Having a Yes Means Yes social policy would change the onus of responsibility for making sure that sex is consensual from the woman - who is obligated to say no if she doesn't want to - to both parties who must say yes to proceed.

I'm in my late 40s, and in my experience women of my generation generally do not want the onus put on them in sexual or romantic matters, and prefer the onus to be on the man to make overtures. It's for the man to pursue, and the woman to say no. If a man doesn't pursue, and soon enough, the woman loses interests and will often attribute the lack of pursuit to a character flaw in the man. I don't know that she's wrong.

When I was younger I used to spin webs of "wouldn't it be better if people did X instead". Maybe it would be. Maybe it would be better if people were unicorns instead of people. But they aren't. At least most of them aren't. Things are the way they are for reasons, not magic.

On my end, I am trying very hard to avoid making the mistake you are describing, despite that this is a very emotionally salient topic for me.

Because this topic is so emotionally salient for so many people, it is almost never discussed in an even manner. I have been very pleased with the comments on this post for so many people making nuanced points on a topic that would normally get shut down very quickly in a manner similar to what you describe in a context such as this where there is not a more uniform perspective among the discussion participants.

Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).

From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.

I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.

As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never succeeded to catch anyone. We can't watch everything and everyone all the time, so the arsonist has all the opportunity they need. (We are not even sure it was the same arsonist all the time, but the experience from other villages suggests that it is usually only a person or two per village.) We are desperate, and we are helpless.

In the absence of a proper solution, random pseudosolutions appear naturally. For example, whenever someone shows some anger (whether justified by circumstances, or not), people start saying that this is the kind of personality that could make one become an arsonist. Or when someone lights a cigarette, they are accused of "enjoying fire".

Sometimes political coalitions are built on common interests. For example an organization against smoking adopted the "smokers enjoy fire, which makes them dangerous to their neighbors" as their slogan, first because it instrumentally helped their goals, but gradually the slogan attracted new members who sincerely believed it. A huge theory about a "fire culture" is developed, theorizing that the ancient arsonists invented bonfires to make burning down of their neighbors' houses more socially acceptable; some people make a tenure studying this.

A few years later, smoking is banned, people are taught never to display anger in public, etc. Yet, the arsonist remains uncaught, and once in a few months, another house is set on fire. Which is seen as a proof that we have to be more tough on fire, perhaps remove all positive mentions of fire from books, or something. Because obviously, having a house set on fire every few months, is not how we imagine a decent society where we want to live.

EDIT: I also agree with ialdabaoth's analysis.

I like your examples, and recognize the problem you point out, but I don't agree with your conclusion.

The problem with counter-arguments of the form "Well, if we changed this one variable of a social system to a very different value, X would break!" is that variables like that usually change slowly, with only a small number of people fully and quickly adopting any change, and the rest moving along with the gradually shifting Overton window.

Additionally, having a proposed solution that involves changing a large number of things should probably set off warning alarms in your head: such solutions are more difficult to implement and have a greater number of working parts.

Simply put, a sufficiently reflective and intelligent person could independently figure out about half of the sequence A Human's Guide to Words just by being in a foreign country and thinking about the experience.

I always assumed a sufficiently reflective and intelligent person could independently figure out most of the Sequences just by living as a human.

Thanks for that term. This makes things clearer. Based on what you are arguing, does that make you a convergence theorist then?

Why is that important?

I dunno...I just find the orthogonality thesis as intuitively obvious, and I'm having real trouble grasping what exactly the thought process that leads one to become a convergence theorist might be. I'm hoping you can show me what that thought process is.

I think I can see where the intuitive appeal comes from, and I think I can see where the errors are too.

"Thus to deny the Orthogonality thesis is to assert that there is a goal system G, such that...There cannot exist any efficient real-world algorithm with goal G."

I can see why that is appealing, but it is not equivalent to the claim that any intelligent and rational entity could have any goal. Of course you can write a dumb algorithm to efficiently make paperclips, just as you can build a dumb machine that makes paperclips. And of course an AI could....technically ...design and/or implement such an algorithm, But it doesn't follow that an AGI would do so. (Which is two propositions: it doesn't follow that an AI could be persuaded to adopt such a goal, and it doesn't follow that such a goal could be programmed in ab initio and remain stable).

The Convergentist would want to claim:

"To assert the Orthogonality Thesis is to assert that no matter how intelligent and rational an agent, no matter the breadth of its understanding, no matter the strength of its commitment to objectivity, no matter its abilities to self-reflect and update, it would still never realise that making huge numbers of paperclips is arbitrary and unworthy of its abilities"

The orthogonality claim only has bite against Convergence/Moral Realism if it relates to all or most or typical rational intelligent agents, because that is how moral realists define their claim: they claim that ideal rational agents of a typical kind will converge, or that most rational-enough and intelligent-enough agents will converge. You might be able to build a (genuinely intelligent, reflecting and updating) Clippy, but that wouldn't prove anything. The natural existence of sociopaths doesn't disprove MR because they are statiscally rare, and their typicality is in doubt. You can't prove anything about morality by genetically engineering a sociopath.

As an argument against MR/C, Orthogonality has to claim that the typical, statistically common kind of agent could have arbitrary goals, and that the evidence of convergence amongst humans is explained by specific cultural or genetic features, not by rationality in general.

ETA:

Ben: [The Orthogonality Thesis] may be true, but who cares about possibility “in principle”? The question is whether any level of intelligence is PLAUSIBLY LIKELY to be combined with more or less any final goal in practice. And I really doubt it. I guess I could posit the alternative: Interdependency Thesis: Intelligence and final goals are in practice highly and subtly interdependent.

If we don't understand the relationship between instrumental intelligence and goals, Clippies will seem possible--in the way that p-zombies do if you don't understand the relationship between matter and consciousness.

Many library catalogues are searchable online. So you just have to search a different site to wether they have it or not. If they have it, it's probably quicker to take a trip to the library than to wait for shipping.

Really? I would expect you of all people to see it.

Most atheists alieve in God and trust him to make the future turn out all right (ie they expect the future to magically be ok even if no one deliberately makes it so). Hence "beyond the reach of god" and all that stuff.

I guess this is offtopic in this particular thread, though.

I don't see how this criticism applies to the original quote.

(And yes, the Cheshire Cat's entire schtick is being difficult.)

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the Turing test is very open-ended. You have no idea what a bunch of humans will want to talk to your machine about. Maybe about God, maybe about love, maybe about remembering your first big bloody scrape as a kid... Maybe your machine will get some moral puzzles, maybe logical paradoxes, maybe some nonsense.

This was more of a challenge before the web, with its trillions of lines of text on all subjects. Because of this, I don't consider the text based test as that good anymore - a true open ended test would need to deviate from this text-based format nowadays.