> for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
The reality is that the US is divided on gender issues. Full stop.
It is a distraction and a useful one for MAGA. Among the Democrats, we keep getting tripped up by it and nominate candidates who don't realize the political land mine that it is. I am for gender equality, for racial equality, for renewables, for nuclear energy. But please win the election by prioritizing talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption. After winning the election, then you can address gender issues along with the full slate of Democratic platform priorities.
Dems are supposed to be able to talk frankly about their beliefs without the left wing of the party destroying them. There shouldn't be political consequences from within the Dem coalition for saying "I don't think we should have trans people in professional women's sports".
Since the Dems can't talk about the policies, the right wing gets to take up all the attention on them.
Democrats were NOT talking about transgender issues. Conservatives were.
Democrats talking about jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption gets no votes, because republican voters are not motivated by those. They are using those as talking point against democrats, but that is about it.
It's all about propaganda. Rightwing media is incredibly well funded and a big portion of that reason is because rich people have been using propaganda to boost their industries since almost forever.
Republicans in the late 60s were the party of the EPA. What changed? People like the Koch brothers dumped literal millions into rightwing outlets big and small to talk about how awesome it is to burn oil.
A similar thing happened with smoking. Rush Limbaugh, even as he had lung cancer, was talking about what a myth it was that smoking caused lung cancer almost right up until his death.
Whenever you find highly monied interests, you can find a right wing propagandist that will tell you black is white.
And the insidious thing is that they don't spend their entire broadcast talking about the glories of oil or smoking. No, the best ones just insert it in as little throw away lines while talking about feminazis, gay people, trans people, black people, mexicans, etc.
That's effectively how the propaganda works. Get people highly tuned up on an emotional topic and then just slip in here and there lies that you don't even think about.
As a kid, I listened to probably a thousand hours of rightwing talkshow hosts because of my parents. Once I started viewing things with a more critical mind it became beyond obvious what game they are playing. Unfortunately, not everyone picks up on this game.
The propaganda machine is powerful, precisely because the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war. The wealthy have been successfully astroturfing right-wing anti-democratic movements for decades, to the point that fascism is making a comeback. Climate-change denial was one of their earlier experiments, and anti-trans psyop is their most recent. The result is the same, creating false divisions among the masses who have more in common than they realize.
The world is burning before our eyes. It is unconscionable to use the rights and the bodies of the marginalized to put out the fire. What would be the point of making a better society if it requires leaving the most vulnerable behind? How would that even be a better society? We must be cognizant of who the real enemy is and never do the oppressor's work for them. Billionaires have class solidarity; for our planet’s survival, we must build solidarity as well. Fight the class war, and you fight climate change, transphobia, and all threats to life and liberty.
> the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war
We're capable of fighting more than one political war at a time. All evidence points to the donor class actually being vested in these culture war issues. Democrat donors prioritise Gaza and trans issues. MAGA donors prioritise Israel and Bible thumping. The Adelsons aren't donating to GOP candidates to distract anyome class issues, they're donating because they have non-economic policy preferences to push.
> the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment
No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports. Even the bathrooms were mostly the edges of the political spectrum screaming at each other. But when it touched kids' sports, a lot of folks got off their couches, and that was–given the stakes–a sort of needless battle.
> No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
I get annoyed by some performative language games too, but I just don't see any evidence that your broader claim here is true.
> Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports.
Most people are willing to acknowledge that the sports issue is a bit complicated, but it's also such an incredibly niche issue and so much lower stakes than everything else. People got off their couches for the sports thing because it's a "safe" environment in which to express hatred towards an out group. You can tell that it was never about sports by the actions taken by the loudest complainers on the issue (enshrining housing and employment discrimination, weird laws about forcing teachers to report violations of religious principles to parents, creepy nonsense like the bill to make lists of all trans people or mass cancel all of their drivers licenses etc.)
> climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction
Here's the reality: very few people actually believe climate change is an existential problem. As you say, this is abundantly signalled by very few folks being willing to compromise on other beliefs to advance it.
Want to build infrastructure? Cut taxes? Suddenly, people can put their differences aside. Want to do anything on the climate? Everyone has a policy bogeyman to attach, whether it be union requirements and gender issues or immigration and religious tests.
There's a Guante lyric I really like about this topic that I think highlights how I feel about your argument:
"Those who turn hoses on water protеctors
Are those who cage "Stop Cop City" protеstors
And enforce the brutality of the border
Same ones who enforce bans on drag performers
Same ones who enforce bans
On crossing state lines for abortions
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Are the same that burn everything
For the bosses"
I don't think we totally disagree, but I come down differently on where to point the blame.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction.
I mean, that did happen.
> To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change.
That was said, along with housing prices/inflation/corruption.
> Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue
Here's where you're really, really losing me. You're:
1. Pivoting to a totally different issue
2. Ignoring the role of the media in promoting the most controversial takes and presentation of both issues. It sucks to blame people for having values when the real problem is for-profit engagement-based media.
3. Ick - it really rubs me the wrong way to see people say "BLM wasn't an important issue when compared to climate change". That seems really easy to say if you're not under routine threat of state violence, but BLM was a reaction to a very real epidemic of state violence against black people. To those people, that kind of immediate threat IS as big a deal as climate change. If anything, criticize the branding of "defund the police" (which was so bad I half wonder if it was a psyop).
Moreover, part of my original point was that climate change isn't a separate thing - it's a problem because the same systems that use wedge issues to divide us all benefit from the unsustainable status-quo.
The realpolitik take on this seems so short sighted - it takes for granted that some progress can be made on climate change by ignoring our values, while also ignoring that alienating the affected groups makes it harder to change our society enough to do anything about climate change.
No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important. That might be difficult to accept, because it feels like saying other issues aren't important. But that's not what i'm saying at all.
What i'm saying is, if something is about to destroy the entire world, then every other concern is a distraction. What does it matter what bathrooms we use, or if the police are using violence too much, etc?
Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real. Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
You are showing exactly why we have been less effective at convincing people than we could have been. Because even you are diminishing the importance of climate change. Why should "they" give up any freedom, or luxury, in the name of climate change, if we give ourselves permission to assemble in public during a pandemic for a BLM protest, that let's face it, accomplished little.
> No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important.
You're using a very superficial argument and ignoring several of my points. If your literal home is on fire, is putting it out or running to safety less important than climate change? If you need to change an entire economic system to solve climate change, can you cavalierly ignore inconvenient members of that system that might be needed for a sufficiently motivated coalition? If you're worried about distractions, how can you blame the victims instead of the people committing the distraction?
> What does it matter what bathrooms we use
It ISNT about the bathrooms - that's the propaganda framing that you seem to have uncritically accepted. It's about random people trying to live their lives, and being denied housing and employment because of who they are. It's about the fact that we're talking about these people ONLY because of the propaganda machine.
> if the police are using violence too much
Must be nice that you apparently don't face the sharp end of this. To avoid triggering you with the "P" word, I'd suggest that your life experience is not universal and you should consider trying to understand a little bit about other peoples' lives.
> Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real.
And ignoring our values isn't going to convince those people, and those people will still think we're a bunch of woke idiots because their media has captured their minds.
> Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
[all sorts of citations needed for unsupported reasoning]
I didn't ignore any of your points. If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
Don't distract everyone by claiming that fire is the most important thing, worthy of gathering during a pandemic about.
This isn't about propaganda, well not in the sense you're using it. The argument, which you seem to disagree with, is the importance of focusing on
a single existential issue, and ignoring everything else. To actually prove to people that are doubters, that WE actually BELIEVE what we're saying.
That this really is the key thing to be worried about.
Everything else you're saying all amounts to the same argument, that climate change isn't important enough to take focus away from these other
important issues. We just fundamentally disagree. And I contend your attitude is exactly why we have had so much trouble convincing the
doubters that we're serious about climate change... when we're so willing to give just as much (if not more) energy to these other "distractions"
Your argument basically boils down to "Climate change is the most important thing, so action on any other issue is bad."
I don't see you responding anywhere to the general categories of criticisms I raised:
1. Climate change isn't one thing - it's a systemic problem in a system with lots of problems.
2. It seems ludicrous to assume that suddenly people will listen to us about climate change if we ignore other issues, ESPECIALLY because doing so would make us (or at least, me) moral hypocrites. We haven't even discussed direct causal issues, like political corruption. I honestly think no meaningful action is possible in the US on climate change until we have major reforms of our electoral and media systems - where does that put me in your oversimplified schema?
3. You're completely ignoring my argument about immediate needs. This is actually kind of funny:
> If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
The fire in this metaphor IS a social problem! Putting the fire out IS a social movement!!
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, but either way - here's hoping we can do something meaningful about climate change. Have a good day.
Social action has a price, both in effort, attention, and goodwill; there is
no free lunch. If you are blind to the COST of social action you will fail
to realize how you are hurting our chances of fighting climate change.
If you honestly believe that it is an existential crisis, then you must accept
that NOTHING WILL EXIST if we fail to address climate change. So any social gain
we make fighting fires will be wiped out anyway if we fail to deal with
climate change. That you don't see this, and that you are willing for all
these other issues to share the stage with climate change, is a big problem.
You want to blame the media, and the right-wing, and perhaps other things for
the lack of progress, without fully comprehending your own part.
> In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Trans rights ain't even that popular; most people are okay with "you think you're someone else? Well, fine, no skin off my nose". OTOH, the majority of people globally aren't okay with "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
The identity politics, of all forms, sucked out much of the air from the room leaving precious little left for discussing things like climate change.
Whether we like it or not, human attention is a limited resource. If you're going to allow a few vocal nutters to direct the course of your discussion, then you can't very well complain, now can you?
I mean, that's what leaders are supposed to do - direct the discussion. When the opposition says "They want to let men into women's changing rooms", then you say "No, we don't support that at all".
I mean, voters find some things distasteful - you have to choose which of those things you are going to argue for, and which you are going to back down from.
Diluting your message so that you mention a little bit of everything is just dumb politics, because human attention is a limited resource!
> when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Yes. That's what rights are. If we don't support them for one person, we don't have them for any person.
> I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Literally conservatives did that. THEY made this focus of the debate. Democrats reaction do not even matter here. It is ultimately irrelevant, because people like you then obsess over imaginary democrats positions democratic party never really had.
It does indeed matter - they were the ones who were insufficiently convinced of their nominees messages. Not convinced enough to vote for them, at any rate.
The opposition does not matter when your "supporters" don't vote for you because the message they received is different from the message you think you transmitted.
Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
It was a bad move to put themselves in such a position that they can't defend when conservatives attacks it, that was moving too fast and therefore we ended up with a conservative government.
You can say it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability of the liberals position, but you can also say that it was the liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular with a large part of their supporters so they are now in a vulnerable spot.
> Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
Not true. Conservatives are creating this point, because it makes their base afraid and more radical. It has nothing to do with what liberals do or don't do. It is not about splintering liberals, it is about creating a weak enemy so you can beat him. Liberals have two choices: join trans hate and gain no votes or do not join trans hate.
> it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability
I think conservatives are to blame, because they picked someone weak to bully him and use as political cudgel. Also because they lie.
> liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular
Except that it did not happened. There was no comparable democratic pro-trans campaign. You are just doing that funny thing where if there is a single person opposed to conservative agenda, then conservatives are absolved of everything.
> we ended up with a conservative government.
Conservative movement becoming fascists personality cult is the issue. In an alternative universe, there could have been pro-democratic lawful conservative government. Conservative did not had to imply what it does today. And conservative movement turning into what it is now is fully fault of conservatives.
> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.
Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.
Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.
Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.
What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"
It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.
While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.
This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.
I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.
> What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right
Trans people haven't done nothing, there are many reforms that have moved the trans issue a lot that were pushed by trans people, that is not nothing. The right isn't innovating anything by rolling back those, they are just being conservative which is in their name.
You could argue those reforms are good, but you can't argue it is the right that is changing things here, the right just undo change they don't do the changing on these issues.
And you can't fault the right for trying to win the election. You have to try to win the election as well, throwing it away by sticking to unpopular policies such as trans in sports is just ignorant. It isn't just the right that doesn't want trans in sports, it is a large majority of the entire population that doesn't want that.
In the US, it was the left who decided to push gender identity into law and policy, with no regard to the adverse consequences of doing so. That the right decided to capitalize on this for political reasons is just them taking an opportunity that was basically handed to them on a plate.
Interestingly it's a bit different in the UK. Both the main left and right parties had been promoting gender identity based policy for years, and it was only though the dedicated efforts of feminists who pointed out all the problems with this, and particularly the negative impacts on women and girls, that it recently started to be reversed.
I don't think you and I live in the same information universe, since I disagree with literally every thing you've said here. Unfortunately I don't have the energy to productively try to disabuse you of (what I believe are) delusions, misinformation and ignorance, so... have a nice day I guess.
Perhaps we have received different information on this topic. I am curious why you disagree though, as I consider my perspective to based in verifiable fact.
For example, in the UK, it was Theresa May's right-wing Conservative government who planned to reform the law to make it easier, and with fewer medical requirements, for people to acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate. They had a public consultation too. This move was supported by the left-wing Labour Party.
And in recent years, legal action and advocacy by feminist groups has been a highly significant factor in policy changes around this area, most notably For Women Scotland who took their legal challenge all the way to the UK's Supreme Court, winning the case with a statutory reinterpretation of the Equality Act.
> I think Android and iOS are safer platforms than PCs and that's why banks want you to use your phone.
This statement fills me with revulsion and rage lol. The only real "safety" involved here is the removal of user agency. I have a lot more trust in a machine I can actually control, secure, and monitor than the black box walled-garden of phoneland.
Your bank's insurer trusts Google's security more than yours, and they must surely (and rightfully) believe that while Google would spy on you, they wouldn't steal your bank account.
My favorite is when it must have punctuation, but certain punctuation is silently banned, so I have to keep refreshing my password generator until it gives me an acceptable combination.
I came across a "special character" requirement while creating an account. The client validation was not the same as the server validation. The client proceeded as if my account was created, but it never was. The client functioned without an account until it was closed. I asked the creator what their app's problem was, why did I need to keep resetting my password, then be told that I don't have an account, and have to create it anew.
They would not believe I was creating an account and using the device, because their own logging was so terrible.
I had to send them a screen recording from me using this abomination, and only then was I told "you're using the wrong special characters". They helpfully gave me some examples of allowed special characters, which then would pass the server validation.
I wish they would have gotten rid of the account requirement, as the device and client software seemed to work fine without them.
Sometimes when that happens, and any of `:({ |&;` are on the no-no list, I try bypassing the client validations and setting my password to a shell fork bomb. So far as I'm aware it hasn't broken anything yet, but I'm determined to keep trying.
Somewhat unrelated, is there any technical reason certain punctuation might be banned? I can understand maybe not allowing letters with diacritics or other NON-ASCII chars but why would a system reject an @ sign or bracket > for example?
Depending on the protocol they can be url encoded or even helpfully html encoded; the same password can be used over different protocols. It's the best to not use punctuation by default (length supplies more entropy than charset), I add -0 at the end to make dumb password policies happy.
Sorry I'm a bit lost here. Are you saying requiring a special character and a number are dumb password policies? Wouldn't charset AND length make for exponentially higher entropy? 52 (or 62 for digits) to the length power vs (62+20 special chars) to the length power? Or am I missing something?
I guess what they're saying is that, for example, a password of length 12 has about 71 bits of entropy if using an alphabet of 62 characters, and 76 bits with an alphabet of 82 characters. But if you only increase the length by 1 you already get 77 bits with 62 characters only. So length beats adding special chars in that sense.
Gotcha, I guess my question is, why not both? Is it the requirement of special chars over a min-length password that is in question here? Like the system is like "minimum 8 char password but also three special chars, ancient heiroglyphs, and the blood of your firstborn child" when you can omit the special chars and just have min 16 char password for the same security benefit?
This is true, but I think the argument is that for maintainers of the system, it's more work to allow more char options when it (should be) more trivial to change MAX_PASS_LENGTH from 12 to 32. Like, if you're gonna add more restrictions, make it the ones that encourage, not block, more secure passwords.
A lot of the restricted stuff is cargo-cult fear of symbols that could be used in SQL-injection or XSS attacks.
A properly-coded system wouldn't care, but the people who write the rules have read old OWASP documents and in there they saw these symbols were somehow involved in big scary hacks that they didn't understand. So it's easier to ban them.
Having more than just alphanumeric characters widens the domain of the password hash function, and this directly increases the difficulty of brute-force cracking. But having a such a small maximum password length is... puzzling, to say the least. I would accept passwords of up to 1 KiB in length.
With rainbow tables, even 11-character simple passwords like 'password123' can be trivially cracked, and as the number of password leaks show, not everyone is great at managing secrets and credentials.
It's easier for me to remember really long passphrases than even short alphanumeric strings - small maximum password lengths set my teeth on edge. The passwords should be getting hashed anyway right?
The problem is that you never really know what a website operator does with your credentials. Ideally, you have both a unique email and a unique password for each site, because sadly credential stuffing [1] is a thing.
I recommend all my friends and family to use a password manager like Bitwarden, and if they can't do that for some reason, at least use a 3-word passphrase separated by a hyphen.
The amount of times people have complained to me that this doesn't work because of low max-chars on passwords is insane.
I regularly conduct transactions at the branch of my local bank wherein they ask me for no credentials whatsoever. I also once forgot to bring my account number with me and the teller said "no worries, I'll look it up for you." Kind of horrifying.
That's scary. I wonder if incompetence like that could lead to a lawsuit in the case of a breach.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there exists a system that just asks for username with a checkbox "check here if you are the owner of this account"
Until the late 2010s, the AD account password at my financial institution employer was capped at 12 characters because, for a subset of workers, AD creds were sync'ed to a mainframe application that could only support that many characters.
Sounds about right. One of Australia's big four banks had the online banking password requirement of exactly six characters for a long time - for similar reasons I assume.
I think we (whoever we is) should start normalizing the concept of passphrases; on sign-up screens they should show the benefits of a passphrase. I'm surprised that Googles PW generator does not use passphrases, and I don't know about ios because I haven't tried theirs yet.
When I'm trying to log into something on a device that has a terrible keyboard, like a TV or giant touchscreen, it's a lot easier to type words I know than gibberish.
Haha having such a low range of max chars just makes it that much easier to brute force doesn't it?
On password length, I once had an account on Aetna that let me put whatever I want for my password, so I used a three-word passphrase that bitwarden generated for me. It ended up being like 20 chars.
Then I tried to log in with that password. Whooosies, the password input only allowed max 16 chars!
Ended up using a much less secure password because of this.
Maximum lengths like this are like a big neon sign that says:
"Hey idiot, I'm storing your password in plaintext, don't know anything about password security, and I'm also going to make you pick something you can't remember for 'security'."
Gotta admit, this triggered me. I don’t think those are the same thing. If no one had a good password we wouldn’t affect each other negatively. If no one picked up trash, we would.
I'm pretty sure it's referencing Half-Life 2, where an agent of an oppressive regime tells you to pick up a can that they just dropped on the floor as a sadistic display of authority (and to provide world-building and teach the grab mechanics to the player).
The GP is equating policies for strong passwords that aren't trivially cracked with authoritarianism.
If no one had a good password, we actually would affect each other negatively. If your personal banker can be easily compromised, that means that you could be easily parted with your money.
> The GP is equating policies for strong passwords that aren't trivially cracked with authoritarianism.
Incorrect - the requirements I mentioned make passwords less memorable and less secure (maximum length 12???). Obviously that's not as bad as authoritarianism, but I was trying to capture the arbitrary act being forced on us for no real justifiable reason.
The RCS issue is why I switched back to iPhone, reluctantly.
If anything, iOS seems buggier and less reliable, but I know (and am related to) a lot of people who insist on using iMessage/RCS, and I can't be missing messages.
> Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.
I keep seeing this argument, but it really seems like a completely false equivalence. Just because a sufficiently powerful simulation would be expected to be indistinguishable from reality doesn't imply that there's any reason to take seriously the idea that we're dealing with something "sufficiently powerful".
Human brains do things like language and reasoning on top of a giant ball of evolutionary mud - as such they do it inefficiently, and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the background. LLMs work along entirely different principles, working through statistically efficient summaries of a large corpus of language itself - there's little reason to posit that anything analogously experiential is going on.
If we were simulating brains and getting this kind of output, that would be a completely different kind of thing.
I also don't discount that other modes of "consiousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
Unless you're being sarcastic, this is exactly the kind of surface-level false equivalence illogic I'm talking about. From my post:
> I also don't discount that other modes of "consciousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
> Dumping tokens into a pile of linear algebra doesn't magically create sentience.
More precisely: we don't know which linear algebra in particular magically creates sentience.
Whole universe appears to follow laws that can be written as linear algebra. Our brains are sometimes conscious and aware of their own thoughts, other times they're asleep, and we don't know why we sleep.
"This statistical model is governed by physics": true
"This statistical model is like our brain": what? no
You don't gotta believe in magic or souls or whatever to know that brains are much much much much much much much much more complex than a pile of statistics. This is like saying "oh we'll just put AI data centers on the moon". You people have zero sense of scale lol
We, all of us collectively, are deeply, deeply ignorant of what is a necessary and sufficient condition to be a being that has an experience. Our ignorance is broad enough and deep enough to encompass everything from panpsychism to solipsism.
The only thing I'm confident of, and even then only because the possibility space is so large, is that if (if!) a Transformer model were to have subjective experience, it would not be like that of any human.
Note: That doesn't say they do or that they don't have any subjective experience. The gap between Transformer models and (working awake rested adult human) brains is much smaller than the gap between panpsychism and solipsism.
Ok, how about "a pile of linear algebra [that is vastly simpler and more limited than systems we know about in nature which do experience or appear to experience subjective reality]"?
Garbage collection, for one thing. Transfer from short-term to long-term memory is another. There's undoubtedly more processes optimized for or through sleep.
Those are things we do while asleep, but do not explain why we sleep. Why did evolution settle on that path, with all the dangers of being unconscious for 4-20 hours a day depending on species? That variation is already pretty weird just by itself.
Worse, evolution clearly can get around this, dolphins have a trick that lets them (air-breathing mammals living in water) be alert 24/7, so why didn't every other creature get that? What's the thing that dolphins fail to get, where the cost of its absence is only worthwhile when the alternative is as immediately severe as drowning?
Because dolphins are also substantially less affected by the day/night cycle. It is more energy intensive to hunt in the dark (less heat, less light), unless you are specifically optimized for it.
That's a just-so story, not a reason. Evolution can make something nocturnal, just as it can give alternating-hemisphere sleep. And not just nocturnal, cats are crepuscular. Why does animal sleep vary from 4-20 hours even outside dolphins?
Sure, there's flaws with what evolution can and can't do (it's limited to gradient descent), but why didn't any of these become dominant strategies once they evolved? Why didn't something that was already nocturnal develop the means to stay awake and increase hunting/breeding opportunities?
Why do insects sleep, when they don't have anything like our brains? Do they have "Garbage collection" or "Transfer from short-term to long-term memory"? Again, some insects are nocturnal, why didn't the night-adapted ones also develop 24/7 modes?
Everything about sleep is, at first glance, weird and wrong. There's deep (and surely important) stuff happening there at every level, not just what can be hypothesised about with a few one-line answers.
Yes, actually. Insects have both garbage collection & memory transfer processes during sleep. They rely on the same circadian rhythm for probably the same reasons.
And the answer to "Why not always awake?" is very likely "Irreversible decision due to side effects". Core system decisions like bihemispheric vs unihemispheric sleep can likely only be changed in relatively simple lifeforms because the cost of negative side effects increases in more complex lifeforms due to all the additional systems depending on the core system "API".
And that's fine, but I was doing the same to you :)
Consciousness (of the qualia kind) is still magic to us. The underpants gnomes of philosophy, if you'll forgive me for one of the few South Park references that I actually know: Step 1: some foundation; step 2: ???; step 3: consciousness.
Right, I don't disagree with that. I just really objected to the "must", and I was using "pile of linear algebra" to describe LLMs as they currently exist, rather than as a general catch-all for things which an be done with/expressed in linear algebra.
Agreed; "disorienting" is perhaps a poor choice of word, loaded as it is. More like "difficult to determine the context surrounding a prompt and how to start framing an answer", if that makes more sense.
You're replying to me, but I don't agree with your take - if you simulate the universe precisely enough, presumably it must be indistinguishable from our experienced reality (otherwise what... magic?).
My objection was:
1. I don't personally think anything similar is happening right now with LLMs.
2. I object to the OP's implication that it is obvious such a phenomenon is occurring.
Your response is at the level of a thought terminating cliche. You gain no insight on the operation of the machine with your line of thought. You can't make future predictions on behavior. You can't make sense of past responses.
It's even funnier in the sense of humans and feeling wetness... you don't. You only feel temperature change.
Until the price of gas starts to remotely reflect the medium to long term costs of climate change I basically always celebrate anything that increases gas or carbon-based energy prices. Like, it sucks... but there's lots of data that consumers respond to these prices in their choices.
The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.
I agree. I’m just addressing the notion raised in the post above that oil companies will bear cost increases in an industry where everyone sells an identical product and consumers can just cross the street to save $0.10 a gallon.
If you wanted to pay for direct air capture of CO2 to directly "undo" your climate effect of driving, the cost would currently be about $6 per gallon. Price comes from [1], found [2] looking for a second opinion on current direct air capture cost.
Direct air capture is just not feasible at a world scale.
And the whole circus around it, manufacturing (and extracting the natural resources for that) of all the machinery for it, clearing land to place it (and all the NIMBY circus), all the energy generation for it, the transmission lines, the maintenance, the burying of the captured carbon. It's all going to lead to lots of pollution and CO2 emissions even if the things are powered by 100% green energy.
It's just a pipe dream of the people looking for a quick fix so we can continue doing what we've been doing.
But we'll just need so hellish many of them to make a dent in global CO2 levels in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change. It's just impossible.
The only way to really fix things is not emitting the stuff in the first place but most people prefer putting their fingers in their ears.
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
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