The question we should continually insist on asking ourselves, both as makers of tools and users of them, is how they can help us improve the flow of love. Do they connect us with each other, and reinforce our instincts to treat each other as moral ends? Do they help us convey our love out into the world through information and interfaces, or help us know when we are being offered any?

I get what he’s saying, and there’s some nice prose here, but to me it seems like a whole lot of jibber-jabber. AI is making even the smartest people in my blogroll a bit loopy.

This shit is gonna make me cry, man. I gotta fucking read this guy’s book.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF1-15J2DWY

We hypothesized that if the threshold were raised, e.g. to 0.7 or 0.8, the model would reduce false positives by only returning articles it was very confident about. Our experiments confirmed this, but also showed a tradeoff: a stricter threshold means missing some truly relevant articles.

When we presented this tradeoff to the Pregnancy Justice team, they offered a surprising insight: they wanted the false positives. They explained that reviewing even the false positive articles, those not directly about pregnancy criminalization, was actually valuable. These articles helped them understand the broader landscape: adjacent policy discussions, related criminal justice issues, and the wider context in which pregnancy criminalization occurs. What we labeled as irrelevant from a technical standpoint was often relevant from a strategic advocacy standpoint.

Filtering is hard!

With reference to SNAP as an illustration

You probably know one hundred people. Picture two of them staring at a broken screen. The 98% statistic is a lazy shortcut. Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases. If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”. It failed to meet the basic minimum for 2% of the people out there.

via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959

Moral conviction predicts not only a desire for distance but a greater acceptance of violence as a way to resolve conflict. I want to leave that thought hanging over everything that follows—because resistance to AI has already begun producing more than op-eds and think-pieces. It has produced threats, break-ins, and worse. Quietly, moralization sorts a society into camps that would rather not share a room—or a planet. And we already have another name for that: polarization.

I understand where the author is coming from, but I really feel like this article reveals why consequentialism struggles to work in practice. At some point, it actually becomes inhumane to force the talking out of problems and to make value judgements. Morality at some point must be brought into the picture when we are making sweeping decisions about the lives of millions with an extreme lack of consent from the majority.

see: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5mwre_v11

Hooking up: sexual liberation or unethical exploitation? With the rise of dating apps, sexual gratification seems like a few taps (or swipes) away at any given moment. What implications does this have for sexual ethics around consent, fantasy, and using other people merely for pleasure? In this episode, Ellie and David dive into the history, theory, and criticisms of hookup culture. Is there a way to hook up ethically? Some argue that the power imbalances fundamental to hooking up prevent it from ever being on equal grounds, yet others claim that the shift to hooking up generates potential for queer exploration and for sexual discretion in ways that were previously unavailable. Let’s find out!

On this episode of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into monogamy. Ellie jumps into her obsession with reality shows centered around monogamy that are actually examples of polyamory, aka the entire Bachelor franchise. Then they discuss the appeal to nature that is often made when talking about monogamy as well as Aristophanes’ story of the one, the potential negatives of all-consuming love, cheating, and more!

previous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BYtI6GmOeo

This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, the disjunction of all such mistakes should receive significant credence. The article then discusses what our society should do in light of the likelihood that we are doing something seriously wrong

A bit of a consequentialist/effective altruism bent to it, but still a good and quite reasonable piece, nonetheless.

via: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/dg852CXinRkieekxZ/p/Dtr8aHqCQSDhyueFZ

For however futuristic the new genies seem, there is never actually progress in genies. Magic is not a measurement of their capability, but a description of our irresponsibility. Effortless wish-fulfillment is a perpetual hypothetical, no matter how perilously it is ever approximated.

I want you to explore. I want you to want to explore. If you walk into the darkness with a lamp, you will come upon all sorts of things you did not already know were there. One of them might be the thing you would have told the genie to fetch, but the more you explore the darkness, the better you will understand what else you might want from it, or from yourself. Everything you do changes you: exploring cultivates your curiosity and discernment and perspective and humility; settling for wish-fulfillment impoverishes your experience and then even your wishes.

On people who use AI to think.

So this view, that ideas spring fully-formed, and then it’s mere toil to turn them into prose, is false. There is no ideating before writing, because the writing is the thinking. Writing is the ne plus ultra of thinking. A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking.

So when a scientific journal rejects an AI-written submission, they’re not rejecting AI. I’m sure poor old ChatGPT with its weird syntactic obsessions is a more honest scientist than many. They’re rejecting a human whose actions prove they are dishonest and irresponsible and too easily impressed.

A tiny, anecdotal bit of context for this story:

My dad was an assistant warden at a county prison when I was growing up. Over 30 years ago he sat me down in his office one day and showed me how he could look up anyone he wanted in their databases, which had demographic information, information about criminal records, last known location, all sorts of things in what today would look like a charming ASCII art interface resembling old school dbase (probably written in it). He said he always looked up men my female cousins were dating, and showed me one. Many of his pals were in law enforcement and I got the sense that this was a widespread practice, something they all knew they shouldn’t be doing but routinely did anyway. He tried to convince me that I should get into writing software like this prisonware. I never did that or anything like it. I still feel a little guilty about what I saw that day decades ago.

Regarding the feminist concept of sexual objectification, Bauer explains that it was coined as part of a feminist shift in how to understand the world and one’s experience in it. According to the shift in question, in a context in which women experience widespread, systematic, diachronic, and structural disadvantages, certain ways of perceiving and representing women tend to cause them material and psychological harm. Bauer argues that once someone participates in this shift, the term ‘sexual objectification’ will ‘light up’ the relevant phenomena, and the person in question will see objectification everywhere she looks in contemporary culture. This is the case even if she is not in a position to specify exactly its marks and features.

Finally, I have read my first SEP entry in full. This reading has definitely strengthened my understanding of common positions, but no real illumination was had with respect to what to do about this whole thing. Sigh.

Cognitive scientist Molly Crockett joins the show to talk about what it’s like to be known in the field as an “AI skeptic.” We talk about where Molly is actually skeptical, but also what she thinks that label gets wrong. Along the way, we cover a bunch of other things too: Molly’s research in social neuroscience, computational modeling, and moral psychology; Molly and Mickey’s disagreements about empathic AI; and Molly’s case for what she’s calling “thick empathy.” Finally, Molly makes a pitch for non-alcoholic beer, which sadly falls on deaf ears.

We have a tendency to think of just war as the normal case, and war crimes as a bizarre aberration done by monsters. In reality, the natural state of any army is to commit war crimes. Until the formation of the modern laws of war in the late nineteenth century, every army on every side of every war committed what we would think of as war crimes.

War is a machine that makes people evil, and this is why. To fight a war, you have to lie to yourself.

This does raise some questions about what it means to live out the Peace Testimony. Does it mean anything at all to live peacefully if I’ve never had the opportunity to choose violence? What does it mean for me, in my social context, to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars?

I have very little desire to do violence to anyone. But I do, often, practice the habits of mind that make people want to fight wars.

A lot of excellent stuff here.

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At [no] time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

This now has a name.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/quaker-peace-testimony

Treating certain groups as too delicate for critique isn’t protection; it’s condescension. I get why “don’t punch down” feels right—it comes from a desire to protect the vulnerable. But if we want real equity in academia, we need to hold everyone’s ideas to the same rigorous standards: careful criticism delivered with respect, regardless of who’s giving or receiving it. Maybe instead of worrying about which direction we’re punching, we could focus on having better fights; maybe we can speak to each other, even when we’re criticizing, with more kindness.

Everywhere—from politics to science, from love to law—we are constantly asking: how can we get people to do the right thing? And the answer comes to us so naturally: prod them, push them, shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them! But every time we try to do this, we run into the same paradox that the Roman poet Juvenal pointed out 2,000 years ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?

Peoole need to take the ideas in this piece more seriosusly. Capitalism is cranking out people absent of virtue (including me) by the millions, and we need to stop thinking that we can alleviate the symptoms with rules on rules.

Boobs, breasts, baps, jugs, tits…what’s the fascination? And why on earth are they SO politicised?

Really great series on Nebula I’ve been following.

Some exceptions and why they matter

Excellent stuff.