aaplok

The article addresses this very point, using the example of climate change:

> it will be VERY plausible for an AI to simply conclude that it should proceed with the most expedient way to delete ~95% of humans.

The elimination of ~95% of humans is a realistic way of "solving" climate change, without bending reality. It just so happens that this is not a morally acceptable solution to most of us. In other words, it is not an issue of people bending reality, it is an issue of the reality being far more complicated than humans programmers can fathom, and consequently, that humans programming an AI to address real issues will be inherently limited by their own imagination of what the solutions to those issue most might be.

In other words, woke programmers may be bending reality due to their biases and limitations, leading to unacceptable outcomes from their AI, but don't be so arrogant as to think that your own biases and limitations aren't going to yield equally unacceptable output.

Good point, motive and intent do have value in assessing the likelihood that someone committed an crime (or any action). It's not quite the same as using motive to claim that someone is wrong though.

However, I agree that ad hominem is not always fallacious. If I claim that tobacco is not bad for health and it turns out that I have no medical background and that I was paid by the tobacco industry, arguably an ad hominem argument can be used to cast some doubts on my credibility on this particular issue. Probably enough doubts that one doesn't need to pay further attention to what I said.

However it's an approach that should be used with caution. It is much too easy to misuse it to lazily explain away someone's inconvenient argument. It is particularly pernicious when it is using a supposed feeling like jealousy, that are hard to disprove.

> We create small, smart cadres of people who watch power and wealth pass them by, and they advocate to overturn the system driving their envy.

"They're just jealous" forms of arguments are an ad-hominem fallacy, where characteristics of the opponent (here their supposed intent) are used to discredit their argument [0]. Not only is there no evidence that these activists aren't sincere (which doesn't mean that they are right) but even if they were driven by envy, that doesn't invalidate their criticism of those in power...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

> it’s common knowledge that most faculty today are de facto activists.

Whose common knowledge? I have never heard the argument that most faculties are activists.

This argument is a classic ad populum fallacy [0]. Using it to characterise (and discredit) and entire group is not a honorable thing to do.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

From the article: "The concerns articulated in the FfY formation statement pertain to universities — and not their members! — as activists".

They push back on institutions taking up activism, not individual faculties engaging in activism.

You could try to create an account for them on hn?

You left out quite a bit from that quote:

> Bates held research and teaching positions at Cornell, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins universities in the US between 1980 until 2011. > > In 2005, Bates founded Singular Computing to commercialize various computing architectures.

Patent trolls don't commercialize anything, they just hold patents in order to attack people after they start using them.

Then there is also this:

> According to the complaint, Bates disclosed various technologies he had come up with to Google under a non-disclosure agreement on three occasions between 2010 and 2014.

I don't know if Singular's claims hold any ground, but based on the article it sounds nothing like a patent troll.

Maybe the gifted kids that are not neurodivergent are better at avoiding to stand out, and so are more likely to escape notice?

> I doubt even 0.01% of the people in this this thread are talking about spiking. That is a strawman.

At least two different people referenced spiking explicitly in their comments. There are 136 comments in this thread at the time of writing this one. That is a lot more than 0.01% of commenters.

Regardless, your original comment was "An inebriated person on the street has decided to accept that people will see them in a compromising situation." If you want the discussion to only concern addicts then it is better to say it explicitly than assume it's obvious.

> Your dictionary definition does not convince me that there is no decision been made, it is semantics.

Well the meaning of words matters. Addiction is defined or described as a compulsion. If you prefer, the WHO defines it as "the user (referred to as an addict) is periodically or chronically intoxicated, shows a compulsion to take the preferred substance (or substances), has great difficulty in voluntarily ceasing or modifying substance use, and exhibits determination to obtain psychoactive substances by almost any means." We can play semantics all day, but ultimately the words "great difficulty in voluntarily..." are pretty clear...

I wasn't talking about addicts. Spiking is a thing. Being a victim of spiking puts one in an extremely vulnerable state, and filming someone in that state is abject, whether or not you are aware they've been spiked.

Nobody pretends that addicts are being forced to take drugs. However addiction is generally seen a a compulsion to consume. The key term here, compulsion, indicates an absence of choice (Merriam Webster [0] defines it as an "an irresistible persistent impulse to perform an act." If you can't resist, you're not deciding).

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compulsion

> An inebriated person on the street has decided to accept that people will see them in a compromising situation.

Not necessarily. At the very least the person may have been drugged against their will - it happens, even if it's not the majority of cases. Then there are many grey situations like addicts who are homeless. Given the possibility, a share of these people would likely choose not to be homeless, not to be addicted, or to be neither.

Taking a photo or a video of a person in a vulnerable situation when they can't protect themselves is abusive and it is not OK, no matter what this person's behaviour was at that time. Your comment comes awfully close to blaming the victims.

Galois didn't take part in the French revolution, he was born well after. On the other hand it is true that there was a lot of turmoil in French politics during his time, and that he was pretty radicalized himself.

> If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously.

Not really. It only signals that you consider your career and interests as more important than the ones of your entire family. Because this increases the selective advantages of narcissistic people, this is a pretty toxic signal to look for.

Yes, you are right that discoverability isn't detrimental unless it becomes an expectation that this is how one must engage with software. I assume that it is also the preferred way to engage with software for some people .

I usually struggle with GUIs and I find the concept of discoverability awful. Having to randomly click through tons of menus until you discover the right place is frustrating. I use MS Word maybe twice a month, and every time I go through that ritual of clicking through several tabs just to be able to discover how to save a file. If I used it more often I certainly would remember, but then it's no longer about discovering.

Oh and if you're lucky you have the option to hover for a second to find what the icons mean through a tooltip. Having to do that with every icon until you find the right one is not pleasant.

I just find typing "help" or "man" a lot more intuitive than the random clicking on icons.

I'm sure that I'm a rare specimen and most people would prefer clicking to reading, but personally I find discoverability a bad user experience.

> the boomer phase of their life

Isn't a boomer somebody who was born during the baby boom? What's the boomer phase of life?

Small correction. Bongo is (was) the ruler of Gabon, not Niger.

> Syncthing is my key to keeping my ~/git tree in sync between the two environments.

Why don't you use git directly for that?

Without going into the merits of this particular case, you can get charged for inciting to violence. Indeed that's being arrested for what others could've done. Specifically for what they could have done, but would not have done if you had not incited them to.

For example, if a black man walks into a neighbourhood and someone claims to the neighbours that he is armed and on a killing spree, they are possibly putting that man's life in danger.

Edit: actually a better example is swarming. It's seriously endangering someone's life, so someone doing it can get arrested for what police could have done.

What matlab workflow do you use that makes transitioning from REPL to file easy?

Why does this affect whether it is a war crime or not?

Imperial Japan committed numerous war crimes, whether or not they agreed that they were war crimes at the time. By the same token anything that was done to them should not be judged by what their own standard was.

> Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass destruction, to defend themselves.

Not according to the Geneva convention. Targeting civilians is a war crime, regardless of who does it.

In many wars, both sides claim to only defend themselves, often both sides even claim to have been attacked first. Just look at the last few wars fought by the US for example. Under such a simplistic moral compass as you gave, they'd both feel justified to do anything.

> Attacking to with intent to kill even one person is crime.

Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian center is attacking with intent to kill.

It is just not so simple.

> All of the inclusivity movements that have happened in my workplace have involved hiring people unfit to do their job.

Honestly it sounds more like a problem with your job's hiring process than with diversity movements. Even if you restrict your pool of candidates to a minority, if that minority is large enough, it's very likely someone from that community is capable of filling the role.

If you really don't care about the background then you can ally yourself with someone who does and get someone who both increases diversity and is competent at their job.

> The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.

That's not specific to diversity. Dick measurement contests have existed forever. It's a myth that the past was more meritocratic that now. The proof is actually that if it were then the high ranks would be a lot more diverse than they are now. At least if you accept the premise that background is not related to capability (ie you are not racist/misogynic).

> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them.

If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?

> no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.

The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.

I'm not sure lecturers profit off textbooks. What you are witnessing is more likely indifference and hubris from the academics than a deliberate strategy to extract more money out of students. This doesn't make it less unethical, but unless it's a textbook they themselves authored, it's probably not a conflict of interest.

I agree. Collaborative editing in this space is awful.

> This field really is another case of "we can re-land and re-use rockets, but digitally organizing a theoretically well-structured information space is impossible".

Maybe because it doesn't matter that much to most people? People who live in uncommented F77 codebases are lightyears away from worrying about properly archiving information.

You don't normally need to enter metadata manually. You can import it using the publication's doi, arxiv etc. Then papis gives you an opportunity to review and update the metadata. The other functionality that papis provides is a quick search through titles, authors etc.

Of course much of that can be done with doi2bib [0], arxiv2bib [1], etc., which you can combine with the wonderful bibtool [2] to keep a clean bibtex file. That's what I use and the advantage of this over papis is that you can version control it.

That said papis has its use. It's less heavy than zotero, a bit less proprietary format (the info is stored in yaml files iirc) and it provides a layer over bibtex. If it had full text indexing and search I could see myself using it more.

[0] https://github.com/bibcure/bibcure

[1] https://nathangrigg.github.io/arxiv2bib/

[2] https://www.gerd-neugebauer.de/software/TeX/BibTool/en/

Could it be that you won't apologise because a part of you fears that the apology might be used against you?

The recovery process will necessarily pass by trusting people again, and making yourself vulnerable to them. That is the only way you can experience that they behave like normal human beings who won't exploit your weaknesses.

I feel that you are shifting the goalpost and trying to drag me into a debate I am not interested in.

Your question was simple: "OP was asking why de Sade is promoted so heavily. [...] OP's question is also my question. Why is this vile little man being promoted so much?"

My answer to you was simply in response to that question. I don't claim that these people are right, I don't claim that their reading is the only possible reading. I try to explain under which possible reading Sade interests some people enough that they promote him.

You are welcome to rebut my point, but to do it, it is not enough to give an alternative reading. This is a different debate, which you would need to take up with people who are interested in promoting Sade (of which I am not).

> Presumptuous only enters the picture if one insists, as you do, that such a choice can only be validated by a cultural and intellectual establishment

Please give me the quote(s) where I do that. This is not the point I was trying to make, so if I mis-expressed my idea I would welcome an opportunity to correct myself.