It's not the case that doing good makes one's bad deeds less bad.
In isolation, I think that quoted line is (morally) correct, though. Moral conundrums abound, I've got a list of several hundred written down somewhere, so being hardline about everything is just a way to be more aggressively wrong.
(I'll note that the question of whether to punish somebody is separate from the question of whether they did wrong. What's punishment? It evolved alongside payment and vengeance, and now it has extra functions, such as deterrence, and taking power away from people who are statistically likely to do further bad things. It's related to the paradox of tolerance, and it's a desperate measure. It's not rational. The world should not run on punishment! The rational thing to do is talk everything out. But since that doesn't happen, punishment is the suboptimal but practical solution to conflict. When it comes to punishment, we do take people's good deeds into account. Don't ask me how that should apply to Huang, this is just a footnote.)
Nothing reveals the value of information. New purposes for old information arise unexpectedly. For each purpose, or person, other people's assessment of value is wrong. Books destroyed by libraries are often books I wanted. Space constraints are tragic.
I think "previously" meant "previously, using AI," not "previously to AI." The comment is confusing because "the AI era" seems like the antecedent of "previously" but it isn't.
That doesn't ruin a good game. It might spoil a plot-based game. It doesn't ruin a game where you creatively interact with mechanisms and rules, because all a cheat does is push some of those mechanisms and rules aside, so that you skip interacting with the substantial part of the game.
This really is not the message though. From the post:
“That’s why the worst possible reaction to a failed intervention is resignation. We may not know enough to improve our lot right now, but perhaps we could figure it out, if we tried.”
From reading the whole post, I gather that he’s truly not advocating some libertarian angle, he really is writing on the observation that policy is hard, and it’s nearly impossible to actually predict all the effects of societal intervention.
From my reading, I’m not sure even sure that he’s advocating caution or reluctance to social policy. Just goat sacrifices!
I think neither you nor the comment you are replying to are understanding what the article is trying to say.
It is saying, acts must be done to reaffirm the commitment to the goal, the goat is a litmus test as to whether the goal is worth it. Not to abandon the goal, some things are worth the sacrifice, but to be aware of it.
If you read more of the author's stuff it'll be obvious to you why this is wrong.
His whole thing is "we don't understand the world remotely as well as we think we do, and we need to be trying more diverse things (and reliably measuring the outcomes) so that we can understand it better"
Wow. So we must not ask if any govt interventions work for fear that the wrong answer will empower political groups disfavoured by the govt and govt staff?
We should not cherry pick interventions that don't work and misleadingly show that interventions meant for one purpose did not work for another purpose in order to advance a narrative that no interventions work.
> "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave,"
Well, we need to be organized around a plan, such as electrifying power generation and transport. Since government already heavily manages those things, it's not a matter of individual behavior, apart from the behavior of voting, and generally expressing approval of policies.
I do think you should stop with the guilt-tripping of individuals, and I do think that they're powerless - without organization - and that attacking consumers is wrong-headed. To complain about consuming says that the problem is that we have industry and nice things, but that's incorrect. It's a hard sell, firstly because people like nice things and think they're entitled to them, and secondly because they're right about that. The problem is that we have emissions, not that we have consumer goods.
US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.
In isolation, I think that quoted line is (morally) correct, though. Moral conundrums abound, I've got a list of several hundred written down somewhere, so being hardline about everything is just a way to be more aggressively wrong.
(I'll note that the question of whether to punish somebody is separate from the question of whether they did wrong. What's punishment? It evolved alongside payment and vengeance, and now it has extra functions, such as deterrence, and taking power away from people who are statistically likely to do further bad things. It's related to the paradox of tolerance, and it's a desperate measure. It's not rational. The world should not run on punishment! The rational thing to do is talk everything out. But since that doesn't happen, punishment is the suboptimal but practical solution to conflict. When it comes to punishment, we do take people's good deeds into account. Don't ask me how that should apply to Huang, this is just a footnote.)
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