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There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

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Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#111

Post by gspr »

modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

Nonsense. That's like saying that the concept of government in general is bad because a particular government might be bad.

It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#112

Post by temporaryacc2 »

grey-area wrote: post #67
modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

American hostility to the whole concept of government has led you to Trump’s brand of gangster capitalism (which will lead you to fascism if you let it). Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading. When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US h…

Agreed.

HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.

Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).

I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#113

Post by simonask »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #92
simonask wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development. I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many de…

That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy. A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else. Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes becaus…

This betrays a simplistic understanding of democracy. In short, its meaning cannot be derived from decomposing its etymology, and your take here is ... certainly unique.

Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the majority.

Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.

Some people call what I'm describing here "liberal" democracy, but that's to distract from the fundamental fact that there is no meaningful definition of democracy that isn't liberal. If we're not free and equal, we cannot participate in democracy, and therefore it isn't democracy.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#114

Post by holoduke »

simonask wrote: post #74
psychoslave wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not much example of actual democracy at scale though. Even Switzerland which is often cited as the closest form of actual democratic governance is still not ticking all of the basics of a democratic checklist.

No. The average Democracy Index of Western Europe is 8.05 (full democracy), while the US scores 7.65 (flawed democracy, trending downwards). Just below Poland, just above Botswana. You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

That index is a product of the institute itself. Funded by non democratic values. Worthless junk / progoganda piece if you ask me.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#115

Post by usef- »

andrewparker wrote: post #34

OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card. But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model. The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.

I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they?

From the original 2019 release:

> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):

    Generate misleading news articles
    Impersonate others online
    Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
    Automate the production of spam/phishing content
> These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the “deep fakes (opens in a new window)” phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images.

These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out

https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#117

Post by temporaryacc2 »

andrewparker wrote: post #34

OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card. But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model. The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.

Maybe because Dario was actually reasoning through potential risks, rather than blindly thinking everything will be okay?

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#118

Post by hmry »

rustcleaner wrote: post #101
seattle_spring wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).

[flagged]

US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#119

Post by rustcleaner »

schrototo wrote: post #46
modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.

[flagged]

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#120

Post by SilverSlash »

SgtBastard wrote: post #11
Iolaum wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is a bit bigger than US and China With respect to AI capabilities is it really? I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.

Mistral in the EU, for one.

they already firmly in irrelevant territory
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