better".
Robert: Cultural, or political?
Please see below.
++++++++++++++++
US WORLD RANKINGS BY VARIOUS INDICATORS
SOCIAL INDICATORS
Life Expectancy
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)
57th in the world as of 2021, and DECLINING
Human Development Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index)
21st in the world as of 2021 and DOWN 3 since 2015
OECD Better Life Index
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Better_Life_Index)
10th in the world as of 2020
Social Progress Index
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index)
25th in the world as of 2022
============================
EDUCATION
International Education Database
(https://worldtop20.org/education-database/)
29th in the world as of 2023
Most Educated
(https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-educated-countries)
6th in the world as of 2018
===========================
FREEDOM
List of Fredom Indices
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices)
35th in the world (Overall) as of 2023
Freedom in the world
61st in the world as of 2023
Democracy Index
25th in the world as of 2023- “Flawed Democracy”
Index of Economic Freedom
26th in the world as of 2023
Press Freedom Index
45th in the world as of 2023
============================
MISCELLANEOUS
Incarceration Rates, Prison Population
(https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country)
1st in the world (in both categories) as of 2023
Income Equality
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality)
120th in the world as of 2019 (Gini Index)
World Happiness Report
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report)
15th in the world as of 2023
Larry,
What is society's primary responsibility if not…
Okay. Let me do my Thatcher imitation here. Who EXACTLY are you saying has that as their primary responsibility? Point at the belly buttons assigned that duty please.
Society doesn't work for you. You don't pay it's paycheck. It has no job description. PEOPLE in society might work for you (indirectly) and have job descriptions connected to their pay. Most importantly, though, it is PEOPLE we can hold responsible for injustices done upon us. There are no heads to lop off if society commits an injustice because it is people who do it.
The obvious truth is that Ukraine is responsible for its own self-defense…
Ah. Now you personify nations. I actually agree with your inclination to do so, but I don't see nations as humans. They are a different kind of critter. Yes. Nations are responsible for their self-defense… even when they belong to alliances who offer help.
Your description of the original purpose of the UN describes a war-weary fantasy. There was really no way an empire was going to surrender its defense objectives to the UN. Nations only appeared to do so because they had no other viable option. Neither the UN nor League of Nations is really a viable idea.
———
I don't accept your Joker argument. Making a thing unusable is closer to vandalism than theft. If the thief can't use it either it isn't the same as when they can. YOU might be deprived of your property both ways, but let's not mistake the two things for each other.
I know there are some who assert there is no such thing as a commons. They do so largely on a position that social groups aren't agents. I disagree with them and point out that there real issue with the term is that they can't abide an exception. If a commons exists, they worry (rightly) about who gets to speak for it. Who defends air quality or oxygen levels in your examples? The exception is easy to spot. If a commons exists, there is a justification for government.
reason,
Larry summarized my response to the active shooter fairly, so I'll just add to it.
Arresting an active shooter IS dangerous to all concerned. While we don't want the police leaving the endangered public at risk, we also don't want them going in guns blazing even if all they could hit were the bad guys.
You want them setting priorities appropriately. I agree with you. That is the proper outlook. All I'm pointing out is that your safety is actually NOT their top priority and expectations that it is lead to conflict for them. In an active shooter situation, we'd still prefer they arrest the shooter if possible. It's unlikely due to the psychology of most shooters in the moment, but not impossible. If they don't make at least a fig leaf effort, many of us view it as state-approved murder when they shoot the shooter.
———
I can understand your annoyance at 'absence of compulsion' arguments. Some people take them WAY too far. However, the counter-response to them some offer is pretty weak. Compelling people not to piss in the pool isn't really the same thing as compelling them to pay taxes. When someone tells me to stop fouling the pool, they are usually exercising trespass laws. "You may use this property IF you abide by these rules." See? Break those rules and you are invited to leave. Fail to leave and you are actually guilty of trespass on someone's property. The compulsion isn't about pissing in the pool. It's about following the contracted agreement for non-owners using property.
I'm not an anarchist, so don't expect me to argue for a no-compulsion society. I'm not even a min-archist, but I am sympathetic to their position. The reason I use absence arguments is that I reject positive definitions of freedom/liberty. You are in a state of liberty when no one is compelling you. See? You can agree to the rules and use the pool and you still aren't compelled to get out to piss somewhere else. You can simply agree to follow the rules and remain in a state of liberty. If you don't, you still aren't compelled until someone invites you to leave and you decline to do that too. Only when security shows up to eject you do you no longer find yourself in a state of liberty…. and you brought it down on your own head after being given a number of ways to avoid it.
The problem with 'rules' (whether for pools or things like taxes and jury duty) is that many of us don't have an option. We agree to them or immediately face consequences. You can't use the pool if you don't agree to the rules. You must pay taxes or risk hefty fines and garnishments and even jail time. Those don't feel like voluntary agreements to many of us and some bring with them very serious threats. That's why I can't use a positive definition for liberty. If the threat exists, I'm not really free even if following the rules leaves me otherwise free.
I won't use absolutist arguments in attempts to persuade any of you to change policy. I'll use them to make a point that your rosy view of how things work isn't really true. Some of us see it different and we aren't wrong for doing so. When it comes time to discuss policy changes, I'll ask that you consider an alternate method to mitigate our concerns. For example, instead of ejecting someone who pisses in the pool, would you consider posting a picture of them being caught in the act? There are simple dyes we can put in the water. 8)
Keith,
Heh. You gotta get into the roleplay to properly grasp us.
It's not about 'more money for me'.
Lowering my taxes means stopping the steal.
It's a shame an orange child took that phrase from us and applied it to an election he lost, but for many of us taxation is theft. Lowering taxes stops the stealing.
If you think they're happy with some of what that child did, you'd be right. What they actually want, though, is for a President to slash the budget in half and veto all attempts by Congress to restore anything. They want wholesale slaughter of federal agencies.
I'm partially sympathetic too. Slashing the budget would make the feds a far less tempting target for corrupting influences. The flip side to that is pretty drastic, though. Much of what gets cut puts limits on the golf buddy clade. They'd love to go about their business without as many enforcers around. (Like what happened recently with the IRS. If y'all ARE going to steal from us, at least do it impartially.)
@ Alfred: Thanks. I remember somebody (it might have been Frederick Pohl) once had an idea-
"Pay all the taxes that you owe and a certain premium, and you get to decide what it's spent on."
Alfred,
If taxation is theft, then so is property and for exactly the same reason. And I don't think not having a positive definition of liberty is nuts. Freedom means being able to choose. The choice between starving and thieving in some cases is not a choice. In math you talk about degrees of freedom. The more degrees of freedom most people have, then in my mind, the freeer the society is. I can't eat negative liberty.
Alfred Differ:
Who EXACTLY are you saying has that as their primary responsibility? Point at the belly buttons assigned that duty please.
We're obviously talking about different things here. I'm rhetorically asking, "What exactly is society for?" Also flashing back to grade school social studies when we were given short definitions of terms like "community", "society", "nation", and such. I don't remember the start of the sentence, but the definition of society ended with "...for the mutual benefit and protection of all." A simplification for children, to be sure, but it's been in the back of my mind forever.
There are no heads to lop off if society commits an injustice because it is people who do it.
If society does not bring force to bear to prevent or discourage transgressions against its citizens, then it is failing. No, there are no civil injunctions against "society"--just people dropping out because they don't see the point.
Ah. Now you personify nations.
For purposes of analogy.
I actually agree with your inclination to do so, but I don't see nations as humans. They are a different kind of critter. Yes. Nations are responsible for their self-defense… even when they belong to alliances who offer help.
So you do agree with the analogy. You were already arguing that persons are responsible for their self-defense. I think you find it useful to personify nations more than I do.
Neither the UN nor League of Nations is really a viable idea.
Not in the sense of nations surrendering their sovereignty and being bound to take orders from a central committee, no. But a federation of nations agreeing to discourage transgressions against members? NATO seems to function that way. Until recently, so did the United States, which was originally born as something more like the UN than as a single nation.
I don't accept your Joker argument. Making a thing unusable is closer to vandalism than theft. If the thief can't use it either it isn't the same as when they can. YOU might be deprived of your property both ways, but let's not mistake the two things for each other.
Depends what you're talking about. In the Batman episode, Joker was holding the reservoir for ransom, so the only point of stealing it was to deprive the city of its use. In the case I was alluding to, the polluters aren't making air and water unusable because they're mustache-twitching villains. They do it because not doing so eats into their profits. And yet, from the POV of the person deprived of that bit of the commons, their motivation hardly makes a difference. The deprivation is what matters.
If a commons exists, there is a justification for government.
Can't argue with that.
I posted earlier:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Jun15-6.html
WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT WHITE HOUSE
AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED
I heard that the person responsible for that chyron was fired. And thinking about it a little more, I wonder if that was a kind of "F%%k You!" from someone who was essentially already out the door. Like the guy who once deactivated Trump's Twitter account on his way out of that company's employ.
There's a reason companies usually escort employees out the door when they are let go or suddenly quit. :)
Most have probably already heard of Ted Cruz's weird denunciation of Democrats which referenced Pat Benetar:
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/ted-cruz-pat-benatar-puzzling-reference-satanic-sacrifice-biden-1235646930/
Appearing on Joe Pagliarulo’s conservative talk show, Cruz was asked if he thought there was any possibility that President Joe Biden could be both impeached and convicted by a supermajority in the Senate, a fantasy scenario openly hoped for by some on the far right.
Expressing the unlikeliness of that, Cruz replied, “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.”
First of all, isn't this a pot-meet-kettle situation? Cruz is complaining that Democrats wouldn't abandon Biden no matter how much of a fictitious potential outrage he might perpetrate--one we can hardly imagine happening in real life. OTOH, Republicans have demonstrated time and again that they won't abandon Trump no matter what outrages he actually perpetrates, not just against our sensibilities, but against national security, law enforcement, and armed service people.
On the surface, Cruz's statement is accurate in the sense that I used to claim that you could show me a video of Barack Obama eating Jewish babies and saying, "Tastes like chicken", and I'd still vote for him. But my point in that case was that I would assume such a video would be a fake like Hunter Biden's "laptop", because Obama simply wouldn't do such a thing. Likewise, demonic-Brandon.
All that aside, "Pat Benetar"? WTF? And what decade are we living in?
Robert: “Viewed from the outside, it appears that those expressing the most rage see themselves as losing ground, and their rage is being directed at those who are catching up rather than those who have manipulated the game”
Exactly wrong, Robert. Oh, sure, there’s some racism toward ‘others’ who are rising. But among the most popular folks beloved of Republicans are blacks and other minorities who wise up and parrot the party line.
The ones the MAGA crowd truly hate are nerds. The folks they bullied in Jr. High School who now understand and prosper in a modern world that leaves the former bullies disempowered and confused… a spite that is exacerbated by relentless anti-nerd propaganda by media financed by an oligarchy who know that the nerds are the one force in the world who are thwarting a return to feudalism.
Reason, almost all libertarians, including Randians(!) say government exists to prevent others from exerting force on each other. That and to enforce contracts.
Keith your glomming onto those states is unfair, US & Canada take in nearly all of the world’s migrants and refugees. That contorts a lot of the stats.
Also a lot of those ‘reports’ are biased because the Empire is always gonna get more critical attention, especially under the SoA reflex that America itself promulgates.
Above all, it is pathetic to ignore that Pax Americana allowed most nations to spend 1% as much on defense and armies as used to be traditionally needed across 6000 years. That and the indulgent trade systems that funneled tens of trillions overseas that we might have chosen to spend at home, were we mercantilists, like every other empire ever seen.
It’s not just crap. It is crap steeped in steaming ingratitude.
Dr Brin:
Oh, sure, there’s some racism toward ‘others’ who are rising. But among the most popular folks beloved of Republicans are blacks and other minorities who wise up and parrot the party line.
The ones the MAGA crowd truly hate are nerds.
The ones who have rational capacity may blame nerds for their troubles. But the rank-and-file "base" the party throws red meat to most definitely have it in for blacks, Jews, gays, Arabs, and women (to name a few). Otherwise, why do they spend so much time trying to defend their right to say "n----r", "f----t", and such in public? They may privately hate nerds, but their politicians aren't running on a platform of bullying smart people. They are running on a platform of bullying trans people.
reason,
You are very welcome to use a positive definition for liberty, it's just that I don't think it is a sound one.
The problem is a simple one. If your liberty is measured by your 'degrees of freedom' the a reduction in that number or a constraint that prevents a particular one should be judged as harmful. I think most reductions and constraints have nothing to do with the actions of people. Lady Luck is often involved. Absent a moral agent limiting you, I can't bring myself to feel that you've been harmed in a way I am obligated to fix or mitigate.
If you live in the next town over from me and we are connected by one road, a meteor strike making a huge crater in it constrains our freedom of movement. That meteor is not a moral agent, so I'm not going to get too upset. I'll help rebuild the road, but liberty and freedom won't be even slightly related to that activity.
I think people overloaded the meaning of freedom and divided it and liberty into many slivers. They did so quite some time ago, but I think that was a mistake we should correct by readjusting the meanings. People using language can do that, though there are some who will see the choice as a freedom limiting constraint.
For me the best meaning for liberty is a state of being in which one is not coerced. The number of degrees of freedom we experience in that state is a different matter.
Dr. Brin:
Re: Immigrants distorting ("dragging down") social figures:
https://wol.iza.org › uploads › articles › pdf
On arrival, immigrants are healthier than native residents (the “healthy immigrant effect”). New immigrants bring healthier habits and lifestyles, such as physical activity, low-calorie diets, close family ties, and protective cultural factors.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-021-09647-6#:~:text=The%20immigrant%20health%20advantage%20suggests,on%20other%20racial%2Fethnic%20groups.
https://chicagohispanichealthcoalition.org/hispanic-health-paradox-hispanics-live-longer-despite-higher-rates-poverty-harsher-jobs-less-education-health-services/#:~:text=researchers%20for%20years.-,Despite%20having%20higher%20rates%20of%20poverty%2C%20harsher%20jobs%2C%20less%20education,and%20a%20slower%20biological%20clock.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/
Asians (28%), Mexicans (25%) and other Latin Americans (25%) each make up about a quarter of the U.S. immigrant population, followed by 9% who were born in another region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population
According to the United Nations, in 2019, the United States, Germany, and Saudi Arabia had the largest number of immigrants of any country.
Canada, Australia, and Germany have higher percentages of recent immigrants than we do, and surpass us in many of the social (and other) statistics.
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/15-myths-about-immigration-debunked/
MYTH #9: “The United States has the most open immigration policy in the world.”
FACT: The annual inflow of immigrants to the United States, as a percentage of our population, is below that of most other rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
SUMMARY: Immigrants don't drag down our (health) social statistics.
...................................................................
Re:statistics: You claim that these statistics from a variety of sources are biased against America. What evidence do you have of that? Do you have statistics which show contrary information? I do: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-for-education. This shows that America's educational system is ranked as best in the world. (While our system of community colleges is the envy of many nations, the educational achievements of our students are much more in line with those numbers earlier presented.)
...........................................................................................
Re: Pax Americana: Yes we did great things and we helped tens of millions climb out of the ruins of WW II and build stable and prosperous lives, and instead of working out sensible, multi-year transition programs (or payment for services rendered/to be rendered) we continue to support them to this day. (Why is that?) If I were a foreign nation, I'd happily ride that gravy train as long as I could. Also, gratitude doesn't last forever, and we shouldn't expect it to.
SUMMARY: I agree that America has been perhaps the best empire the world has seen, but now we are an empire in decline. Can we reverse the decline? I hope so and will work in my very limited ways to do so.
Larry,
I don't get hung up on purposes for things very often. As you pointed out, some of the definitions we offer children are simplified. We also tend to moralize everything for them to teach the unspoken rules of justice.
What is a society for?
Well… as an adult I'd be wary of any purpose described by anyone that didn't connect back to evolutionary biology. Same goes for nations, cultures, tribes, etc. I actually DO think they exist, but I don't treat them as moral agents like I expect of individual humans. As for their purposes… well… they are likely emergent ones born of evolution processes. They DO all sorts of things, but they propagate because they help us individuals propagate.
If society does not bring force to bear to prevent or discourage transgressions against its citizens, then it is failing.
This is only true if you have already assigned a purpose and then metrics for measuring success. You should be cautious here because society doesn't have to bring force like that. Individual humans are already inclined to do it. In fact, there is a good argument that society limits our impulsive, emotional responses with attempts to displace them to people less emotional about the actual harm being done. If someone abuses your daughter, you might not stop after identifying him to let society convict and punish, hmm? I certainly wouldn't have stopped if I'd known the guy who attacked one of my sisters.
I put to you that these purposes aren't as clear as we like to say they are for the children. As emergent properties, they might not even be known to anyone let alone designed by us.
———
…so did the United States, which was originally born as something more like the UN than as a single nation.
Heh. Uhm… No. I don't think that's even close. In fact, I think it is revisionist.
Some of the colonists strongly disliked their neighbors, but found common cause in not being ruled from afar. Well… some of them found common cause. The taxes imposed on them to pay for the French/Indian war weren't even all that bad compared to what folks on the home front were paying, but the fact that it could be forced by people not immediately responsible to the locals (no direct representation in Parliament) irked a lot of them.
THE United States was technically a nation, but didn't develop a national identity until well after the Revolution. The individual States weren't really nations either no matter how much sovereignty they had or lost. Loyalty to the Crown swung like a pendulum that depended a great deal on how involved the homeland was in trading with the colonies. Right before the Revolution the pendulum was on the side where most everyone was at their most loyal. Most of them saw themselves as British, so that says a lot about how irked they were at having no direct representation in Parliament.
I think it best to view our revolution as something of a civil war. A whole bunch of British subjects disagreed with how they were governed that they threw out the old and created the new based on an idealized system being discussed among liberals.
A.F. Rey,
here's a reason companies usually escort employees out the door ...
Exactly one of my former employers did that... and I think it was the right thing to do. They also terminated you on the spot when you gave a two week notice, but not with prejudice. We all knew it and the custom was still to give that notice, but we already had our belongings in a box when we did.
Companies needing that two week notice aren't planning succession properly. People who get hospitalized from a car accident don't give two weeks notice, so I think managers who don't have plans for replacing people don't DO their jobs very well.
All sorts of emotions happen around lay-offs, firings, and other job transitions. The crime and fraud associated with those high emotions can be prevented SO easily... by respectfully escorting people out and ensuring they aren't in a position to do harm. That's how it was explained to me by that one employer, but they didn't have to because I had already seen the harm done by angry people. I just nodded, smiled as best I could, and packed my box while the security guy watched me... and protected all of us in case I slipped up.
Alfred
The Revolution was nothing to do with "representation in Parliament"
There were two major issues
The end of slavery was visible - Somerset decision 1772
Being told to keep their signed treaties and stop stealing Indian land - Washington became the richest US President ever by stealing Indian land
@Alfred Differ,
You are more temperamentally aligned with a world in which you survive on your own. I am not. I know I need to be part of a somewhat altruistic, somewhat tolerant, somewhat honorable society in order to get by. Doubtless, this difference colors our respective value systems.
I admire your version, but cannot live it.
LH: “The ones who have rational capacity may blame nerds for their troubles. But the rank-and-file "base" the party throws red meat to most definitely have it in for blacks, Jews, gays, Arabs, and women (to name a few).”
Nope. Dead wrong. There ARE racists and sexist pigs. And a majority of republicans genuinely think “I’m not racist!” Whether or not it’s true, they deeply resent being called racist and point to scores of black or woman icons of conservatism.
The hatred of nerds spans all levels and all segments of Red America. It is intense, unrelenting and hugely visceral.
“ Also, gratitude doesn't last forever, and we shouldn't expect it to.”
Baloney. This is the world of hope that America led and made. Try that when it stops utterly, utterly relying on the USA to maintain the pax that is the best time of peace and progress the world ever knew.
“ but now we are an empire in decline.”
More utter trash. Sorry. I’d demand wager stakes. But I accomplish nothing confronting you. There are far more dangerous bullshits out there.
Though that one is very dangerous.
Dr Brin:
The hatred of nerds spans all levels and all segments of Red America. It is intense, unrelenting and hugely visceral.
Ok, I'll concede that. None of them seems to say, "I'm not anti-intellectual. Some of my best friends are intellectuals."
Still...
There ARE racists and sexist pigs. And a majority of republicans genuinely think “I’m not racist!”
Then why do Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson command such followings? It seems to me that they give tacit permission to not be ashamed of their racism. And the reaction is a sigh of relief at being allowed to let their hair down and say what they really feel.
Whether or not it’s true, they deeply resent being called racist and point to scores of black or woman icons of conservatism.
Racists and misogynists don't like being called those things because they think the words are too negatively-charged. Same with fascists. "How dare you call me a fascist? That makes it sound like there's something wrong with what I am!"
their politicians aren't running on a platform of bullying smart people. They are running on a platform of bullying trans people.
And other groups, judging by my inbox. I don't know any Republicans personally (at least, none that have made themselves known as such), but I get over 100 emails a day from various Republican politicians angling for support and money, and the overall tone is antagonistic towards anyone who isn't either a white male or properly subservient.
Maybe it looks different up close? I don't really follow American media, especially not Fox opinion/entertainment shows (legally not news, apparently). I assumed that politicians looking for support and money would be playing to those who are already Republican supporters.
Then why do Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson command such followings? It seems to me that they give tacit permission to not be ashamed of their racism. And the reaction is a sigh of relief at being allowed to let their hair down and say what they really feel.
When Trump was elected one of Google's data scientists did a deep dive into Google searches to see what correlated with Trump votes, narrowing it down to polling districts (or whatever you call them). The search that most correlated with Trump votes was "good n****r jokes".
The taxes imposed on them to pay for the French/Indian war weren't even all that bad compared to what folks on the home front were paying, but the fact that it could be forced by people not immediately responsible to the locals (no direct representation in Parliament) irked a lot of them.
Which didn't stop the newly independent country from quashing rebellions by people within it upset about being taxed while not having any direct representation in the new government. (Shays and others.)
I suspect that it isn't that people hate nerds/experts for "what they know". Rather, I think much of the hate arises from living in a system that is so complex that they have to avail themselves of the services of experts in order to conduct routine matters. That erodes agency. And, it's the perceived loss of agency that breeds resentment/hatred.
Legislators generally consider complexity to be a "feature". It allows minimization of "waste fraud and abuse" and liability by covering as many eventualities as possible. It allows them to cater to special interests/provide pork for their constituents on a granular level. It acts as a perpetual jobs program for the experts... But, as systems become too complex for the average person to understand, their intricacies force reliance on experts. And, that, again, erodes agency and triggers resentment. If legislators, instead, considered complexity as a cost/burden and attempted to minimize it (within the constraints of the stated purpose) there would be much less resistance. If the income tax was greatly simplified--limited to its basic progressive structure without all the credits/deductions/conditions so that the average person could actually file his return on a postcard, there would be far fewer complaints. One of the strongest appeals of demagogues is that they promise to drastically simplify the system. It seldom works, in practice, but that's what they promise to gain support...
CP
The solution to THAT "Legislators generally consider complexity to be a "feature"" is quite simple
The "Purpose Statement"
All legislation should start with a "Purpose Statement"
That makes the inevitable tweaks and fixes quite simple
The US Constitution starts with a "Purpose Statement"
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The problem is that people do NOT treat it as the "Purpose Statement"
As the "Purpose Statement" it is actually MORE important than the rest of the Constitution and Amendments
Larry,
I don't survive on my own anymore than you do. I know I need much the same things you do.
The way I usually tell my 'awakening' story is that I had to leave the Boy Scouts when I was 14 because I couldn't stand the hypocrisy they taught me to see. Serve my community? Sure! Great Idea! What do you mean those people need help, but those other people don't deserve it?
It's not that I'm inclined to try surviving on my own. It's that I'm inclined to think on my own. I start with a big, heaping plate of SOA because of my Boy Scout experience, but my mother's choice to ensure I received no religious indoctrination as a kid played the biggest role.
———
As someone else pointed out earlier, we'd be cat food on our own. The reason I didn't have to learn the nuances of formal demonstrations of respect to my betters (bowing) is because some of us team up against them and effectively level the social classes. Not perfectly, but it's been a fight going on since the English civil war… and I need them to remain strong.
Robert,
There's a line in the HBO series covering John Adams after he's left office where he bemoans the fact that future generations will remember him for the Alien and Sedition Acts. Many of us DO remember that about him while also recall that we've flirted with that madness more than once.
If ever we need proof for the NON-sacredness of the efforts of the Founders and Framers, we really don't have to look far. Read them in their own words and we can see their mistakes and blindnesses.
Still… they got us started on this path. I see no reason not to continue our efforts at improvement.
Duncan,
The French/Indian war lead the British to realize they needed to use the French approach in dealing with native tribes. That wasn't going to work with colonists pouring across the Appalachians, but the limitations mostly impacted colonists to the north looking at the Ohio River.
Many colonists wanted to be self-governed but remain in the empire. Virginia went so far as to create their own variation on Parliament that went way back. I think it is a mistake to discount their desire to touch those who governed them.
Alfred Differ:
I don't survive on my own anymore than you do. I know I need much the same things you do.
I think what I have in mind is Batman's lament from the "Dark Knight" series, "...The world only makes sense if you force it to." My sense of you--my mental model if you will--is that you are more accepting than I am of the world's not making sense, and more willing to force it to in certain situations.
My own experience tells me that I am not able to force it to. The best I can do along those lines is to persuade it to. Sometimes, that actually works.
but my mother's choice to ensure I received no religious indoctrination as a kid played the biggest role.
My family wasn't especially devout--we ate bacon after all--but my late father always believed in God and in His choosing of the Jewish people. When my brother and I reached the age where we doubted the supernatural, I think that caused him to question his own faith as well, but he never let go of it the way we did. I think that his life story relied too much on the underpinning of God looking out for him, and anything less was unthinkable.
I may be making the same mistake with my life story relying on the underpinning of American civilization. The difference being that I am able to imagine the unthinkable. I just don't want to.
Re: American civilization
Always remember that it's not just American. And election hokery pokery won't be anywhere near enough to send everyone back to the caves.
scidata:
Always remember that it's not just American.
I rely on American civilization to protect me personally.
And election hokery pokery won't be anywhere near enough to send everyone back to the caves.
Yes, I know. Modern democracy has metaphorically reached the planets, and will survive even if its world of origin is destroyed.
onward
onward
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