When I think of someone not having the intuitive concept of Grice's maxims, I don't think of someone who doesn't follow them (because part of the point is that people usually do so, and assume others will do so, without ever having conceptualized them; also because ISTM someone who actually didn't, on any level, know them would be pretty impaired in everyday life, so people who don't follow them in arguments are more often selectively suspending common sense). I think of someone analyzing the meaning of what someone said, or what the right thing to say is, overly literally without recognizing implicature.
1I completely agree, except I thought "woo" meant things that were more supernaturalism-adjacent, or metaphysically-committed, or disruptive-to-mental-structures, or something, definitely not with Focusing or authentic relating as solid examples[1]. (And that ambiguity makes me uncomfortable with normatively-charged public conversations about "woo" that don't try to intensionally define it.)
(This is as much a response to the OP as to your comment, but I wanted to keep this topic under one top-level thread.)
- ^
in my idiolect, the name for the category that does include those is "hippie shit" (non-derogatory)
Very similar: 'Deciding to eat meat or not won't affect how many animals are farmed, because decisions about how many animals to farm are very coarse-grained.'
1I think a lot of people got baited hard by paech et al's "the entire state is obliterated each token" claims, even though this was obviously untrue even at a glance
I expect this gained credence because a nearby thing is true: the state is a pure function of the tokens, so it doesn't have to be retained between forward passes, except for performance reasons; in one sense, it contains no information that's not in the tokens; a transformer can be expressed just fine as a pure function from prompt to next-token(-logits) that gets (sampled and) iterated. But in the pure-function frame, it's possible to miss (at least, I didn't grok until the Introspective Awareness paper) that the activations computed on forward pass n+k include all the same activations computed on forward pass n, so the past thought process is still fully accessible (exactly reconstructed or retained, doesn't matter).
I'm hopeful the details can be fleshed out in late crunch-time.
You don't want to be figuring out ethics in crunch time, you want to be figuring out how to pass off (or buy time to pass off) the question to something-like-CEV or a long reflection.
that particular case of mass hysteria is a myth
1
1A cynical theory of why someone might believe going insane is the default human reaction: weaponized incompetence, absolving them of responsibility for thinking clearly about the world, because they can't handle the truth, and they can't reasonably be expected to because no normal human can either.
Yes, this. That part of the OP reads to me like
- fraud / fare-dodging makes you a bad person
- ⇒ banks/transit agencies/Amazon ban you because you're a bad person
- ... which is appropriate in this case because they have good info + specialization in evaluating that type of badness
but that's not what's going on at all; the entities in question aren't trying to evaluate someone's overall character or enforce norms for social benefit.
Banning someone to protect infrastructure just doesn't extend to banning someone because they abuse their family, it doesn't create a question of where to draw the line.
It seems to me like the OP tacitly assumes (& is confused by) something like 'all punishment/enforcement-like actions should be justified in terms of universal morality, not particular responsibilities and interests'.
Like the OP says, I have heard people say that not eating meat has no effect because production decisions are made in large chunks. That isn't about a preference for big actions.