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Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

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21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#21
post #10

On one hand I appreciate the considerate scholarship on display, and since there are so many Catholics maybe some will even listen to their purported leader. On the other hand I find any talk of greed, selfishness, manipulation and degradation of humanity... really rich coming from a pope. Maybe I'm supposed to forgive, but I'm not going to forget that they spent decades abusing, hiding abuse, trying to force abortio…

Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#24
post #10

On one hand I appreciate the considerate scholarship on display, and since there are so many Catholics maybe some will even listen to their purported leader. On the other hand I find any talk of greed, selfishness, manipulation and degradation of humanity... really rich coming from a pope. Maybe I'm supposed to forgive, but I'm not going to forget that they spent decades abusing, hiding abuse, trying to force abortio…

Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.

I'm unsure how this relates to my comment, unless you're under the impression that HIV is exclusively spread through "gay sex" as you put. I certainly don't want to make the assumption about you though, given how archaic and bigoted that view is. If you could clarify what you mean I'd appreciate it.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#25
post #10

On one hand I appreciate the considerate scholarship on display, and since there are so many Catholics maybe some will even listen to their purported leader. On the other hand I find any talk of greed, selfishness, manipulation and degradation of humanity... really rich coming from a pope. Maybe I'm supposed to forgive, but I'm not going to forget that they spent decades abusing, hiding abuse, trying to force abortio…

Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.

Restricting the availability of the condoms restricts them for everyone.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that the outcome mostly depends on whether something resembling AGI is achieved since that would more or less inevitably end up leading to something resembling ASI ('super-intelligence') which in turn makes it questionable whether the resulting entity can be counted upon to 'serve the common good' - whatever that may be. The quest for ROI has at most a temporary influence on the direction if this path is foll…

I am afraid that anything created by humans will be, inherently, influenced in its ultimate development by human nature. Therefore, whatever AGI looks like will be selfish, violent, and short sighted... But our current crop of chatbots are not it. They're just parrots that happen to be pretty bad for the climate.

That's the thing about modern chatbots--they are nothing new technologically. They're just taking the same old neural networks and brute-forcing everything with ridiculous computing power and energy consumption. Autonomous agents just feed everything back into a loop that's even more wasteful.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#27

> The direction that AI takes is not written into the technology itself. It depends on our choices, on the institutions that host and underpin that choosing, and on our ability to manage innovation responsibly to serve the common good. This is such a key point -- the problem is that the $T that are being poured into AI are doing so for one purpose alone: ROI The choice has already been made, and it's the wrong one.

Yeah. And the quality of AI will only get worse from here unless we can commoditize open weight models.

If Google and Anthropic and such are able to own access, they will enshittify it horribly. Because they are powerless to do anything but, in the name of profit.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.

I'm unsure how this relates to my comment, unless you're under the impression that HIV is exclusively spread through "gay sex" as you put. I certainly don't want to make the assumption about you though, given how archaic and bigoted that view is. If you could clarify what you mean I'd appreciate it.

Not exclusively but predominantly. Which makes me doubtful that the Catholic Church moved the numbers much on the HIV pandemic. Assuming of course that they weren't against condom use between men, which I'm not sure if they had or have a stance on.

Re: Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

#30
There is interesting debate about whether, and how much, LLMs were used to write parts of this encyclical. Generally encyclicals are written by a group of Cardinals and/or Bishops, with significant input from the Pope, so it seems possible that while the Pope's sections and speeches have been human-written, some of the other writers used LLMs in some capacity.

The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.

I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.

Best post I've found arguing that there was LLM use: https://substack.com/inbox/post/199316613

Australian startup apparently verifying (without much detail) that it's not: https://www.proudlyhuman.org/news-room/media-releases/pope-l...

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