SeñorDingDong
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Re: Soft Law. Today, I agree it is mostly wordcel bullshit.
But in the 1950s and 1960s? Quite influential, especially with US + friends, even without the threat of 'bombs.' Many of the moral and legal norms on bioethics are the downstream result of soft-law promulgated in the postwar period.
To get in this headspace, think of a UN resolution taking up space in the major national newspaper for several weeks, or even months. A world where single books and conferences routinely defined the future of fields and movements (e.g. Silent Spring) because of its relative media undersaturation.
Very helpful. If you are interested in adding a section about other countries/regions, I have done some research on various regulatory regimes (mainly in Europe). Happy to share.
I think this might explain the difference in framing? From the quote below, I assumed you were trying to come up with a fully general solution to the problem you specify:
What I think Wat Do is, figure out how to build a political network that is powerful enough to have leverage, but, is still based on a solid foundation of epistemic trust.
But I see now that you were taking the existence of a community of sane, reasonable, and mostly value-aligned participants as a given, and instead focusing on a framework which could make their interaction with the wider political process saner.
The uncharitable reading is that you are assuming a can opener, but, from reading your other writing, evidently the better reading is that you do have a model for producing/widening this community elsewhere (inter alia).
Have you ever read Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"? You can have as many checks and balances and clever system frameworks as you want, but at some point you just need people to believe in democracy. That is to say, your model of good government is never going to be complete without some kind of model of culture and shared values.
Maybe talking about culture - which is fuzzy, historical, symbolic, and social - is outside your wheelhouse. So what? Maybe clever system design and creating good incentive structures is outside my competency - that doesn't mean I can create meaningful political change by writing fiction alone or going to rallies. Don't fall into... (read more)
Some points:
1. "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Brevity & elegance =/= low-effort.
2. Footnotes/endnotes, collapsable boxes, and appendices exist for a reason. Good writing succinctly conveys an idea and withstands deeper scrutiny. The internet is not paper.
3. Often a few in-depth reads > a million skims. Small group dynamics are potent - e.g., NrX and Mencius Moldbug, or early Tumblr. True for both development of ideas & influence.
4. "You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people." Literally false:
The practical solution that medieval courts arrived at, and later the British and American admiralty, was the ship itself does.
This is not false, but unhelpfully misleading when compared to corporations. The medieval reference is presumably referring to deodand law, which has little to do legal personhood in the sense most people are interested in.
The description of the legal personification of the vessel is accurate, but it can hardly be said that ships are 'accorded the rank of person' analogously to a corporation.
That said, if we are going with the broad, non-technical use of the word 'person', an interesting case is the trial of animals.
This post surely cannot be complete without a mention of the Soviet petrol-powered rocket boots.
If it is of interest, I carried out a highly informal reddit survey on the birthrate in the context of Scotland's TFR being below that of Japan (with a summary here).
A common reason for not having children was the cost in terms of health, time, stress, freedom to travel, plan holidays, and move house. These are mostly invariant with income (unless you can afford a full-time nanny) and are the natural product of "good parenting" norms/obligations.
(which, it should be noted, are often reasonable: I think being a good parent does require spending a lot - more than any usual lifestyle activity - of time on your children; the kind of emotional investment which can lead to stress or pain; and a degree of stability/commitment which precludes the free-wheeling lifestyle of a single or DINK).
I am guessing that many modern people rate these intangible costs quite highly and the amount needed to pay them to accept the tradeoffs is therefore very high.
This is fun (although endless, especially if we include things related to deliberate/semi-deliberate signalling), here are a few:
(1) Hobby-related examples. Callouses on the palm in the spot where fingers connect to hand (e.g. like weightlifting callouses) , and on the thumb (on the side facing towards the other fingers), is quite commonly due to rowing. E.g., the friction of the oar rotating around the fingers and thumb holding it. Crooked nose sometimes indicates repeated breaking - high contact sports or plain fighting most common. From experience, boxing is quite common due to the artificially frequent number of blows to the face. Can combine this with scars on the knuckles, or slightly puffy... (read 392 more words →)
I find the tone or vibe of this essay fluctuates. Sometimes the tone is 'powerful AI is coming and we better make sure it wants to do the right kind of philosophy', which imo seems incredibly fraught. The world where the manipulation example is a live problem is absurdly dangerous.
Other times - especially in section 3, I get the vibe that philosophy is less relevant than not building strong AI in the first place (limiting the extent of optimization, or keeping AI as a tool, or confined to local contexts &c).
The effect is disconcerting. I think I am confused because the background model of AI progress is missing. I.e: do you think a pause is ideal but impossible, so this is the next best thing?