Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@HarveyEsq Which part of his argument demonstrates impairment?

1.) we can make something smarter than ourselves
2.) that thing might have unexpected goals, since we can't really understand how it works
3.) there are lots of reasons why a superintelligence would kill us with and/or without intending to

To me, I feel like (1) is a lot farther away than he seems to think it is, but I don't know of any great analysis of that question to link to.

@ShekinahCanCook@universeodon.com @davidho I think the theory is that it would be able to lay its own cables and so on. 😂

@davidho Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests AI might use climate change to kill us all: it needs more compute power to accomplish whatever its goals are, and that process inevitably creates waste heat which will eventually make the planet uninhabitable. (I think he wouldn't say this is the most likely thing that kills us first, though.)

Normally, climate change as we think of it wouldn't cause human extinction, of course. I mean, worst-case scenario is bad enough, just not that bad.

@olm_e @davidho That is one of the points of the article :)

@kentborg Interesting claim; in what ways do you see him as less reasonable?

@TruthSandwich @freemo That sounds like an opportunity to learn something interesting.

@bryanruby Yeah, there's been a lot of hubbub about "child labor" recently, but I'm not sure I disagree with most of these new rules.

In some states it is really hard for a 15-year-old to get a summer job or whatever: some employers just won't even bother jumping through the hoops. This is not good. Fixing that is a good thing. Nobody wants 10 year olds to drop out of school to work in the coal mines, but this doesn't mean small adjustments like this are necessarily a bad thing.

It looks like now in Iowa 17yos can get a job operating a power saw. I am ok with this; 17yos are capable of learning to safely operate power saws.

@tweetsjen "do you have any evidence that anyone was actually teaching ..." – Just a tangential note about this: like I said, I don't, and I suspect it is vanishingly rare. But I think I can see where the fear that it is happening is coming from.

Authors like DiAngelo write things like "I know that because I was socialized as white in a racism-based society, I have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racist patterns, and investments in the racist system that has elevated me." Now, I don't think she means this in terms of normal-english "racism", but instead she means her and Kendi's definition: as a white person she by default perpetuates "whiteness": being white as the default/norm, supporting systems that (unintentionally, even) benefit white people, (usually because they benefit rich people, but that's another topic).

However, taken out of context, it sure looks like she's trying to promote that idea, doesn't it. (I think this redefinition of the term is a rhetorical strategy. I doubt it works, but even if it does, as we can see here it causes confusion.)

@GatekeepKen Heh gotta love mastodon. This comment is the only one I see with an ounce of self-awareness – the rest play right into Boebert's "trap". And it gets shot down anyway.

@tweetsjen Thanks

Let me start with this: "Merriam-Webster’s definition #2" – this definition appears to assume intent, so yeah, I would think most people would think of that as racism. What I was getting at above is like how Kendi talks about racism, and I think his definition has held sway in a lot of literature/etc – no intent needed: if a policy or system has a disparate *effect*, then that is *by definition* racist, to him. Regardless of why. (It's almost a category error to talk about the "intent" of a systemic outcome, so he has a point; also "magical intent" applies.) To DiAngelo, defining racism like your Webster's link (discrete actions with intent) is one of "the pillars of whiteness". I'm annoyed by the rhetorical confusion, but again, she has a point: the main problem today isn't someone's intent, it's these kinds of systemic interactions.

So: to my point above: you could teach about the unintended consequences of laws and systems that seem to inevitably have a bad outcome for non-white people. Drug sentencing guidelines from a few years back are a great example: they were actually set up with the best of intentions, but they have had a wildly bad outcome for people of color. That isn't normal-english "racist", but it is Kendi-definition "racist". So, I think you could teach about this sort of thing given the guidelines you linked to. (I am no lawyer, though.)

70 years ago we had redlining and Jim Crow, those were not only Kendi-definition but also normal-english definition racist. But, past tense, so you could teach about those.

So I'm wondering what practical impact these guidelines had in that OC school district.

"teachers have been fired." In that southern CA school district we're talking about? for violating these guidelines? Can you link me to news about this? I would love to read more.

"You seem to be an apologist for these policies" Well, I'm certainly against teaching children that they're inherently (normal-english definition) racist, but of course I am, that is silly and cruel. But is that happening with any frequency? Not that I know of? I suspect a lot of this is moral panic. I'm generally not in favor of policies that ban something that ~never happens. You hinted at some of the problems with that earlier! (I almost feel you don't need a policy for this specific thing anyway: if a teacher tries to do that, it should be covered by "don't be cruel or stupid".)

"I think it’s clear why you are picking this fight" I hope so! I'm trying to understand what impact these guidelines are having "on the ground". I don't want struggle sessions where we shame white kindergartners, and I don't want districts to ban teaching about Jim Crow, Tulsa, and the bad health & economic outcomes black people still face today. I suspect neither of those things happens with any frequency, though: most normies get the nuance between those two extremes :)

@tweetsjen has anyone lost their job in that district? Have they stopped teaching about Jim Crow?

"Racism that’s embedded within systems and institutions is indeed a normal English meaning of racism" <-- depends what you mean by "racism", of course...

@tweetsjen Well, I think you could: "racism is ... codified in law" is present tense, so you could teach about past tense racist laws.

When we talk about "racism is embedded within systems and institutions" we usually don't mean the normal-english meaning of the word "racism", so that doesn't seem like much of a problem, you could still teach about how legal, financial, etc institutions work together in unintended ways to make life hard for poor or marginalized people.

Or can you? I don't know how this policy is applied.

@gwynnion "they overwhelmingly lose to cis women" can you point me to analysis of this? I'm wondering exactly what this means.

I would expect this to be true in some sense just because outlier cis-female athletes are better than enough cis-males at their sport that they're just likely to be better than the X% of the population who is trans. Like, Li Wenwen is SO good, that she's better than enough cis-men that it's unlikely that any of the handful of trans-women weightlifters are going to be as good as she is, even if trans-women and cis-men have exactly the same distribution of talent.

Or are you saying something else?

@tweetsjen That document borders on incoherent. I wonder how it plays out in practice.

@tweetsjen @kumarvibe @e_urq @mhoye And typically they don't ban "CRT", that is lazy reporting or political rhetoric. They specifically ban things like teaching that "An individual, by virtue of the individual's nationality, color, ethnicity, race, or sex, is inherently racist, sexist," etc

I am super curious about the specific policies/etc that led to this speech.

@jaykass @SrRochardBunson What policy? Do you know the specifics of what he's calling out? It feels like a speech directed at people who have the context already, and I don't.

@mazjay OK but literally it would be nice if we could understand the thought process behind banning this particular poem. Is anyone able to find the details of the complaint?

@RyunosukeKusanagi as he would say, that makes the yarmulke weird.

@flexghost May all our terrorists be this incompetent.