Are you familiar with Georgia’s “Cop City”? This sort of thing does and has happened in the United States, and recently.
> Carr obtained indictments against 61 people, alleging violations of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, over ongoing efforts to halt construction of Cop City. Indicted activists, including a protest observer, face steep penalties of up to 20 years in prison. Three bail fund organizers face additional money laundering charges, and five people also face state domestic terrorism charges. [0]
Is it ok because the prosecutor isn’t seeking life sentences? Do you contend that the activists are being treated fairly as one expects in a democratic society that values rule of law? Is it acceptable because America is 66% less repressive than China and against a narrower range of views (like socialism/communism, see Debs et al)? Have you really even interrogated your positions?
> Is it ok because the prosecutor isn’t seeking life sentences?
Okay and comparable are planets part. The prosecutor is prosecuting. They aren’t a general opening machine gun fire at the protesters. The false equivalence is beyond ridiculous.
To find an American analog to the Tiananmen massacre, you have to go back to when we were fighting Indians. (The Ludlow massacre, in 1914, comes close in kind but not scale [1].)
This not being Like to like != I think America is Okay.
The comparison was between the recent campus arrests and this.
Most of the rest of your comment is just baseless speculation on my views
> were they charged and convicted with subversion, treason, or anything like a felony? Because that's what happen in HK.
Not yet. But it’s obtuse bordering on disingenuous to claim this isn’t on the table, given rhetoric from politicians (current and former). Or is eliminationist rhetoric and political repression okay as long as it isn’t done the way China does it?
Also, are you familiar what how the anti-Cop City protest movement has been treated in Georgia?
Honestly I want to know if you’re speaking from ignorance or malice.
As a American who's followed politics closely since 1980s, I'll bet I can level harder hitting more direct criticism of US politics bleeding into justice under the law than any outsider. Now is not that time. Yet, the prepondernce of immigration remains to the US and oecd. Not china, and many other places the US has substantial differences with. Eventually even the Chinese/hk populous who are in a sense more patient will get sick of things too. Let's not work in absolutes that US criticism means our house is 100% not glass. Instiutionally the US congress, gop, and even scotus have serious problems which are bad for everyone. Basically since newt gingrich was house speaker congress has been sucking it more and more. And that's from a person who until about 10 years ago was a straight line gop voter, the only one in my family.
This is so bleak, and the reason these bromides against CEOs appear is because this system of global capitalism is intent on commoditizing everything; even a CEO’s skill set.
Some people (either CEOs themselves or temporarily embarrassed wage workers) will bristle at this because it’s written from the perspective of warning/mocking CEOs who so readily automate-away workforces.
But an honest accounting would recognize that these automation processes have been happening for many decades, now. And maybe the CEO is diminished, but that’s besides the point that all of this just serves to accumulate wealth to the capital class, who’ve almost become sovereign (when Bezos, Musk, Andreeson et al can conduct independent foreign diplomacy or get a dedicated seat in the UNSC, I will be happy to revise this).
Everything is up for grabs, and if a board of ancient mummies can enslave a populace with an AI as well as with a flesh-and-blood C-suite, then they will. Because of the pressures to optimize and deliver more value that undergird our current society!
On the upside: an LLM probably lies less than a human CEO.
That it doesn't matter that the saving is trivial. I think it's a signal of one of two things: Either they want a popular committee dependent on their income and easy to manipulate. Or we're to see lots of savings at any cost at any opportunity. That's what I meant by "losing less" - not a truism, but a beginning of doing anything and everything to reach breakeven. And lots of it will be stupid and not make a difference apart from making things just a bit worse.
Please expand on the tension between the competing passages of “We have the technology to pause the worst effects..” and “It’s far from a complete solution”.
The phrase “since the dawn of humanity” is doing a lot of work in this comment. On a long enough timeline, the “world has ended” multiple times. This isn’t doomerism, it’s a pragmatic view from a biologist’s perspective.
Also as others pointed out, you misinterpret or misrepresent the interviewee’s words by placing “the end of the world” alongside TFA’s as though a thoughtful discussion with domain experts (in biology) is the same as the ravings of apocalyptic cranks.
Do you have an argument besides the ad hominem directed at “these people among us”?
I thought this article (a polemic and critical reflection on New Atheism) would be interest to the HN community.
History has shown us that a lot of “intellectual movements” loved by technologists et al have gone nowhere or otherwise been a joke:
- Rationalism: Styling itself as a rigorous way to interrogate reality to chart the best path forward (nurtured by the lesswrong community), its crowning achievement was Roko’s Basilisk, a hilarious “doomsday scenario” that only holds true if you happen to have a VERY specific set of beliefs about AGI and what its motive would be (ie the priors you must hold to believe RB are de facto religious)
Effective Altruism: Same as above, but (supposedly) tied to material pursuit of improving life for humanity as a whole; in practice, another rich tech brat playground and favored mindset of at least one multi-billion dollar fraud; also EA-motivated actors haven’t made a dent in any measurable global indicator of health/happiness, so what is all that money going for? Could it be think tanks?
And New Atheism: just a stalking horse for evopsych sex pests and neocons in academia (see the support for the war on terror, obsession with “western values” ,positions on campus protest post 10/7, etc… the article covers it well)
Putting this together: I think that “our community” isn’t very good at philosophy and the “lifestyles” we endorse end being the positions of culture-war conservatives (ie transphobia on the basis of “scientific reality”) or economic libertarians and white supremecist freaks like Moldbug.
I’d also like to be able to say I’m against ideology, but really I’m not. You can probably guess my perspective by what I devalue in my comment above. We are all reflections of our effect on the world, and I think the effect of the three “movements” above has been negative.
A good heuristic for whether a popular idea is worth paying attention to is whether you know more about the idea and why one might think it's true than you do about the person or people who are pushing it. If you know more about the people than the idea, there's a good chance that it's all marketing.
Atheism, I know what that is and why one might subscribe to it. "New Atheism"? The main thing I know about that is the names of the "Four Horsemen". I've read way too many articles in high-minded glossy magazines about it, that were mostly presented as profiles of people. I still have no idea how it's supposed to be different from atheism in substantive content.
“New Atheism” was basically just package branding for a handful of conference speakers/academics. It, much like “New Coke” before it, was about marketing a product (the speakers, not Atheism broadly) and did very well for them. It was basically just a subculture of atheists and their acolytes.
I did not like the article and I need to chew on it to give a proper reasoning, but the key point was the glib labeling and and over simplification of positions taken.
