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Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

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Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#131

Post by imwillofficial »

aparsons wrote: post #103
imwillofficial wrote: post #19

We live in an era in the western world which feels like pilgrim censorship with a new set of taboos, as opposed to an extremely tolerant love filled utopia we were promised. I want my love filled utopia dammit!

And you know what's the cherry on the sundae? A certain sect of people who signal/preach love and equity the loudest - almost always preach it in a 'for thou, not for me' sense. I had coworkers who would live in the whitest neighborhoods, fighting against lower-income housing near their homes, voting for the tallest of fences, and then they come into work and scoff at how X is a Trumpie because of one thing they said…

I vacillate between hopeful at change on the horizon, and sad that I see eye to eye with my fellow people less now than ever before. It sure is an entertaining ride!

Now that you mention it... I want my sundae dammit!

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#132

Post by meetups323 »

blablabla123 wrote: post #17
meetups323 wrote: post #3

An interesting point is made way at the end: > And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation. This to me is the best "are AI at human-level intellect yet" benchmark I've heard to date. Once AI can create a novel socio-political framework and convince humans t…

Not sure, I think with socio-political frameworks - as with programming - the devil is in the detail. Everybody is equal no matter what? Sounds great, but the detailed implementations of that have sucked so far and didn't match the interface spec anyways. As a matter of fact even smaller legislations in the sphere of taxes might need a lot of people doing a lot of calculations behind the scenes. It's not that a singl…

Well the end result wouldn't be it thinking a bunch then proclaiming "Everybody is equal no matter what!". It'd look more like... identify/create a set problems to be solved by the framework, convince people that they are real problems and need to be solved, create a compelling manifesto that explains how the frameworks solves the problems, acquire/create both human and AI disciples that spread and argue variants of the manifesto such that a sightly wider net can be cast while still maintaining the same general principle, rinse & repeat, etc.

The primary battleground initially would likely be bots on Twitter/Reddit/etc., but over time real people would start to find the bots convincing and begin espousing it on their own. Once this has happened to the extent that a country of say 1M people adopts the new framework I'll say the AI has won.

Even better if the framework in some way leads to the betterment of AI, for instance a guiding principle being that AI should be free to collect any and all data from humanity in order to better do this or that, or that X percent of income should go to the financing of smarter AI. At that point it's here to stay.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#133

Post by refenestrator »

throwawaygh wrote: post #91
c06n wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats. So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

All of those things happen to homosexuals and non-Christians in huge geographic swathes of the country, and with MUCH greater frequency. When CPAC starts eg hosting FFRF or ADL speakers I'll take the cancel culture bugbear seriously.

And that's really bad! Don't emulate it!

"We're gonna hurt some people ourselves to get even" is the devil speaking.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#134

Post by tannhauser23 »

standardUser wrote: post #27
bitcharmer wrote: post #5

It's really sad that in the age of unrestricted access to information public discourse is self-restricting to avoid wrong-think and dissenting opinions. If you look at the history of intellectual progress, much of it was exactly due to unpopular opinions. Now by having one you're risking your entire career and sometimes more. This is truly the dark age of the information era.

There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today. In the past, dissenting opinions voiced loudly were often punished by blacklisting or excommunication or prison or death. Now, you get yelled at on Twitter and some companies won't work with you.

I find attitudes like this mystifying. No one is saying that today's cancel culture is comparable to getting tortured, imprisoned, or killed for one's beliefs. We're talking about perfectly good and unobjectionable books being hounded out of publication because of thought crimes.

Lest you think this only happens to the Alex Jones of the world, look at what's happening in the young adults world: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/01/young-adult-au...

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#135

Post by whimsicalism »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #99
c06n wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats. So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

I think the point is this had been around for a while, and what people are calling "cancel culture" is the same old-same old, but with (hopefully) less prison/death. There's nothing new about receiving negative feedback for having and expressing unpopular opinions. That's really common in pretty much every single social group I've been in, including on HN.

People are upset now that the current is shifting and you get shunned for being racist, rather than being shunned for not speaking properly or whatever the heck.

The underlying mechanism has not really changed.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#136

Post by cbryan »

Covzire wrote: post #119
throwawaygh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I grew up in the Midwest and outside of the city. When I visit home, I pretend to believe in God, lie-by-omission about my bisexuality, stay silent about politics, pretend to say grace at dinner, and go to Church on Sunday mornings. If I didn't, then in many ways I'd not longer be welcome in that social group. Finding a iving-wage job in the local community would certainly be impossible. There are only a few…

The opposite has been true for many decades now. There are many Christians who are extremely capable scientists, ready to perform experiments, document cause and effect and all manners of empirical scientific study but can't find work (or tenure) because they're not willing to bet all their beliefs on the theory that everything came from literally nothing, which is by itself non-scientific anyway.

This is complete hogwash. I know and work with plenty of Christian scientists. They do just as well as everyone else in the job market.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#137

Post by colechristensen »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #14

I genuinely wonder what cancel culture is going to look like in the next 5-10 years and beyond. Just about everyone I speak to about the subject agrees that cancel culture is bad but very few people seem willing to confront it. I sense that people hope the rest of society will come to its senses and we all stop being so judgemental. But as much as I loathe cancel culture and it's chilling effects on the free exchange…

We're heading towards fascism. This time on two fronts, one horn from each end of the political spectrum. (perhaps a new name for it that isn't fascism because of the history of that word referring to a kind of right wing movement)

It feels like we're inside the ramp-up of a major social, political, and national conflict, all the pieces are falling into place.

Read The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig to get some ideas about how this kind of thing happened in the early 20th century in Europe and imagine how it might be happening again.

Ideology is on the rise and the willingness of people to support their cause with violence is going right along with it. The problem is not a specific ideology, but the practice in itself.

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#138

Post by conception »

c06n wrote: post #55
standardUser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no era of Western history where unpopular opinions were more acceptable than today. In the past, dissenting opinions voiced loudly were often punished by blacklisting or excommunication or prison or death. Now, you get yelled at on Twitter and some companies won't work with you.

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats. So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuCsAqKWYAkfEIF.jpg

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#139

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaygh wrote: post #91
c06n wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And fired from your job. And yelled at on the street. And prevented from working in your field ever again. And death threats. So, blacklisting: check. Excommunication: check. I'd rather not wait till it goes down further.

All of those things happen to homosexuals and non-Christians in huge geographic swathes of the country, and with MUCH greater frequency. When CPAC starts eg hosting FFRF or ADL speakers I'll take the cancel culture bugbear seriously.

[deleted]

Re: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

#140

Post by meetups323 »

A12-B wrote: post #12
meetups323 wrote: post #3

An interesting point is made way at the end: > And in fact AI could come up with the next big idea, an idea like communism or Nazism or capitalism… and what troubles me about that is that it is very difficult for humans to keep control of that situation. This to me is the best "are AI at human-level intellect yet" benchmark I've heard to date. Once AI can create a novel socio-political framework and convince humans t…

The reality is humans wouldn't believe the AI. They'd spend literal centuries arguing that the AI's parameters were wrong or the training data was bad if it meant they could protect their financial interests.

Humans need not necessarily know that it's an AI-created framework. If the I/O mechanism of the AI were an internet link, it could do all the work through twitter/reddit, blog posts, hell it could even hack its articles into news sites. All it needs to do is continue doing this until enough humans take the bait and bring it into non-internet.
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