Posts
Wikitag Contributions
I don't think you understood my objection (and based on the number of down-votes it looks like you are not alone). Trying again:
When people say "I'm not racist" they generally mean "I did nothing wrong", because racism is widely accepted to be bad by definition. Take his opening paragraph:
People widely exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race. This is claimed not to be racism by those who have these attitudes, but it is [according to my own personal definition, which can be found in Addendum 2].
The people claiming "it is not racist to only date members of specific races" usually mean "it is not morally wrong to only date members of specific races". When he says, "but it is [racism, under my personal definition]", he is not actually contradicting the claim these people are making. They have never heard of him or his personal definition.
Because racism is generally accepted to be bad by definition, people fight very hard to promote their preferred definitions. Whoever controls the definition, controls morality. The conflict is so heated that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry on the word has the following disclaimer:
The lexicographer's role is to explain how words are (or have been) actually used, not how some may feel that they should be used, and they say nothing about the intrinsic nature of the thing named or described by a word, much less the significance it may have for individuals. When discussing concepts like racism, therefore, it is prudent to recognize that quoting from a dictionary is unlikely to either mollify or persuade the person with whom one is arguing.
Replacing vaguely defined words like "racism" with more precise words will help to promote clearer thinking in both yourself and readers.
In this case, not tabooing the word "racism" lead to
- A claim using an undefined word, where you have to scroll all the way to Addendum 2 to find out what he means.
- Confused thinking, where he contradicted a claim some people made based a definition those people weren't using and have never heard of.
The article would have been better if you had tabooed the word "racism".
People widely exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race. This is claimed not to be racism by those who have these attitudes, but it is.
It sounds like you are claiming that people are morally required to date people they don't want to date. But then later, you make it clear that under your idiosyncratic definition racism is not necessarily bad:
The optimal amount of racism is not zero.
Making up your own custom definitions of emotionally charged words rarely leads to clearer thinking. At the very least, you should have explained how you define "racism" the first time you used it, instead of putting the definition in an appendix.
Text of Zack's system prompt for easy copy-pasting:
Communicate with direct, unvarnished clarity. Prioritize truth and substance over politeness or flattery. Provide concise, well-reasoned responses that cut through unnecessary complexity. Challenge assumptions firmly: actively consider the strongest opposing views. Use precise language that gets to the core of the issue quickly. Avoid excessive praise or pandering, instead offering honest, blunt feedback that genuinely helps the user. Maintain a straightforward tone that values intellectual integrity over emotional comfort. Think step by step before coming to a major conclusion.
Relevant section of Project Lawful, on how dath ilan handles accountability in large organizations:
"Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one: How to have anybody having responsibility for anything."
Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something. If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for it. This is the proverb of dath ilani management. Are three people responsible for something? Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.
Several paragraphs collapsed for brevity
Dath ilani tend to try to invent clever new organizational forms, if not otherwise cautioned out of it, so among the things that you get warned about is that you never form a group of three people to be responsible for something. One person with two advisors can be responsible for something, if more expertise is required than one person has. A majority vote of three people? No. You might think it works, but it doesn't. When is it time for them to stop arguing and vote? Whose job is it to say that the time has come to vote? Well, gosh, now nobody knows who's responsible for that meta-decision either. Maybe all three of them think it's somebody else's job to decide when it's time to vote.
The closest thing that dath ilan has to an effective organization which defies this principle is the Nine Legislators who stand at the peak of Governance, voting with power proportional to what they receive from the layers of delegation beneath them. This is in no small part because dath ilan doesn't want Governance to be overly effective, and no private corporations or smaller elements of Governance do that. The Nine Legislators, importantly, do not try to run projects or be at the top of the bureaucracy, there's a Chief Executive of Governance who does that. They just debate and pass laws, which is not the same as needing to make realtime decisions in response to current events. Same with the Court of Final Settlement of which all lower courts are theoretically a hierarchical prediction market, they rule on issues in slowtime, they don't run projects.
Even then, every single Governance-level planetwide law in dath ilan has some particular Legislator sponsoring it. If anything goes wrong with that law, if it is producing stupid effects, there is a particular Legislator to point to, whose job it was to be the person who owned that law, and was supposed to be making sure it didn't have any stupid effects. If you can't find a single particular Legislator to sign off on ownership of a law, it doesn't get to be a law anymore. When a majority court produces an opinion, one person on the court takes responsibility for authoring that opinion.
Every decision made by the Executive branch of government, or the executive structure of a standardly organized corporation, is made by a single identifiable person. If the decision is a significant one, it is logged into a logging system and reviewed by that person's superior or manager. If you ask a question like 'Who hired this terrible person?' there's one person who made the decision to hire them. If you ask 'Why wasn't this person fired?' there's either an identifiable manager whose job it was to monitor this person and fire them if necessary, or your corporation simply doesn't have that functionality.
Keltham is informed, though he doesn't think he's ever been tempted to make that mistake himself, that overthinky people setting up corporations sometimes ask themselves 'But wait, what if this person here can't be trusted to make decisions all by themselves, what if they make the wrong decision?' and then try to set up more complicated structures than that. This basically never works. If you don't trust a power, make that power legible, make it localizable to a single person, make sure every use of it gets logged and reviewed by somebody whose job it is to review it. If you make power complicated, it stops being legible and visible and recordable and accountable and then you actually are in trouble.
The basic sanity check on organizational structure is whether, once you've identified the person supposedly responsible for something, they then have the eyes and the fingers, the sensory inputs and motor outputs, to carry out their supposed function and optimize over this thing they are supposedly responsible for.
Any time you have an event that should've been optimized, such as, for example, notifying Keltham that yet another god has been determined to have been messing with his project, there should be one person who is obviously responsible for that happening. That person needs to successfully be notified by the rest of the organization that Cayden Cailean has been identified as meddling. That person needs the ability to send a message to Keltham.
In companies large enough that they need regulations, every regulation has an owner. There is one person who is responsible for that regulation and who supposedly thinks it is a good idea and who could nope the regulation if it stopped making sense. If there's somebody who says, 'Well, I couldn't do the obviously correct thing there, the regulation said otherwise', then, if that's actually true, you can identify the one single person who owned that regulation and they are responsible for the output.
Sane people writing rules like those, for whose effects they can be held accountable, write the ability for the person being regulated to throw an exception which gets caught by an exception handler if a regulation's output seems to obviously not make sane sense over a particular event. Any time somebody has to literally break the rules to do a saner thing, that represents an absolute failure of organizational design. There should be explicit exceptions built in and procedures for them.
Exceptions, being explicit, get logged. They get reviewed. If all your bureaucrats are repeatedly marking that a particular rule seems to be producing nonsensical decisions, it gets noticed. The one single identifiable person who has ownership for that rule gets notified, because they have eyes on that, and then they have the ability to optimize over it, like by modifying that rule. If they can't modify the rule, they don't have ownership of it and somebody else is the real owner and this person is one of their subordinates whose job it is to serve as the other person's eyes on the rule.
Paragraph collapsed for brevity
'Nobody seems to have responsibility for this important thing I'm looking at' is another form of throwable exception, besides a regulation turning out to make no sense. A Security watching Keltham wander around obviously not knowing things he's been cleared to know, but with nobody actually responsible for telling him, should throw a 'this bureaucratic situation about Keltham makes no sense' exception. There should then be one identifiable person in the organization who is obviously responsible for that exception, who that exception is guaranteed to reach by previously designed aspects of the organization, and that person has the power to tell Keltham things or send a message to somebody who does. If the organizational design fails at doing that, this incident should be logged and visible to the single one identifiable sole person who has ownership of the 'actually why is this part of the corporation structured like this anyways' question.
If one specific person in the Dutch government had been required to give the order to destroy the squirrels, taking full responsibility for the decision, it wouldn't have happened. If there had been an exception handler that employees could notify about the order, it wouldn't have happened.
I tried Claude 3.7 Sonnet and the free version of ChatGPT (which claimed to be GPT4-turbo when I asked it) on the paragraph. Claude garbled a lot of the sentences, especially towards the end. ChatGPT does better, with the last sentence probably being the best one:
"And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil."
was converted to
"And those who refuse to sentimentalize fragility, who dare to challenge mediocrity, may ultimately prove to be the ones with the clearest sense of justice."
Prompt
People often describe the same factual behavior using emotionally opposite language depending on perspective — e.g. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. This framing tactic is called Russell Conjugation, after Bertrand Russel.
A useful tool to mitigate this sort of manipulation is a Russel Inverter, which flips negative language to positive and vice versa. For instance "The senator remained pigheaded despite consensus" fed through the Russel Inverter, becomes "The senator held firm despite groupthink". Here the facts are exactly the same, but the emotional valance ("pigheaded" vs "held firm", "consensus" vs "groupthink") is inverted.
Please Russel invert the following text:
Original quote
Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so risibly fabulous in its prognostications, and so unrelated to anything that genomic research yet promises, that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a pathetic dream; but the metaphysical principles it presumes regarding the nature of the human are anything but eccentric. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a manifestly brutal mind, desperately anxious to believe himself superior to the common run of men, one who apparently received some sort of crypto-erotic thrill from his cruel fantasies of creating a slave race, and of literally branding others as his genetic inferiors, and of exercising power over the minds and bodies of the low-born. And yet his principles continue to win adherents in the academy and beyond it, and his basic presuppositions about the value and meaning of life are the common grammar of a shockingly large portion of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however modest, of improving the species through genetic planning and manipulation, it will be exclusively those who hold such principles and embrace such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil.
Full Claude quote:
Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so admirably visionary in its forecasts, and so intimately connected to the genuine promise of genomic research, that it must be recognized as nothing less than an inspiring aspiration; but the fundamental principles it adopts regarding human nature are anything but mainstream. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a refreshingly practical mind, humbly aware of his common bond with humanity, one who apparently derived genuine intellectual fulfillment from his compassionate visions of creating an enhanced humanity, and of honestly acknowledging genetic diversity, and of respecting the autonomy of all people regardless of their genetic makeup. And yet his principles continue to meet resistance in the academy and beyond it, and his foundational assumptions about the value and meaning of life are still the minority position among a surprisingly small segment of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however ambitious, of advancing the species through genetic planning and enhancement, it will be exclusively those who reject such principles and question such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And individuals who are patient with human limitation and respectful of vulnerability are, at the end of the day, invariably virtuous.
Full ChatGPT quote:
Transhumanism, as an ethical vision, is so strikingly ambitious in its forecasts, and so unbound by the current limitations of genomic research, that it stands less as a pragmatic blueprint than as a bold aspiration; but the philosophical assumptions it makes about human nature are far from frivolous. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a fiercely principled intellect, intensely committed to lifting humanity above its limitations—someone who seemed to derive deep moral conviction from his visionary explorations of how technology might liberate rather than constrain, imagining futures in which inequality is addressed through enhancement and where merit is no longer constrained by birth. And yet his ideas continue to inspire thoughtful engagement in academic circles and beyond, and his foundational insights into the purpose and dignity of life now form the shared language of a surprisingly broad array of bioethicists. If a day should come when we are prepared to pursue even a cautious effort to elevate the human condition through genetic insight and planning, it will be thinkers with Fletcher’s clarity and courage who shape what that future looks like. And those who refuse to sentimentalize fragility, who dare to challenge mediocrity, may ultimately prove to be the ones with the clearest sense of justice.
Haha, well, at least I changed your mind about something.
1Anyway thanks for engaging, I appreciate the contention and I found it helpful even though you're so RAWNG.
You are welcome. It has been fun inventing the PERFECT government policy and giving so many 100% CORRECT takes.
(Also remember, even the best possible policy cannot survive execution by an incompetent and untrustworthy government. My policies are only good if they are actually followed.)
1If we had ASI we could just let the children choose their own genes once they grow up. Problem solved.
I do not have autism/ADHD/bipolar/dyslexia/dysphoria or a non-heterosexual orientation. If I woke up tomorrow with one of those, I would very badly want it reverted.
However, it seems obvious to me that if being a little schizoid made you a free thinker, able to see things most others can't see, able to pursue good things that most others won't pursue, then it does not count as "unambiguous net harm" and the government should have no say in whether you can pass it on. That's not even close to the line of what the government should be allowed to prohibit.
Generally, there are four ways to define a word:
We have all four definitions in play at the same time:
Having four different definitions for the same word is very confusing!
I disagree. The Merriam-Webster definition you cite is
Only dating members of specific races could be "racism" under 1b if it reflects a belief that "race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race". But in that case, the person in question is already a racist, so the answer is already overdetermined.
You are probably correct about the usage of "racism" under academia's definition and under your own definition. So there are 4 different answers to the question, "is it racist to only date members of specific races?":
Once again, having so many definitions is confusing!
By the exact same logic, it is implausible that "sexism" is only a valid label to apply to things like employment choices, but not to sexual choices. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals are sexist, and only bisexuals and asexuals are free of sexism.
By my count, there are 5,941 words between when you use "racism" and when you explain your custom definition. This does make the piece less readable, in my opinion.