YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @ YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Whenever one of these comes out and gets posted to /r/SneerClub it feels like going to see band you’ve loved since they were hometown favourites play a big venue in another city, except that you always despised the band and they’re leading major policy decisions which aim to destroy everything you love

There’s nothing ipso facto wrong with thinking that a country to which you don’t belong should adopt a particular policy, whether it regards rights for pastafarians, the promotion of secular society, or more aptly rights for gay people. Gay people are the obvious point: I would hope that you think on some important level that Russian law should not discriminate against gay people. To be authentically in favour of democracy is to be in favour of democracy’s good, not to reify democratic process as an end in itself - and indeed one should want Russia to be democratic, which is not the case as things currently stand, but only on grounds of democratic good, not of process as an end in itself.

One reason to limit one’s criticisms of a country’s internal democratic politics is lack of understanding, and that seems to be the closest thing to what you’re shooting for here that isn’t what I would bluntly call an inauthentic pro-democracy stance. That’s a reason for being cautious, and it’s closely related to good arguments against particular interventions by outsiders in the internal affairs of a polity: a bunch of Westerners get up in arms that Indonesia, for example, introduces a law which negatively affects or appears to negatively affect gay people, but their failure to understand Indonesia’s highly complex politics means that their outraged arguments don’t even touch on what the effects of the new law actually are. Their hearts were, so to speak, “in the right place”, but in the worst way, and they only ended up making things worse.

In a sense these situations do touch on a right that members of a polity have which outsiders don’t, which is the right to “have a say” in the management of their affairs. If outsiders begin to “have a say” and the polity begins to lose some of its democratic character as a consequence, then there is a genuine concern that self-determination is at risk, not to mention the intelligent management of things by people who actually understand how things work locally. But this is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute, otherwise we would be left with a political world in which the only rights we gave people were those they got from the polity of which they happen to be a member, and Russia would be off the hook - there is clearly another order beyond the locally political by which people deserve morally good treatment, and outsiders to a polity cannot be denied a say in the nature of that order.

I’m a communist, I’ll criticise who I want about what they do wherever

If the last act of the human race is to raise a forlorn statue of that woman in every town square it will be a fitting end

Un-fucking-believable

They aren’t their goalposts! They’re the goalposts already laid out in advance by the discourse and shaped in press releases since god knows when, that’s why it’s so easy to shift! There’s a whole avenue to be burrowed in Rationalism Studies, incidentally, about how Yud and his ilk inherited the same techniques from tobacco companies and the defense industry of the 1980s.

I understand that you’re olive branching me here, but I don’t accept “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess”. Trends are analysable, and the sources of projections are equally analysable. A book that’s ten years old is far better than (a) 30-year old (and more) newspaper-level stuff, without citations, about backyard anthrax, (b) nothing, and (c) two links to tangentially related reports, and you’ve brought those three.

I am seriously concerned about the confluence of two things: (1) how closely your comments here mirror, right down to the level of language, press releases and opinion columns paraphrasing press releases, some of them (the anthrax stuff) extremely old hat; (2) the level of outrage and confidence you bring to the table when challenged on this and similar. Phrases like “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess” are press release language - they have absolutely no place in serious discussion, but they have a powerful rhetorical effect which allows them to displace serious analysis, and that displacement furthers specific, analysable, interpretable sectoral and political interests.

The same goes for “bio tech revolution” - you are never clear, in any of this, what that actually entails. What you do is cite possibility and unknowability, in a manner innovated precisely by sectoral and political interests from the 1950s onward. You have no detail of any value, and you write off actual detail with speculation and glib remarks about the age of the detail you’re given - that is a political innovation to which you have allowed yourself to be susceptible. You may also try on Naomi Oreskes for size as an author who grapples with this in both directions.

Look, if you want to understand where I’m coming from, I can give you - at a glance - the two sources I’ve already given: Alex Wellerstein Unrestricted Data and J.R. Ravetz “The Merger of Knowledge with Power”, specifically the two chapters cited (the Wellerstein chapter is “Unrestricted Data: New Challenges to the Cold War Secrecy Regime”. I would also urge you to check out Lisa Stampnitzky Disciplining Terror. The introduction to the Ravetz book is also a must-read, not just for this, but also for a general understanding of how scientific research at the industrial level serves political and sectoral interests of all kinds - this is not radical pamphleteering about “the politics of politicians” but real empirical work about the real conditions under which science is done.

Stampnitzky is extremely useful here for understanding how the word “terrorist” (or similar) functions in the sorts of papers you cite at the very top. “Terrorist” and “state actor” are political words, and the risks (supposedly) measured which are attached to the threats you describe are weighted by those words, not by the scientific words pertaining to technical capability. To say that “terrorists” might get hold of this or that technology is to say that a particular type of person (who may or may not exist) will get hold of that technical capacity and make use of it.

The point is, in fact, that technical capacity has almost nothing to do with the measurement of risk from terrorist acquisition of that technical capacity. The measurement of risk is locused pretty much exclusively around the type of person who poses a threat. That type of person is a construction of politics, not a scientifically neutral object term in which people with medical or physical science qualifications have any expertise whatsoever.

To put it extremely briefly, this means that when you come across papers by CBRN professionals assessing speculative risks, much of the work being done is being done at the behest of political projects which have their home in the defense industry, not in assessment of the mere technical capacities available to people at large. As we learn from Ravetz, speculative risk created such an enormous bubble during the Cold War that it is almost impossible to take those measured risks remotely seriously - and as we learn from Stampnitzky, the idea of a “terrorist” has been constructed in such a way as to fuel that bubble. This means that CBRN professionals, however unimpeachable their contributions to the amelioration of those occasional disasters which do actually happen, are thoroughly questionable as unbiased witnesses to the scale that risks at large present.

Because, as your own inconsistencies show, you are not having a focused discussion (for example: you angrily claim in your second reply that in your first you asked me to expand on an earlier point, even though this never actually happened) it is extremely difficult to get this point across without appearing to just be dismissive of technical capacity as a factor. But in fact technical capacity has been factored in to my discussion this entire time. The fact that you’re unaware of the political environment in which your (non-)fear finds its sources is not anybody’s fault, but it is your fault if you don’t even acknowledge that other people might have a clearer idea about how this stuff works.

“focused discussion”…right

100% agreed, what terrifies me is that our friend here seems to see the word “science” in here and immediately assume impeccable faith and perfect knowledge

If I may refer you back to the book cited, the (made up) fears of that time in fact incorporated the difficulty of obtaining fissile material during that period, when amongst the worries was that obtaining fissile material would not actually be that difficult. To simply state that biological and chemical warfare bear no resemblance is to depart from the lesson being related here to making excuses for that object of which you happen to be afraid. In each case the fear being constructed will make its own allowances for the real or supposed facts on the ground, and in this case there was no need to assume that a bombmaker would have to make his own plutonium - you’re drawing attention to an irrelevant distraction.

Another point which you’re glibly avoiding, with tellingly unnecessary recourse to insulting language, is that “CBRN” the construct cannot be so easily distinguished from the “practical and technical application” that the real enterprise has. Indeed the existence of the real enterprise is often driven in part by the made-up fears (which does not licence the fears) - this happened, for example, with security protocols around the management of fissile material. I refer you back to the same book and to the rather famous data point about Bill Clinton’s interest in manufactured diseases.

For more on stuff like this, although again not on the subject of bioterrorism because I don’t have that material in front of me, I recommend the confluence of two chapters in The Merger of Knowledge with Power by Rabitz (as well as the whole book), namely “Recombinant DNA Research: Whose Risks?” and “Hardware and Fantasy in Military Technology”. This isn’t paranoid soapboxing from a teenage Chomsky fan, it’s just part of the fabric of industrial science and technology as a social phenomenon.

I expressly put “CBRN groups” in scare quotes to tag along with my line at the bottom “I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts…but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility”

You, however, have me saying “cbrn is made up to self justify” - of course if I had said any such thing, then one counter-example would have sufficed. Although actually it wouldn’t have sufficed, because in this context we’re talking about terroristic or otherwise chaotic release of a novel weapon. We’re not talking at all about bad powerful people deliberately employing chemical weapons they already have, for which of course CBRN is a worthy use and “genuine attempt at being ready”.

“CBRN groups”, here, operates at the level of rhetoric, and that’s what I tried to draw attention to. The context in which “CBRN groups” the rhetorical and political device emerged was that in which Bill Clinton could become so enthused by a sci-fi novel about bioterrorism that he had its author up in front of the senate testifying as an expert on the subject. So on reflection, I should have deferred to Eisenhower’s original formulation: the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Edit: you could always try Alex Wellerstein for the aggressively obvious historical counter-point to this whole fantasy. In his Restricted Data he provides a useful companion to Barriers to Bioweapons in a chapter discussing the notorious “backyard atomic bomb built from declassified material” cases. But because it’s a work of history we learn the most salient fact of all: the only way anyone believed that the backyard bomb designs were viable was because somebody wanted them to believe it, or because they had some reason to want to believe it themselves.

Without that ingredient it was plain that the actual know-how was just not there, however that fact was fundamentally obscured by the desire to believe, and so people saw viability where there was none: plugging holes in their imaginary with meaningless verbiage about risk and but-what-if?

I think what’s going miss here is that “CBRN groups” is very obviously and primarily shit made up by the military-industrial complex to justify itself after the Cold War

I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts at being ready just in case, but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility

Too late! You already mean “moronarchy”

To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.

The great philosophical dialogues in English - those by Berkeley, Hume, Lakatos - are few and far between. Perhaps there is a general awareness that only these exceptional stylists could pull off the rare trick of not obviously putting words into their antagonist’s mouths, even insofar as the author clearly took the view of his protagonist. Indeed there is still, two and a half centuries later, debate about whose view in his own dialogue Hume actually took - when the rather obvious and straightforward alternative was just writing down “this is what I fucking think, alright?” that aporetic flourish was precisely what justified writing it down in dialogue form in the first place.

or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing

This remarkable sleight of hand sticks out. The argument from the (or rather this particular) GWAS camp goes “we are detecting the genes, contrary to expectations”. There isn’t any positive assumption in favour of that camp, so failure to thus far detect the gene is supposed to motivate against its existence.

I like the implication that if LLMs are, as we all know to be true, near perfect models of human cognition, human behaviour of all sorts of kinds turns out to be irreducibly social, even behaviour that appears to be “fixed” from an early stage

While I agree with you about the economics, I’m trying to point out that physical reality also has constraints other than economic, many of them unknown, some of them discovered in the process of development.

Bird’s flight isn’t magic, or unknowable, or non reproduceable.

No. But it is unreproducible if you already have arms with shoulders, elbows, hands, and five stubby fingers. Human and bird bodies are sufficiently different that there are no close approximations for humans which will reproduce flight for humans as it is found in birds.

If it was, we’d have no sense of awe at learning about it, studying it. Imagine if human like behavior of intelligence was completely unknowable. How would we go about teaching things? Communicating at all? Sharing our experiences?

To me, this is a series of non-sequiturs. It’s obvious that you can have awe for something without having a genuine understanding of it, but that’s beside the point. Similarly, the kind of knowledge required for humans to communicate with one another isn’t relevant - what we want to know is the kind of knowledge which goes into the physical task of making artificial humans. And you ride roughshod of one of the most interesting aspects of the human experience: human communication and mutual understanding is possible across vast gulfs of the unknown, which is itself rather beautiful.

But again I can’t work out what makes that particularly relevant. I think there’s a clue here though:

…but I also take care not to put humanity, or intelligence in a broad sense, in some special magical untouchable place, either.

Right, but this would be a common (and mistaken) move some people make which I’m not making, and which I have no desire to make. You’re replying here to people who affirm either an implicit or explicit dualism about human consciousness, and say that the answers to some questions are just out of reach forever. I’m not one of those people, and I’m referring specifically to the words I used to make the point that I made, namely that there exist real physical constraints repeatedly approached and arrived at in the history of technology which demonstrate that not every problem has an ideal solution (and I refer you back to my earlier point about aircraft to show how that cashes out in practice).