String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

> progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have

It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.

> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical

What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.

If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.

> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.

JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.

> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.

Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.

If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.

> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity

I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)

This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.

Paul, I agree with most of the points you've raised in this thread and share your concerns about the way troubled people may be manipulated online in ways that make their problems worse. However I just want to caution you on the point of your experiences on Mastadon. As people in technology industries, it is natural for us to spend a lot of time online, particularly in places which are off the mainstream beaten path like HN, Mastadon, IRC, etc. But for much of the general public this isn't normal, they spend less time online and when they do go online it's usually in mainstream places like Facebook. People who are "very online" and off the beaten path, if not in a tech field, are very often people who have a lot of problems IRL and retreat to online spaces as a refuge of sorts. So there's a selection bias in play here, the trans people you encounter online, particularly outside of mainstream social platforms, are less likely to be socially healthy than the average trans person IRL.

In short, nerds and nutjobs are overrepresented online so any conclusion you reach about groups of people using experiences you've had online need to be taken with a massive grain of salt.

For what it's worth, as the person at the top of this thread, I actually do take AI risk pretty seriously. Not in a singulatarian sense, but in the sense that I would be quite surprised if AI weren't capable of this stuff in ten years.

Even the oracle version is already really dangerous in the wrong hands. A totalitarian government doesn't need to have someone listening to a few specific dissidents if they can have an AI transcriber write down every word of every phone conversation in the country, for example. And while it's certainly not error-proof, asking an LLM to do something like "go through this list of conversations and flag anything that sounds like anti-government sentiment" is going to get plenty of hits, too.

I should have said "interests" rather than rights, although one thing I know is that when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.

Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.

On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.

J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.

As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.

'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]

It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.

I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.

I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)

Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...

[2] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2016/b...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19894-x

[4] My son's friend went through a period of near complete social isolation during the pandemic where just about the only person he talked to was an 'egg hatcher' for months. It is not a clinical study or even a case report but my son and I both have notes on our experiences of knowing this person from elementary school to the present day that we're going to consolidate and turn into a real write-up some day. I'm going to support this person as an individual to the maximum that I can because those are my 'family values', I can still think they're making a mistake.

> As I posted elsewhere on this subject: these people are rationalizing, not rational.

That is sometimes true, but as I said in another comment, I think this is on the weaker end of criticisms because it doesn't really apply to the best of that community's members and the best of its claims, and in either case isn't really a consequence of their explicit values.

> Logic, like software and for the same reason, is “garbage in, garbage out.” If even one of the inputs (premises, priors) is mistaken the entire conclusion can be wildly wrong. Errors cascade, just like software.

True, but an odd analogy: we use software to make very important predictions all the time. For every Therac-25 out there, there's a model helping detect cancer in MRI imagery.

And, of course, other methods are also prone to error.

> That's why every step needs to be checked with experiment or observation before a next step is taken.

Depends on the setting. Some hypotheses are not things you can test in the lab. Some others are consequences you really don't want to confirm. Setting aside AI risk for a second, consider the scientists watching the Trinity Test: they had calculated that it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the entire globe in a firestorm, but...well, they didn't really know until they set the thing off, did they? They had to take a bet based on what they could predict with what they knew.

I really don't agree with the implicit take that "um actually you can never be certain so trying to reason about things is stupid". Excessive chains of reasoning accumulate error, and that error can be severe in cases of numerical instability (e.g. values very close to 0, multiplications, that kind of thing). But shorter chains conducted rigorously are a very important tool to understand the world.