BC SOCIETY
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I think because the reward structure of being a bio-ethicist rewards saying level-headed sounding, cautious-sounding, conventional wisdom?

Though I'm not sure why that is.

 @JeffLadish I guess if you want to radically improve the world, you mostly don't go into a field that is about opining on other people's work, you go into something like Engineering and do the work?
@JeffLadish I note that Nick Bostrom is what a Bioethicist should be: he thinks hard about tradeoffs and risks, and crystalizes concepts like the Unilateralist's curse and black ball technologies.

But this is starting from a place of "The world could be vastly better. How do we get there?"
@JeffLadish I don't know why bioethics doesn't look more like a field of (less smart) Bostroms.
@JeffLadish I guess because everyone's disgust reactions are triggered by the actually good proposals, and in order to make those proposals the consensus of the field a lot of people have to bite the bullet and stick their neck out saying "I know this sounds crazy / absurd / vaguely evil...
@JeffLadish ...to our intuitions / etc, but it is actually the right thing to do."

And there are not enough people who are up for that, to reach a consensus?
@JeffLadish But economics, as a field, _does_ have this property. Economists are famously fine with policies that are abhorrent to the untrained intuition, but that they are confident are actually better on net. That's a good chunk of what economics is.
@JeffLadish But maybe economics has a solid enough theoretical underpinning, that it can manage to be that kind of field, while, the state of consensus in philosophy, and ethics in particular is confused?
@JeffLadish Like, if you have people still fighting over deontology vs. utilitarianism, it is pretty hard to build to a field wide consensus that we should obviously do covid variolation, because it will save lives on net.
@JeffLadish In which case the problem traces back to "Philosophy has bad feedback loops: you don't get to clearly know that you got the right answer. Which means philosophers are incentivized to make interesting and counterintuitive arguments, instead of to steer towards the actual truth."
@JeffLadish Ok. I think this is the answer to the original question: by the standards of science and engineering, you can settle a question to a sufficient degree of precision, and then move on to higher level questions using your answer to the first question as a foundation.
@JeffLadish But by the standards of philosophy, you can practically never settle a question. There is always space for more counter argument. If you settled the question, you wouldn't be able to argue about it any more!
@JeffLadish Which means that you don't build a foundation of answers to basic questions that you can assume, in trying to answer more complicated questions.

To do it right, bioethics would have to, at least in many areas, _assume_ utilitarianism.
@JeffLadish But if you try to assume utilitarianism, a bunch of philosophers will jump on you with many counterarguments and paradoxes and bullets to bite, all of which erode the ability of a bioethics field, as a whole, to stick to its guns about ideas that are counter-intuitive.
@JeffLadish One thing to note here is that the philosophical standards also challenge the foundations of science and engineering. Philosophy as a whole holds that we don't have rock solid reasons to trust our "obvious" answers to questions of epistemology and metaphysics.
@JeffLadish (Like whether there is an external world or whether knowledge is possible.)
@JeffLadish But the scientist and engineers just ignore the philosophers and assume those things anyway, at least for the purposes of doing their science.

And this works. It isn't necessarily philosophically grounded, but it works.
@JeffLadish And the difference is, I think, that the goal of science is to actually land on our all things considered most-correct answer (in part, so that engineering can build cool things like spaceships), while the goal of philosophy is to have air-tight ARGUMENTATION for our answer.
@JeffLadish If you're mostly trying to build spaceships, you don't really care about gettier problems, unless they're fucking up your ability to build working spaceships.
@JeffLadish And if you you just want to know how the sun sines, you don't really care that epistemology isn't grounded, because while you might be confused about the finer points, the finer points of epistemology are not going to get in the way of your getting correct beliefs about the sun.
@JeffLadish It turns out that you can generally build spaceships, and (more controversially) end up with correct beliefs about the sun, without having a solid irrefutable proof about the nature of "beliefs."
@JeffLadish Now it does turn out that having correct beliefs about what beliefs are, is pretty useful for getting more correct beliefs.

But having correct beliefs about what beliefs are turns out to not be the same thing as having solid irrefutable arguments for your belief about beliefs.
@JeffLadish This, by the way, is my main answer to the objection that I am projecting onto some folks that I talked to about critical rationality, recently.

(To be clear, I DON'T think that I definitely understood the points they made, and I may be responding to a straw-man.)
@JeffLadish But, I said recently that I thought that Bayes is the foundation of epistemology.

https://t.co/TfCQgRqUtv
@JeffLadish Different people gave different objections to that, but one objection was (if I understand it correctly) "But, where do your probabilities come from? Either you're infinitely certain of them, or you have an infinite stack of probabilities about the probability below them."
@JeffLadish https://t.co/8joOxuxaPp
@JeffLadish I think I could give some more detailed arguments about how this works, but I also want to dispute frame of the point being argued (if I understand it) a bit.
@JeffLadish It is totally possible to have a functioning brain / epistemology, that actually works for producing knowledge and steering through the world, which does not justify itself on its own terms.
@JeffLadish Like the question of "Does a Bayesian learning mechanism, work, in practice" is a separate question from "How do we justify that it works?"
@JeffLadish In general, I think many questions of the "but how do we justify it?" stripe, just don't matter very much.

For many things, we can't prove that it works, but it does work, and it is more interesting to move on to more advanced problems by assuming some things we can't prove.
@JeffLadish That is not to say that ALL questions of justification are irrelevant. Most of the time, even, it is very practically important to ask "how do we / can we know this is true?"
@JeffLadish But my goal in asking that is to figure out what's true, to the best of my ability, and to my own satisfaction, not to have an airtight argument that something is true.
@JeffLadish ...
Getting back to the original question, I think my answer was incomplete, and part of what is happening here is some self-selection regarding who becomes a bio-ethicist that I don't understand in detail.

Basically, I imagine that they tend towards conventional-mindedness.
@JeffLadish @threadreaderapp unroll

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Eli Tyre
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There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]
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Eli Tyre
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@EpistemicHope
My catch all thread for this discussion of AI risk in relation to Critical Rationalism, to summarize what's happened so far and how to go forward, from here.

I started by simply stating that I thought that the arguments that I had heard so far don't hold up, and seeing if anyone was interested in going into it in depth with


So far, a few people have engaged pretty extensively with me, for instance, scheduling video calls to talk about some of the stuff, or long private chats.

(Links to some of those that are public at the bottom of the thread.)

But in addition to that, there has been a much more sprawling conversation happening on twitter, involving a much larger number of people.

Having talked to a number of people, I then offered a paraphrase of the basic counter that I was hearing from people of the Crit Rat persuasion.
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I know some people who seem (to me) more concerned with receiving VALIDATION for their mental health issues than solving them.

They seem to care most about other people BELIEVING their problems are real.

I'm curious about this.

Like, it's more important to them that people know how debilitating their anxiety is, than to overcome the anxiety.

Or it's important to them that others believe that they're actually depressed, not "just sad."

Or they want people buy into the narrative that they've been traumatized, and might be something like offended if someone minimizes that.

What do we make of this?

1. One possibility is that if solving the problems seems hopeless or even just really hard, you need external support to be able to cope.

If no one cuts you slack because of your mental health stuff, maybe you're in a really bad place, so you need people to believe you.
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
CritRats!

I think AI risk is a real existential concern, and I claim that the CritRat counterarguments that I've heard so far (keywords: universality, person, moral knowledge, education, etc.) don't hold up.

Anyone want to hash this out with


For instance, while I heartily agree with lots of what is said in this video, I don't think that the conclusion about how to prevent (the bad kind of) human extinction, with regard to AGI, follows.

There are a number of reasons to think that AGI will be more dangerous than most people are, despite both people and AGIs being qualitatively the same sort of thing (explanatory knowledge-creating entities).

And, I maintain, that because of practical/quantitative (not fundamental/qualitative) differences, the development of AGI / TAI is very likely to destroy the world, by default.

(I'm not clear on exactly how much disagreement there is. In the video above, Deutsch says "Building an AGI with perverse emotions that lead it to immoral actions would be a crime."
SOCIETY
Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.

This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.

This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.

(I say "hypothetical", because all while this sort of thing is in my hypothesis space, I haven't seen clear enough evidence that intergenerational trauma is a meaningful category that I solidly believe it is real.

More like, "here's a story for how this could work.")

On first glance, I was skeptical of this "active trauma" story.

Why on earth would trauma be agenty, in that way? It sounds like too much to swallow.
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Meanwhile conservatives, generally, struggle to confess that Jim Crow was a (Christian) conservative movement. This is why we can't make any progress in 2020. The idea that black people *and* white people *both* have zero moral culpability on our past or present is fiction.

It's not "racist" for a white male to say black men in urban areas commit more crimes in their own neighborhoods and, therefore, are more likely to have contact with police. And it's false that men who commit violent crime & property crime are only doing so because of poverty.

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Medusa Benincasa
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A man just said “WHAT IS THAT?”when I walked by and then quickly yelled “IT WAS A COMPLIMENT” and then a small child said, and I quote, “Uncle Joe you can’t say that to ladies.” This boy will one day lead us all to greatness as a nation.

This is the second time in a month some dude has said something to me on the street and been shut down before I even said a word. Granted the LA version was more polite than when an NYC dude told me to smile and a lady cursed him out. People are hilarious.

I wouldn’t have been rude to either dude but wow, I didn’t even have to make the choice because we Americans are chatty.

Also I’m worried about Uncle Joe because $10 says his sister is the boy’s mom and we now know she’s not afraid to tell guys what to do.

My eyes got SO BIG and I almost laughed and Uncle Joe said, “That’s fair, my dude” to this kindergartener and I was like oh God the children will lead us.
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Nuddering
Nuddering
@NudderingNudnik
A long thread on how an obsessive & violent antisemite & Holocaust denier has been embraced by the international “community of the good.”

Sarah Wilkinson has a history of Holocaust denial & anti-Jewish hatred dating back (in documented examples) to around 2015.


She is a self-proclaimed British activist for “Palestinian rights” but is more accurately a far Left neo-Nazi. Her son shares the same characteristics of violence, racism & Holocaust denial.

I first documented Sarah Wilkinson’s Holocaust denial back in July 2016. I believe I was the 1st person to do so.

Since then she has produced a long trail of written hate and abuse. See here for a good summary.


Wilkinson has recently been publicly celebrated by @XRebellionUK over her latest violent action against a Jewish owned business. Despite many people calling XR’s attention to her history, XR have chosen to remain in alliance with this neo-Nazi.

Former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP is among those who also chose to stand with Wilkinson via a tweet.

But McDonnell is not alone.

Neo-Nazi Sarah Wilkinson is supported and encouraged by thousands of those on the Left who consider themselves “anti-racists”.
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Somya Lakhani
Somya Lakhani
@somyalakhani
Thread:
A year ago, at this hour exactly I was in Maujpur in northeast Delhi. For days, weeks & months, I -- like several other reporters -- filed multiple stories on the #DelhiRiots. On the violence, the perpetrators, the victims, the burnt homes & shops, the fear.

I remember every minute of Feb 23, 2020 -- from the speeches to smoke billowing from afar. What I can't ever forget is the face of a man who sat alone in front of a shop, his kurta dusty and torn, blood on his forehead, unable to answer who he was & where he wanted to go.

I've his photo, I never posted it anywhere, and I won't either. He was in such shock, and there was no help around. I tried talking to him but he didn't say a word. He was numb.

It'll take me years before I can fully write down what happened that afternoon -- a stampede, stones flying all around me, a colleague who held nu hand & ran, another who lost her slipper for a minute, tear gas, my inhaler, salt.

I sent my mother messages, my hands trembling. At 1 am, I was home -- my head buried inside a pillow between my parents.
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Lindsey Simmons
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When I was 25, I worked as a legislative assistant in the Missouri General Assembly.

It was a dream job, honestly.

But that dream dissipated the day the #MoLeg decided to name Rush Limbaugh as an “honorable Missourian” and place his bust in the “Hall of Famous Missourians.”

1/

The Hall of Famous Missourians sits in the Missouri State Capitol.

There are busts of Mark Twain, Dred Scott, Josephine Baker, Harry Truman and other legends of history.

The day I learned Rush Limbaugh would join their ranks, I thought it was a joke.

2/

We received phone calls from constituents appalled that Missouri would honor a man who had become infamous that year for calling a college student a “slut.”

And who just that week had continued spreading the racist birtherism lie about our then-President, Barack Obama.

3/

What I learned that day is that it wasn’t *despite* his racism, but because of it that he received this award.

It’s because he created a universe where it was permissible to lynch with language America’s first black President.

4/

Several State Representatives and their staffers intended to protest the vote and the selection.

By the time we made it to the doors of the House Floor, we weren’t allowed in. It was Republicans only. The doors were locked and secured by the Highway Patrol.

5/
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“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

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EVOLUTION OF CROWNS

The ancient Indian kings called a head crown as a Mukut and it would mostly constitute of a golden ornamental headgear like an oval cap with gems.

Sometimes it would also include a halo circle to show the divinity of the king

1/7


As it was considered that kings were appointment by the gods themselves. Example the kings of mewar considered themselves to be the ‘Diwan of eklingji')

But in most cases very few Mukut with halo effect have been found.

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Samudragupta in the gupta era coin. You can see the helmet like headwear on him.

Till gupta era the solid golden head wear was used in most days of the monarch.

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Whereas earlier the Maharaja had to wear the mukut whenever his court was in session.

Still mukut was being used prominently for ceremonial activities till recent times.

Maharaj Dahir of Sindh👇

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But as times past the style of headwear also changed.

The kings mostly wore turbans ordained with pearls and gems while rarely anyone wore a true Mukut after 16th century.

Portrait of Sri Krishna Dev Raya👇

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