Basically yes. His staff likely coulda predicted this (eg there were a few circumstances where out of anger he did some small civil rights stuff, then backed off when he cooled down & looked at the political repercussions), and possibly Lady Bird, but no other senator or member of the public had any reliable way to predict this for the reasons you state.

It seems extremely net-positive for civil rights, but mainly through the mechanism of it making Lyndon Johnson a viable candidate for president while maintaining his stature with the southern democrats, leading ultimately to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This can be seen as a generalizable lesson only insofar as you think weak bills like that are typically passed by Lyndon Johnson-like figures playing 4d political chess ultimately for altruistic reasons. Without that effect, it mostly seemed bad, it likely actually decreased the number of black voters, and did not decrease the south's ability to filibuster the senate against civil rights (which was the main mechanism by which civil rights bills were unable to pass), eg they filibustered away another civil rights bill in 1959 or something. Plus, if not for Lyndon Johnson ultimately being pro-civil rights, it would have put someone decidedly anti-civil-rights into the presidency.

Tallness is zero sum

Why is tallness zero sum? Tallness is part of male beauty standards, so if guys were taller that'd be great for everyone.

Also, I don't really know why people think the ANEC or something similar has to be true.

My impression is that its because if it is violated, you get a bunch of crazy shit, like warp drives and perpetual motion (without breaking energy conservation). Plus, it makes the math a lot easier. You need some boundary condition to apply the field equations, and that's an extremely reasonable one.

Insofar Albert is a sociopath, or is in one of those moods where he really does want to screw over someone else... I would usually say "Look man, I want you to pursue your best life and fulfill your values, so I wish you luck. But also I'm going to try to stop you, because I want the same for other people too, and I want higher-order nice things like high trust communities.". One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.

This seems incoherent to me? I'd like it if all the sociopaths are duped by society into not pursuing their values, that's great for my values, and because they're evil I'd rather them not pursue their best life. However I still support distinguishing between goodness and human values for the same general-purpose reasons why often, even if its possible in principle to use some piece of information for evil, its still often better to spread & talk about that information than not.

More generally I think people are too quick to use the phrase "One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes." Yes, you can't argue against the utility function, but if someone has a bad utility function and is unaware what that utility function is, I'm not going to dissuade them from that (unless I think they'll be happy to cooperate with me on bettering both our goals if I do, but sociopaths are not known for such behavior). That's part of stopping them.

There’s a simpler way to get FTL in your sci-fi books, and that’s to assume the existence of negative mass and create an Alcubierre drive, which is indeed a well-known and correct solution to Einstein’s equations (if only you grant negative mass).

The reason not to expect negative mass to exist is much weaker than reasons not to expect relativity to generalize, mainly being that it violates a typical assumption of general relativity, effectively that energy density is nowhere negative. However such assumptions have been violated before, eg due to dark energy, and in my understanding, it’s not fundamental to the Einstein field equations themselves.

To clarify, I listed some of Williamson's claims, but I haven't summarised any of his arguments.

I think even still, if these are the claims he's making, none of them seem particularly relevant to the question of "whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy".

Williamson seems to be making a semantic argument rather than arguing anything concrete. Or at least, the 6 claims he's making seem to all be restatements of "philosophy is a science" without ever actually arguing why "a science" makes philosophy equivalently easy than other things labeled "a science". For example, I can replace "philosophy" in your list of claims with "religion", with the only claim that seems iffy being 5

1. Religion is a science.
2. It's not a natural science (like particle physics, organic chemistry, nephrology), but not all sciences are natural sciences — for instance, mathematics and computer science are formal sciences. Religion is likewise a non-natural science.
3. Although astrology differs from other scientific inquiries, it differs no more in kind or degree than they differ from each other. Put provocatively, theoretical physics might be closer to religion than to experimental physics.
4. Religion, like other sciences, pursues knowledge. Just as mathematics peruses mathematical knowledge, and nephrology peruses nephrological knowledge, religion pursues religious knowledge.
5. Different sciences will vary in their subject-matter, methods, practices, etc., but religion doesn't differ to a far greater degree or in a fundamentally different way. (6) Religious methods (i.e. the ways in which religion achieves its aim, knowledge) aren't starkly different from the methods of other sciences.
6. Religion isn't a science in a parasitic sense. It's not a science because it uses scientific evidence or because it has applications for the sciences. Rather, it's simply another science, not uniquely special. Shmilliamson says, "Religion is neither queen nor handmaid of the sciences, just one more science with a distinctive character, just as other sciences have distinctive character."
7. Religion is not, exceptionally among sciences, concerned with words or concepts. This conflicts with many religious thinkers who conceived religion as chiefly concerned with linguistic or conceptual analysis, such as Maimonides, or Thomas Aquinas.
8. Religion doesn't consist of a series of disconnected visionaries. Rather, it consists in the incremental contribution of thousands of researchers: some great, some mediocre, much like any other scientific inquiry.

But of course, this claim is iffy for philosophy too. In what sense is philosophical knowledge not "starkly different from the methods of other sciences"? A key component of science is experiment, and in that sense, religion is much more science-like than philosophy! Eg see the ideas of personal experimentation in buddhism, and mormon epistemology (ask Claude about the significance of Alma 32 in mormon epistemology).

I'm not saying religion is a science, or that it is more right than philosophy, just that your representation of Williamson here doesn't seem much more than a semantic dispute.

In particular, the real question here is whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy, not whether we ought to semantically group philosophy as a science. The reason we expect science and math to get automated is the existence of relatively concrete & well defined feedback loops between actions and results. Or at minimum, much more concrete feedback loops than philosophy has, and especially the philosophy Wei Dai typically cares about has (eg moral philosophy, decision theory, and metaphysics).

Concretely, if AIs decide that it is a moral good to spread the good word of spiralism, there's nothing (save humans, but that will go away once we're powerless) to stop them, but if they decide quantum mechanics is fake, or 2+2=5, well... they won't make it too far.

I'd guess this is also why Wei Dai believes in "philosophical exceptionalism". Regardless of whether you want to categorize philosophy as a science or not, the above paragraph applies just as well to groups of humans as to AIs. Indeed, there have been much much more evil & philosophically wrong ideologies than spiralism in the past.

Well Orpheus apparently agrees with me, so you probably understood the original comment better than I did!

The pardon example does not at all seem very targeted, the constitution doesn’t even say that weird shit needs to happen before it can be used, and my impression is (though I haven’t done a review of the literature) that much of the time it’s used for nepotism and cronyism, so that one’s friends, families, and political allies don’t have to obey the laws. Recently its been used as a defense for the president himself to avoid laws and justice.

Yes, comparatively its less dumb than things of the form “the president can decide whether there’s an emergency x and then under those circumstances they get a whole bunch more power”, but its still a great tax on the principle of equality under and rule of law.

That this power was used against Nixon is special because it was the president helping their political enemies, it is clearly, on its face, a bad thing to set such a precedent that once president one is not subject to laws anymore because other presidents will bail you out.