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There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

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301–310 of 518 posts

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#301

> 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.

I have been surprised how few people seem to gave taken the lesson from Trump that creating federal authority today empowers all future leaders.

Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.

Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#302

> 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.

We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…

I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#304

> 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.

We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…

This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.

Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.

By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#305

[flagged]

To be clear, the restriction is not to native-born citizens of the US but citizens of the US in general. David Sacks is a US citizen.

Sacks fraudulently obtained citizenship papers but the next administration will likely review the case and revoke his citizenship, which will make him eligible for deportation.

Sacks can choose to self-deport on his own, which will help his chances if he ever decides to re-apply for citizenship or entry into the US.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#306

> 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.

We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…

You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#307

This kills the entire enterprise market for AI models better than Opus 4.8 1) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician. 2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup indivi…

This is the first impression I got, a glass ceiling on AI that will hit the market hard. Timing was right at the late Friday's let's-avoid-the-crash point, we'll see how this flies on Monday.

But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.

Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…

This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority. Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom. By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assumi…

There’s a certain argument that people are just in over their heads for a society as large and complex as our and we just can’t cut it. Nothing that won’t be fixed by overshoot.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…

This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority. Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom. By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assumi…

We're supposed to be giving governments the winning end because if they don't have it, robber barons will. Supposed to.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#310
post #64

> 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.

I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.

Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.

The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.

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