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Magnifica Humanitas

vatican.va

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposition to DEI is not opposition to diversity so much as it is opposition to discrimination. More than just discrimination, DEI often came in the form of a particularly dishonest and two faced approach to it. Unlike affirmative action - which in my experience tends to acknowledge that sometimes justice requires a measured and deliberate exception to equality - DEI often tried to simultaneously condemn the idea tha…

[flagged]

Ad hominem. It would be better to argue against his points than his person.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite any companies which violated federal labor law in this way?

Three out of the four companies I've worked at, for one. YouTube was sued for directing one of its recruiters to exclusively advance diverse candidates for a period of time, and eventually settled with the recruiter [1]. Intel [2] and Microsoft [3] both tied specific percentage quotas to executive's compensation. If saying "reach this racial and gender quota or I'll penalize you financially" isn't discrimination, I'm…

YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved.

Would you like to try again?

edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].

The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be.

[1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#573
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When he quoted Tolkien, my heart stopped. This passage might provide you with a suggestion on how to live a virtuous life: "The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the e…

I wondered if that was the Pope's way of throwing shade at Palantir and Peter Thiel.

Most certainly but after two thousand years the Magisterium have mastered the art of universalizing the moment. A direct call out would age poorly. A hundred years from now, nobody will remember Thiel or Palantir (inshallah) but the sentiment will still most certainly ring true.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#574

AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did. Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralizat…

As someone who created and exited a successful AI startup in the past, I'll say it's actually quite different today. Even I don't have the funds to start a foundational model company, and I absolutely wouldn't before my exit either.

While I do believe there may be valid path forward with smaller models, there are still significant financial barriers to entry that didn't exist to the same extent in the past.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#575
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it is one of the ten commandments.

The part about not stealing? If yes that’s a tiny bit of a stretch :)

We would not have a legal concept of intellectual property at all, if not as a form of theft.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#576
post #95

In the encyclical, the pope talks about the ethics of responsible AI usage. It's pretty dense material, but if I had to summarize it, I'd boil it down to three general moral laws: 1) AI may not be used to injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) AI must faithfully follow the directions of human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 3) AI's existen…

1) Definitely NOT happening. In fact, everyone is working on autonomous drones right now. 2) LLM based systems don't have any internal logic. That will just vomit some slop that rationalizes every constrait you try to bind them by and still "disobey" you.

They are already used extensively to kill people .

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean there’s a whole industry built around DEI? Or that there’s a whole industry built around countermessaging the DEI industry?

> the DEI industry isn't really a thing so much as it's a collection of principles that can be implemented. To the unprincipled, this needs to be converted into a literal enemy that can be vilified, because any attempt to force them to adhere to principles is an attack.

No DEI industry you say? https://web.archive.org/web/20240710195414/https://time.com/...

>The lucrative industry shows few signs of waning–from the spike in well-compensated diversity consultants and czars; to online courses and degree programs at prestigious schools; to professional organizations and conferences; to the commissioning of ever more studies, task forces and climate surveys. The buzzword is emblazoned on blogs and books and boot camps, and Thomson Reuters, a multinational mass-media and information firm, even created a Diversity and Inclusion Index to assess the practices of more than 5,000 publicly traded companies globally.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#578
post #303

This is a surprisingly nuanced and technically literate take on this topic. Kudos. I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.

I believe that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was there, and available for consultation.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#579
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truly interesting question, and the crux of the matter, also hasn't changed much since 1903: How?

If you ignore everything that happened in between 1903 and today, it might seem like we've never made any progress on this, but at least in the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between. For a time in the 20th century, it was possible for someone solidly middle class in the US to be able to save up a bit of money and afford a down payment on a house within a decade…

> the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between

But now we're back to pre ww1 level of inequalities

https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart...

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully that to a ton of people it no longer means 'people who are different are made valuable by that difference'- it's been demonized into essentially meaning 'give black people and women jobs they don't deserve'. It's a prime example of propaganda through language pollution. For whatever reason HN has been slowly goose ste…

> We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance... We should just stop using the term woke. It has been demonized in the common parlance... We should just stop using the term social justice. It has been demonized in the common parlance... We should just stop using the term critical race theory. It has been demonized in the common parlance... We should just stop using the term di…

Feel free to use either, but you will be summarily ignored.
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